Sasha Dichter is the Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund, a global non-profit venture capital fund that invests in enterprises that fight poverty in the developing world. He writes in his blog about how optimism and pessimism play a part in today’s financial markets. He tells an old joke to illustrate the subjectivity of a down-turn:
Two guys hear a bear outside their tent in the woods. The first guy starts lacing up his Nikes, and the second guy says, ‘What are you doing? There’s no way you can outrun a bear.’ The first guy says, ‘I don’t have to run faster than the bear; I just have to run faster than you.’
This is an illustration of the mercenary and opportunistic attitude that played a part in creating the current mess in the world economy. Dichter’s concern is about how donors and foundations will react to this downturn, whether they will react like the camper in sneakers and consider charity a disposable luxury or become more philanthropic because of the greater need of the most vulnerable among us.
Sasha Dichter
Dichter has a Manifesto on the same website, In Defense of Raising Money. It is worth reading for any fund raiser, any non-profit leader, and certainly for donors. In it he says that we may need a new word for fund raiser and says he,
… would rather be an evangelist, a storyteller, an educator, a translator, a table‐pounder, a guy on his soap box, a woman with a megaphone, a candidate for change.
And Dichter is, like many professional fund raisers, inspirational and optimistic. Back on his posting about the current economic downturn, he says,
From what I’ve seen so far, donors and foundations are taking their philanthropic commitments very seriously and doing what they can to step up and support the nonprofits they believe in. And that’s a good thing. It’s tantamount to running TOWARDS the bear and scaring him away.
Perhaps if we all pump up our cooperation and optimism to run towards the bear, it will benefit the people in the most need - and the bear may magically turn into back into a bull.
