Begging for Change: The Dollars and Sense of Making Nonprofits Responsive, Efficient, and Rewarding for All

Begging for Change: The Dollars and Sense of Making Nonprofits Responsive, Efficient, and Rewarding for All
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Wonderful depiction of fundraising today

Good Background and Ideas!

No idea what he's talking about

Intelligent, inspiring, and practical

Chock full of facts and logic

Begging for Change: The Dollars and Sense of Making Nonprofits Responsive, Efficient, and Rewarding for All
Robert Egger
Manufacturer: Collins
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0060541717
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Book Description

You are a good person. You are one of the 84 million Americans who volunteer with a charity. You are part of a national donor pool that contributes nearly $200 billion to good causes every year. But you wonder: Why don't your efforts seem to make a difference?

Fifteen years ago, Robert Egger asked himself this same question as he reluctantly climbed aboard a food service truck for a night of volunteering to help serve meals to the homeless. He wondered why there were still people waiting in line for soup in this day and age. Where were the drug counselors, the job trainers, and the support team to help these men and women get off the streets? Why were volunteers buying supplies from grocery stores when restaurants were throwing away unused fresh food every night? Why had politicians, citizens, and local businesses allowed charity to become an end in itself? Why wasn't there an efficient way to solve the problem?

Robert knew there had to be a better way. In 1989, he started the D.C. Central Kitchen by collecting unused food from local restaurants, caterers, and hotels and bringing it back to a central location where hot, nutritious meals were prepared and distributed to agencies around the city. Since then, the D.C. Central Kitchen has been named one of President Bush Sr.'s Thousand Points of Light and has become one of the most respected and emulated nonprofit agencies in the world, producing and distributing more than 4,000 meals a day. Its highly successful 12-week job-training program equips former homeless transients and drug addicts with culinary and life skills to gain employment in the restaurant business.

In Begging for Change, Robert Egger looks back on his experience and exposes the startling lack of logic, waste, and ineffectiveness he has encountered during his years in the nonprofit sector, and calls for reform of this $800 billion industry from the inside out. In his entertaining and inimitable way, he weaves stories from his days in music, when he encountered legends such as Sarah Vaughan, Mel Torme, and Iggy Pop, together with stories from his experiences in the hunger movement -- and recently as volunteer interim director to help clean up the beleaguered United Way National Capital Area. He asks for nonprofits to be more innovative and results-driven, for corporate and nonprofit leaders to be more focused and responsible, and for citizens who contribute their time and money to be smarter and more demanding of nonprofits and what they provide in return. Robert's appeal to common sense will resonate with readers who are tired of hearing the same nonprofit fund-raising appeals and pity-based messages. Instead of asking the "who" and "what" of giving, he leads the way in asking the "how" and "why" in order to move beyond our 19th-century concept of charity, and usher in a 21st-century model of change and reform for nonprofits.

Enlightening and provocative, engaging and moving, this book is essential reading for nonprofit managers, corporate leaders, and, most of all, any citizen who has ever cared enough to give of themselves to a worthy cause.

Customer Reviews:

Wonderful depiction of fundraising today.......2007-08-23

Great book! Has a wonderful history of fundraising element to it that I was not expecting. It really is fantastic to feel as if the work you are doing for a non-profit is really making a difference, doing things Egger's way will get you there.

Good Background and Ideas!.......2006-03-16

Eighty-four Americans volunteer with a charity, and $200 billion is contributed every year. "Begging for Change" summarizes Robert Egger looking back on his experiences (first running successful night clubs, then a non-profit kitchen and training program) and offering his critique of the $800 billion non-profit world in general.

A key Egger point is that non-profits need to ask: "Are you perpetuating a cycle of need and dependency?" Today charity is governed by innumerable individuals and their egos, many of which are "business-as-usual" career do-gooders who've never run their own company. Many duplicate each others' services and fight each other for funding. They talk of how many were fed or sheltered, but not about how many got out of dependency.

There now are more than 1.5 million non-profits, and their latest evolution is to "realize" that they have to pay those at the top well to attract good people. Thus, in D.C. there are about 25,000 non-profits, requiring over $1.5 billion just for CEO and executive director salaries! Yet, over 70% have revenues less than $500,000/year, and neither government nor Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" act to make those that are ineffective go away. Many should.

In addition, there is the needless complexity added by multiple funding sources and their frequent "strings." One non-profit gets its $20 million from 161 sources - think of all the attention required to mind all those masters!

Egger started a training program for cooks, food-handlers, and servers - thus, both offering them a "hand-up" (instead of just a "hand-out") and substantially reducing the need for full-time assistants. Many fail, but many more succeed; even a substantial number of those that fail initially (drug tests, absences) reform, come back, and later complete the program.

Another important Egger point is that companies interested in helping the poor should first focus on paying their own employees well enough so that they can succeed, rather than paying them so little that they cannot succeed and then wondering how to help others that are downtrodden.

Another Egger innovation was to realize that local catering services were always being leaned on by non-profits to provide deeply discounted services. Egger offered to take that business over with his staff in training - and thus relieved them of a burden while providing his trainees with an important opportunity to demonstrate their talents first-hand to society's higher-ups. He also briefly illustrates examples where organizations provide for-profit services while focusing on hiring those with checkered or limited backgrounds.

Egger points out that the aging Baby Boom will soon provide a test of our social services as they move into old age and increasingly require more services.

Finally, Egger suggests that "more" is not always "better." For example, if his organization held a fund-raiser to renovate or acquire new facilities, that would deplete resources available in the community for other needy organizations.

Egger's examples of systems thinking and sacrifice by those at the top (Egger took only a $50,000 salary while heading the D.C. United Fund) should be taken to heart by all non-profits (especially the Red Cross) and the government (with its many overlapping and conflicting programs).

No idea what he's talking about .......2006-01-25

Egger dismisses the work of fundraising revolutionaries like Dan Pallotta without really understanding what Pallotta was about. With Egger's "vision" non-profits would stay small, pay their workers miserly wages, and the next generation of fundraisers would be wise to look for better paying work. Pathetic lack of fundraising innovation.

Intelligent, inspiring, and practical.......2005-12-11

As a person inexperienced with community foundations or nonprofit organizations and now on a foundation committee, I found Mr. Egger's book to be colorful, amusing, down to earth and imminently practical. To think that someone in the seemingly shallow entertainment business could turn around and use his knowledge to change nonprofits and foundations into dynamic enterprises with enthusiastic participants at all levels is exremely inspiring.

Chock full of facts and logic.......2005-12-01

Egger's book is an excellent combination of facts, cause-effect logic and practical suggestions on how to make charity much more life-changing for the recipients. As a Hurricane Katrina victim, I know first hand how little meaningful help comes from big not-for-profits and government. The system is crying for reform. Eggers has an approach that works better than many current ones. People in positions of authority need to listen and change behaviors.

Making Sense As a School Leader: Persisting Questions, Creative Opportunities (Jossey Bass Education Series)

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Making Sense As a School Leader: Persisting Questions, Creative Opportunities (Jossey Bass Education Series)
Richard H. Ackerman , Gordon A., Jr. Donaldson , and Rebecca van der Bogert
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"A real contribution to an over-discussed subject.... This book reaches below the surface to the real issues and relationships that confront principles in their orchestration of the daily affairs of teachers, parents, and students."

--Harold Howe II, former president of the Ford Foundation for Education and Public Policy

Based on the work of the prestigious Harvard Principal's Center, this book shares some of the "sense" that practicing principals have made of their own complex experiences. The authors offer real-life case examples of typical leadership dilemmas in such areas as student discipline, teacher assessment, fiscal management, parental involvement, and schoolwide planning.

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This volume brings together the best-known and most influential articles on sensemaking by one of its most distinguished exponents, Karl Weick.Weick explores the process of how organizations discover that they face important decisions. Often organizations have discussions in order to see what they think, or act in order to see what they want - before they are even aware that a decision has to be made. The effective organization is one that understands this process of sensemaking and learns to manage it with wisdom. The ways in which people do that are demonstrated in chapters of this book.This important collection provides a valuable addition to the international literature on organization theory and will be welcomed by students and researchers alike.

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A Good Collection of Weick's Work.......2001-01-10

Weick's insights into how people make sense of what is happening in situations is unique and profound. It is also difficult and Weick's work is not always easy to make sense of itself.

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"This book is about organizational survival: the reasons why organizations do not always survive, and what can be done about it. Survival means creating value for stakeholders, and the survival problem starts with uncertainty, change and the need for organizations to adapt to shifting needs and market conditions. The key question is 'Why are organizations slow to change and adapt?' Unsuccessful organizations are distinguished by their failure to overcome thinking and behavioural flaws at personal, organizational and community levels. In this book, we explain what these flaws are and how the scenario approach helps senior managers and organizations to overcome them. Our approach is based on reasoning, research, real world observations - and a long track record developing scenario-based thinking, combining the most effective elements of the many scenario approaches that have been tried over time.

Customer Reviews:

Insightful!.......2004-03-02

This book disserves itself by purporting to be merely about scenario planning, although it covers that subject thoroughly. In fact, it's one of the most lucid, interesting examinations of fortune and folly you will ever read. The recapitulation of disastrous episodes at a handful of once-great companies shows just how little inclined the gods are to spare the proud. Closed minds and entrenched habits of thought managed to afflict even such a venturesome New Economy firm as Yahoo! Originality and experimentation bless even companies in humdrum industries, such as packaging. Captivating anecdotes and illustrations are, in fact, the meat of the book. The scenario planning analysis, while solid, is less convincing than the cases themselves. At times, the book shows the weaknesses that are probably inevitable when so many authors share creation. It tends to meander and, now and then, loses its way in jargon-choked thickets. But, we assure you, the clarity of the cases redeems it and makes it valuable.

Scenario conversations as agents of change.......2003-08-06

The key theme of this book is that the appropriate use of scenario thinking is a highly effective way of catalyzing organizational change and, in particular, minimizing the risk that the organization will suffer due to learning disabilities such as 'group think' or a variety of other flaws in organizational thinking.
The focus is therefore on the process by which the management group can improve their ability to shape their future, through the way in which they engage with the creation of scenarios, and in strategic conversations about their implications in the context of the 'business idea' (competitive stance and advantages) of the organization.
This book represents a consolidation and further exploration of ideas first put forward in van der Heijden's Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. As a successor, it does not have the impact of the first book, and it goes into issues of learning disabilities to a level of detail that can be tedious to those who are familiar with these issues. None the less, it is very useful in reinforcing a sound appreciation of the value of scenarios and the importance of the process by which they are generated and used.
There are very useful summaries at the end of each chapter and at the end of the book. My main criticism is that the authors do not seem to have quite worked out whether they were writing a practical guide for business people or a text for students.

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The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany's Path Towards the New Economy And the American Challenge (Making Sense of History)
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Essential reading for those interested in studying Japan

Making Common Sense of Japan (Pitt Series in Policy and Institutional Studies)
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Essential reading for those interested in studying Japan.......2000-01-05

Various movies, books, and other sources have contributed to an "eroticisation" of Japanese, its people and its culture. Steven R. Reed, in his book, Making Common Sense of Japan, sets out to dispel common myths about Japanese culture some Americans still cling to.

In the first chapter, he sets out his framework by which asking whether Japan is a unique nation, and his conclusion on this may startle Americans: only when the United States is eliminated from comparison Japan is not unique. In fact, he says, it has much in common with Western European countries, with similar sizes of population and land space and that they are industrialized democracies. It is America, not Japan that is unique, in that it has a large population, land mass, and huge crime rate.

The second chapter tackles the question of culture. Reed looks at why people act they way they do, and de-emphasizes rationality (this is a sticking point for rational-choice theorists, who would have a rather technical criticism of his analysis), and dispels the notion of a mystical explanation of culture. Reed's conceptualizes culture in terms of "common sense", which is simply the knowledge gained by experience. He says that too much about a country is attributed to its culture, and for this he gives the example of the use of umbrellas. Upon visiting Japan, he found it odd that many Japanese would open their umbrellas when there was a mist, and quickly attributed it to their culture (they are "wimps" or "conformist"). He found, that after walking for a short period during a mist, that umbrellas were actually quite practical, because he found that walking in a mist made the shoulders of his suit very wet.

The subsequent three chapters deal with (in order) a structural learning approach, an explanation for Japanese permanent employment, and an the the nature of co-operation between government and business. The first chapter is a bit complicated, but the following two are interesting, especially in his concluding remarks of each chapter. Japanese permanent was a compromise between business and labour after World War II, which meant that in return for less worker autonomy, the unions would gain higher job security. Whether the Japanese like it or not, it's been institutionalized, meaning the cost of changing the system is higher than maintaining it. With regard to business-government co-operation, he says that "bureaucrats are the referees, not the players". He argues that some ministries lack enough enforcement power to force companies to stop cheating in the market, but more often than not, a threat is often enough to get companies to fly right.

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Life and Preaching

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Customer Reviews:

Life and Preaching.......2003-04-03

McClendon tells the story of a year as interim pastor of a small church and interweaves his sermons. He explains the context in the life of the church. Good story-telling and good preaching.

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