It all started in my bathtub.

One evening in 1999 after a long day of juggling kids, career and a charity fundraiser meeting, I lay soaking in bath salts wondering why I didn’t feel more fulfilled.

Not in a personal sense, as I have been blessed with Andy, my wonderful husband, and two great children – but rather in an accomplishment sense.  My work as a real estate attorney and later as a real estate consultant was at best interesting at times, but not rewarding.  I wasn’t really changing anyone’s life in a meaningful way with this work.

Actually, my acknowledgment of this, years ago, had propelled me to serve on several non-profit boards.  But even those left me with an empty feeling.  The time spent at the board meetings I attended was usually a waste – hours of people listening to themselves talk, usually about who to honor at the next fundraiser that was identical to the one held the year before and every year before that.  The only difference was which “honoree” would be selected who, more often than not, had never even heard of our charity and was only selected because he or she could be a “draw” for selling dinner tickets.

Frankly, even the honorees sometimes realized the absurdity of their honors.  I can recall attending one event where Whoopie Goldberg told the crowd, “I really don’t know why I am being honored. You who run this charity are the real honorees.”  But the funny part was that even though I was part of that charity’s board, I didn’t feel deserving of an honor.  The dinner was often boring, costly and took months to plan, and in the end, yielded hardly any money compared to the cost in both dollars and time.   My guess was that while nobody was brave enough to say it aloud, many of the attendees were probably wondering as they looked around the lavishly decorated ballroom, how much of their hard-earned dinner ticket dollars were actually going to the bottom line.

There had to be a better way, I thought.  All the checks my husband and I wrote each year for various charities – where did they all go?  And the money all added up by December 31^st.  Granted, there are some marvelous groups out there that really know how to control costs and manage to find corporate underwriters who finance most or all of the event costs.  The companies receive wonderful exposure for their businesses in return.  (I have now learned to ask about this in advance of attending an event.)  But if you look at the bottom line numbers at the typical charity fundraiser, this is not the case.  And in any case, the time expense alone in executing these functions is enormous (much of it related to appeasing the hierarchy of donors and event volunteers!)

Maybe the fact that I was staring at the drain in the tub caused me to dwell on where my own charity dollars had been going the last few years.  Party and auction planners?  Expensive florists and invitation designers for events no one was even excited to be attending?

My kids always would beg me as I was walking out the door all dolled up, “Mommy, stay home.”  And I was always wondering, deep down inside, why wasn’t I staying home?  I would rather have been cuddling on the sofa with my kids and popcorn and a video any evening than going to the crowded ballroom of some hotel again with people I hardly knew.  “Oh, it’s for a good cause,” I would say… and then wonder… was it?

The other part of many charity dinners I found unappealing was that there rarely was any connection between most of the attendees.  Most of the attendees were there solely out of an obligation to the person who had invited them.  Maybe it was a business associate or someone to whom they owed a favor.  Because of the lack of a direct connection to the organization itself, most attendees really had no idea about how to follow up to make sure their dinner ticket contributions ultimately benefited the charity and not just the social standing of the people who had chaired the event and had their picture in the paper the next day.

And more often than not, the same people who had obliged their friends and bought tickets would be reverse soliciting for their own pet project’s event later that year.

When everyone would truly rather just all stay home…

I would later discover that according to the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics Core 2005 Public Charity File Analysis, of the 102,353 public charities reporting special fundraising events in 2005, the average net was just under 40 cents for every dollar spent.  The costs of producing these events nationally are staggering – $5.92 billion in 2005 in production costs with a net to the organizations of only $3.9 billion.  Of course, this does not even begin to take into account the immense amount of volunteer hours expended.   Clearly, the greatest monetary beneficiaries of these events are the vendors – caterers, florists, auction planners, musicians, invitation designers and the like.

The longer I soaked in the tub, the more disheartened I became.  And then I began to think about my obituary.  Yes, my obituary.  When Andy and I first were married, he began to notice during breakfast that I was always fixated on the obituary section of the newspaper.  He commented that it was a strange and depressing activity to be reading about death first thing in the morning.  Well, surprise, surprise.  Guess what section of the paper we now fight over?  Yes, he has come around to see the light.  Obituaries are a fascinating sociological subject. They are how we sum up people’s lives in a paragraph or two. What one chooses to include (and not include) is actually quite intriguing.  And reading them began to make me start thinking about how I would want my own to read.

Of course, I thought, I would want to be remembered as a good mother, a good wife, sister, daughter, citizen and friend.  But my former careers suddenly seemed mundane to me and not a really integral part of who I was and what really mattered to me.  What I honestly wanted to leave behind was a legacy of having helped others outside my own circle, outside my own family, friends and immediate little world.  I wanted to know that my obituary would include how I had helped to better to the lives of some very unfortunate individuals in a significant way.  It was not so much that I cared about how I appeared to others who would be reading it in the paper.  But that going through the exercise of writing my own obituary in my mind, summarizing my own life in a paragraph or two, allowed me to zero in on what I would like to have accomplished when I leave this planet.

So thinking about my obituary in the bathtub is really what prompted the concept of the Everychild Foundation.  And that truly is where it all fell into place in my head.  Having most recently been on the board of an organization that helped children with life-threatening illnesses and now being a mother myself, children in need immediately came to my mind.  But how to help them?  And so many issues facing children…

Wait, I said to myself, why not a grant-making organization that selects a different children’s program each year to support? That way, we could impact a wide variety of children’s needs and causes.  What if we could give away a huge sum each year and direct it to just one project per year so that the grant could really make an impact as opposed to organizations that give a little here and a little there… And  – this is key – we would only select projects that were novel prototypes – innovative solutions to children’s needs – that could be replicated on a larger scale, thereby leveraging our grant dollars.

And then it came to me, piece by piece…an organization with 220 members each giving $5,000 annually.  That would allow for a $1 million grant and provide a budget of $100,000.  And every year, the members would each have a vote on the project that we would choose to fund.  The beauty of this formula would be its simplicity and democratic theme, and the fact that it eliminates large fundraising costs – the bane of any charity’s efforts.   On top of this, such a cost-effective model would become more appealing to donors during downward swings in the economy when they had to become more selective about which charities they would continue to fund and which to drop.

Of course, such a model could be done at any price point, lower or higher, with any ultimate dollar goal.  I just chose the $5,000 figure since I believed it was a realistic figure in the marketplace I would target.

It would be necessary, of course, to have a board to administer the organization, an IRS requirement in order to be designated at tax-exempt non-profit corporation.  But the board could be kept small and the real “power” of the organization given to all the members as a group.  That way, we could avoid the red tape, hierarchy and internal competition that pervades so many charities and seems to alienate so many participants.  And everyone could, therefore, feel a bit of responsibility and “ownership” in the work of the charity, yet without having to put in all the hours required for parties and auctions.  In fact, the members could simply write an annual check, mail in their vote and call it a day, Alternatively, if they wanted to be more involved, they could participate in the grant screening process and become intellectually stimulated learning about children’s needs in the community and the best programs to address them. .

Instead of having mailings or parties to raise money, people would join as members and the $5,000 would be their “dues.”  The number 220 came to me because that would allow us to provide a $1 million grant and more than enough left over for an operating budget.  We could get by without a paid staff or pay rent as I could run this as a volunteer out of my home with a Post Office Box as the mailing address.  I also thought that a membership of 220 seemed to me to be the maximum size where the members could feel that they had become a part of a “community” and get to know one another instead of feeling lost in the big bureaucracy typical of larger organizations.

I gave myself an estimate of 5 to 7 years before the membership would be completely filled and a “waiting list” in place for new members.  In the meantime, we would make a grant each year of whatever funds we raised.  Members could be recruited by small informational coffees hosted in members’ homes.  And as the membership would grow, new members would in turn host their own coffees.

The other appealing aspect of this concept would be equality of the members.  Everyone would give the same amount, and have one vote, thereby eliminating power seekers.  In other words, no one would get a better seat at the gala for writing the bigger check because there would be no gala and no one would write a “bigger” check.

The budget would need to allow for items such as insurance, audit, bookkeeping, clerical, printing, and telephone.  Having never made large grants on my own, but having had enough experience as a charity board member to understand the complex financial aspects of the non-profit world, I also felt we could benefit by finding the services of a grant consultant to help us to make sure our grants were effective and beyond reproach.

And now, just nine years later, with our membership filled and having given almost $7 million in grants already, we can honestly say that the concept has worked.  We have just made our third $1million grant this year, and unlike many other charities at this time of economic crisis, our annual donation totals have remained steady.  Many of our members have told us that their annual donation to Everychild has remained their philanthropic priority because it is the one place where they can be assured their dollars will be well spent.

To date, we have already funded the capital costs of a state-of the-art mobile dental clinic that serves 30 low-income elementary schools, built 15 libraries and stocked them with books at low-income public schools lacking adequate libraries, rehabilitated an antiquated building that houses a counseling program for abused children allowing it to improve its services and increase its capacity from 650 to 1000 children a year, funded the construction of a new building at a residential school for very troubled teens, provided the down-payment for the purchase of an apartment building to house a residence for emancipated foster youth , funded the construction of a universally-accessible playground which will be the most utilized such facility in the world, provided a grant for a computer learning center for an after-school program in a troubled neighborhood, built a new structure for another after-school program that will allow them to take over 350 children off their waitlist and funded a program to help low-income families of children with asthma and lead poisoning eradicate indoor pollution triggers in their homes and apartments.

We have also energized our members to expand their philanthropic involvement into other areas, and many other local foundations have “piggybacked” on our grants because they so respect our thorough process.  Our members feel empowered and, most importantly, fulfilled both from the sheer numbers of children who have been helped by our grants.  But they are also fulfilled from the meaningful friendships they have formed through Everychild and by having the opportunity to finally use their brains and talents for a good cause.  And the mothers among our members feel they have become better role models for their children.

We have also created a model of philanthropy that can be easily be replicated at any price point, for any cause and with any demographic as its members – a group of Boy Scouts each donating for a toy chest for a children’s hospital, college students funding a beach cleanup, retired seniors sponsoring programs a medical research project. In fact, we have already inspired the creation of at least seven other non-profits patterned on our model. – some very similar and some simply adopting certain portions or our prototype. We have lent them each varying degrees of guidance along the way.  And we have since noticed in the last few years, there is increasing interest around the nation in the giving-circle construct where donors pool dues and make collective grants.  Obviously, people everywhere are itching for alternative forms of fundraising and giving.

So, with this in mind, I have realized that what we have learned could be shared on a broader scale with many others who might be equally interested in either replicating the model or simply applying elements of it to a support arm or auxiliary of an existing organization, particularly during times of economic crisis when so many non-profits are rethinking their fundraising approaches.   For more information, visit The Everychild Foundation website: www.everychildfoundation.org