Class #6 Post

UML Philanthropy BLOG

HONR 3200 P 1 302

Week #6

For this class meeting we started it off with an icebreaker-type question: If there’s any nonprofit you’d like to start what would it be? I chose food bank because I don’t really have a specific vision, but I do think that people shouldn’t have to go hungry if there is a surplus. Some other students chose these as goals for their hypothetical nonprofits: rebuilding the foster care system, protecting sea turtles, providing service dogs for military veterans, and buying textbooks for elementary/middle/high school students that can’t afford them. Our answers to this question were used to sort us into different groups with loosely related ideas, the idea being that each group will make a mission statement for a “fake” nonprofit.

After this we talked about the paper we had written about Oprah’s philanthropy initiative of setting up a school in South Africa for impoverished girls. Part of the purpose of this paper was to get us to analyze whether something is effective philanthropy or not. In the case of Oprah’s school, our class slightly leaned toward saying that Oprah did not practice effective philanthropy in this situation because she didn’t use her resources as effectively as possible, though other people said she was effective in terms of achieving her goals. One interesting point that some made in favor of it not being effective philanthropy was that Oprah’s school tried to get the best teachers in South Africa, but then this drains talent from other schools, possibly unintentionally doing harm to the overall education system.

The whiteboard after our discussion:

After discussing the Oprah case study, we got back into our groups, each group designing their own nonprofit idea. This was interesting because we each had separate visions, but had to compromise to try to make an idea that everyone in the group could get behind. The groups settled on such things as: helping ESL students with tutoring in public schools, making a service to provide therapy animals for veterans, and making a group for helping 16-17 year olds who are leaving the foster care system get support so they’re not in a bad position when leaving the system.

Finally we got back together as a class to discuss both our service projects our class’s mission statement and name for our grant proposal for distributing the money from the Learning by Giving foundation. Our final name was decided: the UML River Givers. People liked this because it was punchy and also identified that we were associated with UMass Lowell. Several students were working on a logo, the result was a drawing of people holding hands. We also worked on finalizing our mission statement, which we did by the end of the class, which was generally about providing mental health care services and education to teen immigrant populations in Lowell. For the service project, several ideas were discussed, but we made a decision to go with cleaning up extra items in the pool at the Lowell Boys & Girls Club.

Students discussing the mission statement:

Class #5 Post

UML Philanthropy BLOG

HONR 3200 P 1 302

Week #5

At the start of class our group of philanthropists started by going over 4 topics that were from either the reading or were recurring topics that the class had shown previous interest in.

This group covered what the most pressing issues were in mental health. One big issue that was discussed was that there are a lot of people who don’t fully understand mental health. Addressing mental health was one of the areas that class was interested in supporting.

This group addressed the pro’s and cons’ of becoming an effective altruist. The point was made that many people were unsure of the individual impact that they could make. There was a lot of internal debate within each individual in the class where they had to decide for themselves whether or not to commit themselves to being an effective altruist.

The class dug deep and came up with many ideas and opinions as a groups covering mental health, effective altruism, The debate on putting restrictions on how foundations operate, and the ethical questions in have tax incentives for giving. Many ideas were generated from these discusions.

 

 For the second half of class each of the 4 groups that were doing research on identifying the big issues in the Lowell community for mental health and substance abuse. Each group presented their own findings with the rest of the group. The group focused on the issues going on in mental health and substance abuse for students of the high school or college age. As a class each group contributed statistics, demographics, current services, and personal accounts from school officials to get a better idea of the