Is a pick-up truck full of sweet corn different than an endowment fund?
If you only bought sugar and peanut butter at the grocery store, could you grow the rest of your food?
My parents grew up on farms in the 1940s and 50s but it was more like Little House on the Prairie times. No modern conveniences. They ate what they grew. I went out for dinner with them recently and asked “what did you buy from the grocery store growing up?” They first answered “nothing,” but then modified that to the two items I just mentioned: sugar and peanut butter. They grew wheat for flour, raised chickens and cows for eggs, milk and meat. Their families had big gardens. Cooking from scratch doesn’t even begin to cover it!
Freezers
We have two people living in our house and we have two chest freezers in the basement. True to our Mennonite heritage, we can, freeze and generally stock up during the summer for the coming winter. Not like my grandparents did, but it’s a weird amount of food prep for suburban Mississauga.
It’s essential to use up the previous year’s supplies, or we will run out of space. Also, frozen food does not improve with time. Buying more freezers is not the solution; eating what we have is.
Is a pick-up truck full of sweet corn different than an endowment fund?
Imagine that a farmer drives her truck to her favourite charity and the back of the pick-up is full of fresh sweet corn. Yum! What a generous gift! What would they do with it? Have a party, sell it, give it away? The corn will go bad quickly, it doesn’t keep. I know exactly how much work it would be to husk, blanche and then scrape the corn off the cobs to freeze it! Freezing all that corn probably doesn’t make sense for a charity.
Fundraisers would be happier with a gift of money. Vegetables rot, but humans have devised all sorts of ways to hang onto money. Which brings me to the topic of endowment funds.
A charity with freezers full of sweet corn couldn’t do much except eat the corn. You don’t earn interest on a freezer full of vegetables. But money, it’s very tempting to hang onto money. Set up an endowment fund and use the interest without dipping into the original investment.
Would the farmer with the pick-up truck full of corn be as generous if she knew that the charity’s freezers were full? Would donors be as generous if they knew the charity had a big endowment fund?
You see how this gets complicated. Some years the crops might be bad. But how much do you need to have set aside just in case? (I realize I’m writing this in a house with one freezer per person!!)
Friends vs. freezers
I wonder if charities need to decide that there are some things they can’t grow on their own - the sugar and peanut butter - but for everything else, rely on the generosity of their donors. Cultivation will be required!
Bigger barns present a constant temptation, as in Luke 12. However, having bigger barns, or bigger freezers, or bigger endowment funds risks weakening a charity’s connections to their supporting community. They don’t need as many friends. It’s better to have generous friends than to have big freezers.