President's Blog

“You are being watched…”

As we approach year-end I am often asked to list the major accomplishments that I can point to at Episcopal Relief & Development.

This year I put our 4-star rating from Charity Navigator right at the top of the list.  As I thought about it, I realized that while I was proud of the rating, I was also slightly unsettled by it.  Let me explain why. 

(No….it’s not because having achieved the top rating, there is no where to go but down, as a witty board member pointed out to me!)

Basically, Charity Navigator and other watchdog agencies, like the Better Business Bureau’s give.org, measure a very specific aspect of most organizations.   They look at the financial data in our tax returns and measure our ratios on fundraising and administration against other not-for-profit organizations and external benchmarks.  They are in essence looking at how efficiently we raise and spend money.  There is a received wisdom that the lower those ratios are, the better the organization.  But that’s not the whole picture.

What the watchdog agencies are not measuring is impact and impact is the real measure of an organization.  Is the organization carrying out its mission effectively?  Is it saving lives? The watchdog agencies take the donor as the primary stakeholder.  To a certain extent this is certainly true, but the people for whom the organization exists are the beneficiaries—not the donors.  Obviously we couldn’t exist without donors, don’t get me wrong (we love our donors!), but donors should be asking us whether we are having an impact on the beneficiaries and holding us accountable for that. 

Unfortunately impact is an elusive thing to measure.  It requires a very heavy investment in monitoring and evaluation of programs.   Furthermore, there is no cross-industry standard on how to measure impact and therefore it is very hard to compared one agency’s impact to another’s.  At Episcopal Relief & Development we are investing heavily in rigorous monitoring and evaluation and have made good progress, particularly in measuring the impact of our malaria net and child survival programs. 

So, while I’m pleased with the good ratings from Charity Navigator and Give.org, what I’m really proud of is the fact that we can document the impact of our programs for those we seek to serve.  We’ll be announcing the monitoring and evaluation results for NetsforLife® in December as we celebrate what we’ve accomplished and proclaim where we’d like to go in the next phase of this important program—so stay tuned!

Have a blessed and peaceful Thanksgiving.

At Episcopal Relief & Development we are often asked how we are different from the many other worthy agencies fighting poverty around the world.

That’s a very good question. There are a number of ways that I see us as being different.

Most importantly, we are faith-based. We represent a community of faith, bound by our baptismal covenant, to respect the dignity of every human being and work to fulfill Jesus’ commandment in Matthew 25.

“…just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

This is the motivation of all of us who work here, those who volunteer for us and those who support us.

But faith is not the full answer. All of our programs are also guided by an important underlying philosophy of empowerment and servant-hood. We try to leave no foot prints. Lao Tsu, the Chinese philosopher, put it best: “Go with the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they have. Build on what they know. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say, ‘We have done this ourselves.’”

Finally, we come with a ready-made and trusted distribution network in our Church partners around the world. I remember in the early stages of planning our malaria program, NetsforLife®, I was sitting with corporate partners, including the Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, discussing how we would deliver 1 million long-lasting insecticide treated nets to the poorest and most remote places in Africa. I pointed out to them that when you go beyond the end of the road in most of Africa, past where the local district health clinic is, past the last school, often the only infrastructure (and I use that term very loosely) you can find is a church. You know you’re on to something when Coca-Cola admires your distribution network!

Episcopal Relief & Development, keeping in mind both Jesus’ and Lao Tsu’s words, can leverage and empower this network for all kinds of good things—clean water, nutritional programs, disease prevention, microfinance, income generation and most of all hope.