Lost donor created new thinking

I really appreciated Kathleen McLaughlin’s [Feb. 6] article on the donor who made large financial commitments to multiple not-for-profits but is not expected to fulfill them. I think these organizations had started questioning whether this was too good to be true, yet they appropriately continued to work with this donor in the hope that he genuinely wanted to advance their missions.

I wanted to offer one positive perspective on this seemingly futile exercise. In the circumstances I am familiar with, the potential donor took the approach that he was going to make a “transformative gift” to their organizations and he challenged them to bring a proposal to him that took them to a much higher level, in some cases equipping them to solve the issues their organizations existed to address.

While the funds will apparently not come from this gentleman, there are multiple organizations that now have a road map to greater impact that did not exist before.

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Bryan Orander
president, Charitable Advisors