Gateway Giving

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 23rd episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

My guest today is Gabe Angieri. Gabe is the Director of Development & Strategy for Arch Grants, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides $50,000 equity-free grants and access to an ecosystem of resources, helping early-stage startups grow and scale in St. Louis.

To be honest, I was somewhat skeptical coming into this interview. Why should an organization that funds for-profit companies be granted nonprofit status? I don’t think many people would argue that giving equity-free grants to early-stage startups and then helping those startups to grow and scale is a bad thing for our region, but just because it’s a good thing doesn’t mean you should get a tax deduction for your donation to an organization that does that.

However, Gabe successfully convinced me that Arch Grants is less venture capital fund and more economic development association. Obviously, the grants they give to these companies are good for the companies and their founders, but it’s also making a positive impact on the economic environment throughout our region, and economic wellbeing is an essential component of overall wellbeing.

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Gabe!

Gabe Angieri and Arch Grants are not affiliated with or endorsed by LPL Financial, Gateway Wealth Management, or Cornerstone Wealth Management.

Links

• Homepage
• Donate
• 2019 IRS Form 990
• 2020 IRS Form 990
• About
• Annual Startup Competition
• Impact Report

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 22nd episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

My guest today is Harley Monk. Harley is the Founder and Executive Director of Giving Alpha, a community of like-minded finance professionals that have committed to improving the world by donating to the most evidence-based, impactful interventions.

Although Harley and I do spend some time discussing his organization, today’s episode primarily serves as an introduction to the “Effective Altruism” movement, a movement and a concept that is very near and dear to my heart.

When I first decided a few years ago to devote my financial planning practice to working with philanthropists, one of the catalysts for that shift was a book I read called “The Life You Can Save” by a philosopher named Peter Singer. That book, originally published in 2009, kickstarted what is now known as the “Effective Altruism” movement. That movement makes, essentially, two arguments:

1. If you live in the developed world (The U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Australia, Japan, etc.), then your income is likely at least in the top 10% globally, and very possibly in the top 1%. Therefore, you have a moral obligation to donate some of your income to help others who didn’t have the good fortune of being born into one of those rich countries.
2. You should make your donations based on reason and evidence, not geography and sentiment.

As you can imagine, telling people, particularly Americans, that they’re being selfish by hoarding their money and that when they do give, they’re probably doing it wrong, or at least inefficiently, sparks a visceral reaction among many. To some degree I had that same reaction when I was first introduced to these concepts, but I encourage you to keep an open mind before you dismiss them.

One of the primary reasons people tend to list for either not giving or not giving more money to charity is because they are concerned that their donations won’t have the intended impact. If that describes you, then giving through the lens of “Effective Altruism” can help you to be confident that your good intentions are having real impact.

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Harley!

Links

• Giving Alpha Homepage
• An Introduction To Effective Altruism
• Defining Alpha
• The Pledge
• Is There Such A Thing As Bad Charity?

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 21st episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

Try to imagine, for a moment, that you’re living your life as you have always lived it, and, all of a sudden, in order to save your life and the lives of your family, you must flee to a foreign country with no money, no connections, no housing, and no job. This is the situation that Afghan refugees are facing today. As you are probably aware, the United States’ decision to pull all of our troops out of Afghanistan has caused massive societal upheaval and created tens of thousands of refugees out of the people who had been assisting the U.S. in its fight against the Taliban. The St. Louis area has agreed to take in up to 500 of those individuals.

Luckily for them and for us, the International Institute of St. Louis is prepared to meet the challenge. It is their goal to help these people achieve self-sufficiency as quickly as possible. My guest today is Paul Costigan, the Sr. Vice President for Operations & Missouri Refugee Coordinator for the International Institute of St. Louis. He’ll tell you about how the International Institute works to achieve that goal of self-sufficiency through short term housing assistance, job training, English classes, and job placement, among other things.

If you believe, as I do, that that the U.S. bears most of the responsibility for turning these people into refugees in the first place, and, thus, we are obligated to help them to escape their oppressors, then I think you’ll get a lot out of this interview.

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Paul!

Links

• Homepage
• Donate
• Volunteer
• 2019 IRS Form 990
• 2020 Annual Report
• About Us
• FAQ
• Immigrant Stories
• 14 Most Common Arguments Against Immigration & Why They're Wrong
• Welcome.US
• Airbnb Nonprofit Foundation
• Operation Allies Welcome

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 20th episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

For this episode, the tables have been turned! Tosha Anderson, who was my guest in episode #13 of this podcast, Assessing The Financial Health of a Nonprofit, has her own podcast called A Modern Nonprofit, and she had me on to talk about some of the mistakes I have seen nonprofit fundraisers make when asking my clients for money.

If you are a donor, this topic may be less compelling to you, but if you work for a nonprofit, particularly if you are a fundraiser or development officer, or even if you’re just a volunteer, then you should absolutely listen to this episode!

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is Tosha's interview with me!

Links

• The Charity CFO
• A Modern Nonprofit Facebook Group
• Charity CFO YouTube
• Charity CFO LinkedIn
• Charity CFO Twitter
• Charity CFO Facebok
• Tosha Anderson LinkedIn

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 19th episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

My guest today is Emily Stuart, the Executive Director of Gateway Pet Guardians, whose mission is to champion a thriving pet welfare community in East St. Louis, Cahokia Heights, Washington Park and Fairmont City, which they have coined the East Side Pet District.

I have been hesitant to have any animal focused nonprofits on the podcast thus far, because it can be hard to justify donating money to a charity that works with animals when there are so many humans who need our help. Even if you don’t believe that animal suffering deserves the same attention as human suffering, I think there are still two compelling reasons to consider donating to animal welfare causes:

1. A great deal of animal suffering is the result of human action or inaction. If we caused the mess, we should take responsibility for cleaning it up.
2. At least in the case of Gateway Pet Guardians, a donation to their organization is just as much about the people in the community as it is the animals.

I think about my dog, Rosemary, and the joy she brings my family and me, and I know that’s true for so many other families. We’re fortunate enough that we have the resources to take her to see a veterinarian who’s only about a 4 minute drive from our house, but that isn’t always true for the people who live in the East Side Pet District. Until Gateway Pet Guardians opened their facility in East St. Louis in 2020, there wasn’t a single veterinary clinic in the area!

If you love animals, like I do, you’ll enjoy this interview!

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Emily!

Links

• Homepage
• Donate
• Volunteer
• Foster
• Amazon Wish List
• Adopt
• YouTube Channel
• 2020 Impact Report
• 2020 IRS Form 990
• 2019 IRS Form 990
• 2020 Audited Financial Statements

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 18th episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

My guests today are Aurdeen Clarkson, Tami Timmer, and Latrice Dinkins, all of whom work for Flance Early Learning Center, a diverse, intentional early childhood education center that nurtures children and adults in a trusting culture of love, Respect, Accountability, Compassion and Consistency.

Early childhood education is an issue that is near and dear to my heart, as I have two kids currently in an early childhood education center, and I have another kid who’s not far removed from one. In contrast with K-12 education in our country, early childhood education is primarily funded by tuition paid by the families utilizing those services. As a result, instead of spreading the costs of early childhood education across our communities, the way we do with K-12, the families who are currently utilizing those services have to foot the entire bill, which is usually somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500 per kid per month. This means that if you’re not in the top income quintile, you’re likely going to have to make some tough choices.

You might decide not to send your kid to an ECEC because the cost would be greater than the amount you would earn from your job. Of course, for a parent who chooses to stay home with their kids, re-entering the workforce can prove challenging, and most people who find themselves in that situation will never be able to get back on their pre-kid income trajectory. And, of course, this phenomenon impacts women, disproportionately. Alternatively, you might decide to send your kid to a home-based daycare, but, if you do that, the odds are high that your kid will be less safe, and they won’t be instructed by someone who has an educational background in early childhood development. Lastly, you might just decide to bite the bullet and pay for the entire cost of a high quality ECEC, which has the potential to put a strain on the rest of your finances.

Taking into consideration the context of what I’ve just described, what the staff at Flance Early Learning Center is doing is remarkable. They’re providing as high a quality of early childhood education as you’ll find in a state of the art facility, and they’re doing it in the poorest zip code in Missouri. A zip code where the median annual household income is roughly equivalent to the cost of providing high quality early childhood education to one infant for one year. Obviously, most of the families they serve don’t have the income to pay full tuition, which means that they rely heavily on philanthropy, as well as government grants through the Head Start Program that is administered, in our area, by Youth In Need.

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Latrice, Aurdeen, and Tami!

Links

• Homepage
• Donate
• Volunteer
• 2019 Annual Report
• 2019 IRS Form 990
• History
• Facebook

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 17th episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

My guest today is Sean Ballard, the operations director for Home Sweet Home, the only furniture bank in the St. Louis region.

For my very first interview in episode 1 of this podcast, I interviewed Mary Kitley of the St. Louis Area Foodbank, and I learned that foodbanks are, essentially, just giant logistics operations. They figure out how to get food to people who either don’t have access to it, or don’t have the resources to afford it on their own.

Well, a furniture bank follows the exact same concept, but the difference here is that there is only one of them in the St. Louis region, and, as evidenced by their rapid growth in just the 6 years since the organization as been in existence, there is an enormous unmet need.

Obviously, all else being equal, having a roof over your head is better than not having a roof over your head, but it’s hard to make a house a home with just a roof and four walls. 90% of the families that Home Sweet Home serves have a household income of less than $18,000 per year. $18,000 per year! If your household income is $18,000 or less, quality furnishings, or any furnishings at all, just aren’t going to be in the budget, so Home Sweet Home has partnered with dozens of organizations from all over the region to connect their donors, people who have furniture they’re no longer using, with people who need it. And, to be clear, they’re not just giving their clients whatever they can find. They are extremely selective on what furniture they will accept, and they have their clients to come to their warehouse to hand pick the items themselves, giving them a sense of pride and dignity in the process.

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Sean!

Links

• Home Sweet Home
• Donate
• Volunteer
• 2020 Annual Report
• 2020 IRS Form 990
• Partner Agencies
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 16th episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

My guest today is Maxine Clark. You may or may not be familiar with her name, but, especially if you are from the St. Louis area, you are almost certainly familiar with her work. She is the founder of Build-A-Bear Workshop.

Since she stepped down from her role as Chief Executive Bear in 2013, she has been spending her time using her wealth and influence to improve the lives of others in the St. Louis region, primarily through the foundation she and her husband, Bob Fox, founded in 2004. In particular, right now she is focused on putting the finishing touches on the Delmar Divine; a mixed-use development for social innovators that will provide office space and shared resources for nonprofits, as well as approximately 150 affordable apartments designed for young, diverse professionals.

I wanted to have Maxine on the podcast, not only because I wanted to hear more about her work with the Delmar Divine, but also because I am fascinated by how people with significant wealth think about the opportunity and/or responsibility they have to use that wealth to give back to the community that helped create it in the first place. One of my missions in life is to convince people with excess wealth to give more of that wealth away to people who aren’t related to them, so I want to know how I can help to replicate Maxine’s attitude about philanthropy and the responsibility we all have to one another across our region and our country.

As you’ll hear in this interview, it's impossible to interact with Maxine and not come away from it feeling more optimistic about the future of St. Louis. This was a delightful conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Maxine Clark!

Links

• Clark-Fox Family Foundation
• 2018 IRS Form 990
• Delmar Divine
• Blueprint4SummerSTL
• Prosper Women's Capital
• St. Louis Magazine Feature
• Newswise Feature
• Wikipedia
• Maxine's Twitter

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 15th episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

Today, I have an interview with Will Jordan, the Executive Director, and Elisabeth Risch, the Assistant Director of the St. Louis Metropolitan Equal Housing and Opportunity Council (EHOC). The EHOC seeks to ensure equal access to housing and places of public accommodation for all people through education, counseling, investigation, and enforcement.

It can be tempting to imagine that, since the Fair Housing Act has been in place for over 50 years now, housing discrimination is a thing of the past. But, as you’ll hear in this discussion, housing discrimination is alive and well. Even if it wasn’t, the legacy of past housing discrimination is still with us today.

The median white family in the U.S. has a net worth that is roughly 10 times that of the median black family, and home equity, or the lack thereof, is the single greatest contributor to that gap. I am no expert on housing discrimination, historical or current, but I am an expert on building wealth and how compound interest works, and, from that lens, it’s easy to understand why this gap persists. Prior to the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, it was legal to discriminate against someone for the purpose of housing based on the color of their skin, which means that, even if the Fair Housing Act had magically fixed everything overnight, most black families had to start from scratch on their home equity building journey, while white families had been on that journey for decades with lots of help from the federal government along the way.

So, it makes sense that housing policy is one of the most important places to focus if we’re trying to right the wrongs of our past. The EHOC, like so many nonprofits in our area, is working hard not only to provide relief to those who are being wronged currently, but to change the way our region operates so that we can prevent these problems in the future. And, as you’ll hear in the interview, this isn’t just a racial issue. Housing discrimination cuts across all lines; income, race, family status, age, gender, etc. In fact, the number one source of housing discrimination today is against people with disabilities.

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Will Jordan and Elisabeth Risch!

Links

• EHOC Homepage
• Donate
• 2019 IRS Form 990
• Report Housing Discrimination
• Know Your Rights
• Eviction Prevention
• Landlord-Tenant Counseling
• Fair Housing Investigation
• Outreach & Education
• Advocacy & Research
• Gateway Neighborhood Fund
• Twitter
• Facebook

By: David M. Foster, CFP®, CAP®

Hello, listeners, and welcome to the 14th episode of the Gateway Giving Podcast!

In a 2018 U.S. Trust study of philanthropy, 9 out of 10 households with a $200,000 household income and/or a net worth greater than $1 million gave money to charity. Disturbingly, among that same group of people, only 42% believed that their giving was having the impact they intended. The other 58% either believed that their giving was not having the intended impact, or, more frequently, they just didn’t know. This group gave an average of almost $30,000 in 2017, and the majority didn’t know if their generosity was helping anyone!

You may or may not be a millionaire, but chances are, if you’re listening to this podcast, you are a giver, and you care about the impact of those gifts. So how can you make sure you’re among the 42% who is confident in the impact of their giving?

My guests today have devoted their professional lives to answering that question. Phil Buchanan is the President of the Center For Effective Philanthropy, and Grace Chiang Nicolette is the VP of Programming & External Relations.

If you’re looking for easy answers to the question of how to make sure your donations are having the desired impact, you won’t find them here. As I discuss with Grace and Phil, philanthropic effectiveness cannot be boiled down to an easy to understand and easy to compare metric the way that return on investment can be used to determine the success of an investment in a for-profit business. But, just because there are no easy answers doesn’t mean there are no answers at all. If you truly believe, as I do, that philanthropy is one of the best ways to impact the world and the community around you, then doing the hard work of determining effectiveness is worth it, and, in this interview, Grace and Phil offer several valuable insights to make that difficult task a little easier.

As always, if you have any questions, requests, or suggestions for people or organizations for me to interview, you can email me at [email protected]. Now, without further ado, here is my interview with Grace Chiang Nicolette & Phil Buchanan!

Links

• The Center For Effective Philanthropy
• About CEP
• Donate
• 2019 Form 990
• 2019 Annual Report
• CEP's Definition of Philanthropic Effectiveness
• How Major Givers Can Best Support Nonprofits
• Donors: 5 Things Nonprofits Want You To Know
• Giving Done Right Book
• Giving Done Right Podcast
• CEP's YouTube Channel
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Grace's Twitter
• Phil's Twitter