How to Heal The World on a Budget: Part II

Read Part I

Suddenly, after half a year of monthly meetings, we were out of time. Our last meeting--the meeting at which we were finally to write the biggest charity check perhaps any of us have ever written--loomed large. We understood that we have just recently begun to operate as a true collective, with a joint notion of giving that is different from--though related to--all our individual plans.

To my surprise, despite our hand-wringing and apparent lack of direction, we in fact had developed some practical thoughts. We seemed to like the grassroots effort. We wanted to support women. We were eager to support the unrecognized cause. For weeks we circled around the idea of giving to Avodah, a one-year program in Brooklyn through which a handful of Jews in their early 20s live together, do good--grassroots--deeds, and study Jewish texts. A kind of "good deeds collective," our counterparts in action.

Others wanted to use it to create offshoots of our own group. I myself was fond of the notion of paying a modest stipend to a smart and spunky intern at a Jewish women's organization who could throw all her youthful self into a time-limited project, like creating a voter registration drive or fixing up an urban vacant lot. It was concrete, human, and it utilized a person's skills as well as our funds. And it was small. All things that registered on our collective radar screen.

Small. It's the one problem that plagued me again and again. Throughout the process I was stuck in a tug-of-war between naive enthusiasm and discouraged cynicism. Every time I settled, tentatively, on one lily-pad, I looked out and saw another. My thoughts became more frenzied and escalated. What about stopping anti-abortion murders? What about saving women from the repressive Taliban regime? Maybe we could run our own candidate for president. Or we could put a woman on the moon ...

I also worred about the randomness of our choice. Did we research every group before rejecting it? Did we create charts of causes and values, good works and overhead costs, and proceed scientifically toward our decision? Certainly we did not. When the time ran out, we decided. Avodah. We paused. We looked around. This was it. Someone else gave words to my worries: "Why Avodah? Because we opened the pages of the Chronicle of Philanthropy and thought it sounded neat?

My answer surprised even me. "Think," I told her, "of how many programs we have talked about, filtered and rejected. This is the one that stuck. If we trust the organic nature of this process, like you trust the organic nature of falling in love, then we have chosen this group because--in our collective, eight-person consciousness--it was right." My answer satisfies even me.

A postscript:
Sorting through the masses of papers that accrued in this process, I discover, in a pile of old newspapers, an article from The Jewish Week, about the launching of our group. The headline: "Giving On a Shoestring." According to a 1940s Webster's dictionary, a shoestring is a small sum of money, "shoestrings being a typical item sold by itinerant venders." It is also defined as "capital inadequate or barely adequate to the needs of a transaction."

It's true that $800 isn't adequate. It wasn't adequate for us either. The four remaining members of our group kept meeting for another year, wondering how to perpetuate ourselves, continuing to donate into the "pot." We talked about outreach. We met in each other's living rooms. We brought strawberries and bagels and seemed very small. We even doubled our donation to $10 to make up for our numbers. Without great confidence, we made up a curriculum based on the past year. We cautiously asked some members of the organized Jewish community: If we open this up to high-school girls, to be our partners in giving, do you think they will come?

It was then we knew we were onto something. Everyone we turned to seemed to want to sponsor us. The Jewish Fund for Justice is handling the finances. (No more desk drawer for our cash.) The JCC on the Upper West Side and Ma'yan: The Jewish Women's Project are helping us with books and publicity. Ansche Chesed, a synagogue in Manhattan, is hosting us. Synagogues and schools all over the city are mailing out flyers and posting notices on bulletin boards. One woman suggested that we'd soon have collective "pods" all over the city. That would be something. A lot more than a shoestring. A lot more than $800.

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"No Small Change" meets for one Sunday afternoon a month in Manhattan, October 2000-May 2001. Spaces are limited, so call soon! Sarah Blustain (212-397-8183) or Rachel Hyman (718-783-5903)