Community

It’s all around you.

Focus the new funds and your energy on a relatively few activities in which HGB can make an important difference.
Concentrate your resources on needs that would not be met without your efforts.
Conversely, avoid making small contributions to the multitude of worthwhile activities that have many possible funders and that would likely proceed without your help.
Pay attention to your home community but favor a broader view.
Judge programs by how they fit with your goals and their chances for success, not by who makes the request.
Expect to make some mistakes; nothing important will be accomplished if you make only “safe” decisions.

Taking your time, money, and effort and putting them into community based causes is one of the four key areas of life, along with personal, family, and business / work. It’s amazing the impact on the world people can have if they choose to take their internal and external resources and put them to work in their community.

As you may or may not know, Warren Buffett has pledged to give away all of his billions of dollars worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock to various charities over his lifetime. What also you may not know is three of those charities receiving billions in gifts are run by his adult children.

When he was giving those gifts to his children gave each of them a letter outlining some thoughts around how to use the money. This letter was indexed on the Berkshire Hathaway site, and I stumbled across it one day while doing research on his investment methods. It provides an amazing framework of thought around community, and how to invest your time and resources to the greatest benefit possible.

Focus your funds and your energy on a relatively few activities in which you can make an important difference and concentrate your resources on needs that would not be met without your time, money, and efforts. There are a ton of good causes in the world, and many of them have lots of really talented people supporting them and working towards solving that problem. Think cancer, heart disease, and stroke. These are huge problems, and lots of great people are working on them. Could you truly make a difference there?

Pause for a moment and think about what skills do you have that could make a difference to an organization, even if you don’t have money. Do you have management skills or business skills you could use to help the boards of smaller organizations who may not have the resources to attract the talent and experience you have?

Or let’s say you’re a really good organizer and planner. What events could you help put on through that skill that would benefit some cause? What makes you different? What makes you good? Where do you have depth of knowledge? Then how do you take that and apply it somewhere? Answer that and you’ll make a huge difference for a great cause.

Conversely, avoid making small contributions to the multitude of worthwhile activities that have many possible funders and that would likely proceed without your help. If you contribute a little here, a little there, and a little more over there, you won’t have much impact at all. Especially if the organizations are already well supporting and well established. If things are moving, and your little push won’t help momentum much, let someone else do that work, and focus on something and somewhere else that you can truly make a difference.

Pay attention to your home community but favor a broader view. Lift where you stand, but see what else is out there. A great place to start is by supporting a local cause. Something in your city, town, or state. But don’t stop there. If you find a cause in the world somewhere where your dollars and experience can have a greater impact, pursue that. One dollar in another country can make a huge difference in someone’s life, whereas that same dollar here might have little or no impact.

Judge programs by how they fit with your goals and their chances for success, not by who makes the request. If you have skills or resources, and you get the word out there about your willingness to help, odds are you will get approached by people who are working on worthy efforts. You may or may not have heard of these people. They may or may not be celebrated, or well known. That shouldn’t make the difference for you. Knowing what you want to accomplish, and the odds on your participation successfully making an impact, should weigh more heavily on what causes you decide to support.

Expect to make some mistakes; nothing important will be accomplished if you make only “safe” decisions. When you make an investment of time or money, what you were hoping to accomplish, may not actually happen. Like every part of life, you, and those around you, will make mistakes. But embrace them. If you’re truly trying to make a difference, to solve some problem that hasn’t been solved yet, there is a reason it hasn’t been solved: it’s a challenging problem and you might fail too! It’s not easy to solve or it would have been solved a long time ago. Take some risks. Fail. Nothing big was ever accomplished by making safe decisions.

For me, at this point in my life I have three organizations I choose to support with my time and effort: EO (the Entrepreneur’s Organization), The Royal Canadian Legion, and PICA (our homeowner’s association). Each of these organizations passes the tests above for me as I am able to take my experience in business and give back in each of these cases.

Let me use the Legion as an example of this framework in action for me. Back in 2018, one of my businesses had grown to the point where I needed some local office space. So I decided to look around the city at potential locations, and found many that would suit my needs. There are lots of good buildings in Toronto with space for rent.

However, there was one unique location that caught my eye every time I drove by it. It was a building on the lakeshore that had a giant poppy on the side of it. After some investigating it turned out this building was operated by the local branch of the Canadian Legion. The poppy is there as a symbol of remembrance for all those who have died for their country in the various wars over the years.

I thought to myself, ‘If I’m going to give money to someone, it might as well be in support of a worthy cause.’ That said, I didn’t know if there was any available space in the building, or if there was, would it suit my needs?

So I called them, out of the blue, and asked if they had any space available for rent. They were a bit surprised as they hadn’t advertised any space for rent, but it turns out they did. The Legion didn’t have any internet (a bit of a challenge these days), but the space would suit my needs, and so we began. I helped support them for years and over time gave thousands and thousands of dollars to a worthy cause.

I got to meet some of the amazing people who had served in the wars on behalf of our country. I became a member of the Legion, and could directly see the impact my contribution had. The entire experience was tremendously gratifying. I was able to use my resources locally and meet a need that would not have been met without my efforts. We both benefited from the relationship.

So when evaluating what you’re going to do with your time and resources, use this framework to help you make decisions and support a community that is right for you. It will help you with the little choices, and enable you to make all the difference in the world for someone else.