Many, perhaps most, causes and social sector organizations are held back by their sense that they don't know how to raise money and advance their situation, or by a general distaste for the whole endeavor of "fund raising."
But after decades in the field, I'm confident that the raising of money is in fact the very best place to find the heart of civic action, or any kind of leadership on behalf of the whole. I'd like to share with you a classic story along these lines, from the early years of my work in the field.
Shelby, Ohio, 1976. Population 10,000.
The board was ready to throw in the towel. For an entire year, they'd been planning and organizing to raise $800,000 to build the first phase of a YMCA community center. The first dollar was yet to be raised and they'd begun to despair. For weeks on end, they'd been having the same conversation, reinforcing over and over their belief that they didn't have it in them to succeed.
"This town is too small."
"It's too much money.
"Nobody cares."
Board member Bob Lederer, then 29 and president of a local packaging company, saw more in the town and its people (perhaps as Churchill had seen in his country?). He grew increasingly impatient with the board's downward spiral.
One evening at a meeting in a church basement, he stood up and said he'd heard enough.
"Tell those who would doubt that we can do it, Yes, we can!"
Bob later backed up his words with a significant financial commitment by his company, a tangible expression of his faith in this enterprise and in the town's future. Bob's example changed the agreed-upon reality and others began to step up. Soon the town was buzzing with excitement about the new community center. A banner reading "Yes, we can!" was raised over Main Street.
More companies joined in making leadership pledges. A group of factory workers came to the campaign office late one night after a meeting at their union hall. They set their own example by each donating an amount equal to the cost of a bottle a beer a day for three years, to shock their company's hesitant leaders into a major commitment.
One day, a waitress in Sid's Coffee Shop, who said she was a single mother working hard just to make ends meet, leaned over the counter to ask me whether she could make a small contribution (as if she doubted her money was good enough).
Within a year, the campaign had met its goal. The banner that flew over Main Street was changed to read, "Yes, we are!" The town celebrated with a parade. And the board decided to keep going to raise the long-range goal, which had earlier seemed like a far-off dream: a total of $1.4 million.
The campaign drew nationwide attention. A UPI reporter and photographer came to Shelby. The story of the "Little Town That Could" ran on front pages across the country on July 4 of the bicentennial year, and inspired a nation to show its support.
One child in California wrote on a piece of notebook paper, "I think this is a great idea," taped two quarters to an index card, and put it in the mail. A woman from West Virginia sent a five dollar bill "from my social security check." Imagine what these heartfelt expressions meant to the people of Shelby.
Once the $1.4 million had been raised, the banner was changed again, this time to read "Yes, we did--thanks to you!" And they marked the occasion with another parade.
At the banquet held to celebrate the conclusion of the campaign, my boss, John Rhodes, and I were invited to toast the town's achievement. So grateful was I to have been a part of the town's accomplishment that I could barely get out the words: "You've done it. You said you wanted to build what you wanted, how you wanted it, where you wanted it. And the success is all the sweeter, thanks to the early doubts."
Even today, I'm moved to remember how that small town did something they were sure was impossible. For me, it meant something far beyond doing my job, far beyond the raising of money, far beyond the building of the community center.
I had seen people coming to know their personal and collective ability to shape the world as they wanted it to be.
I had seen the profound leadership-by-example that can be contained in a single courageous statement, a single defining investment.