Trust, Earned

...29 days to go...

When I started this project eleven months ago, I expected to spend most of the year as an analyst.

That was the frame I brought from my career: gather data, compare organizations, identify the most efficient path to impact, and allocate accordingly. My early posts reflected this. I calculated the cost-per-meal at Ballard Food Bank, the statistical likelihood that a food donation would divert someone from homelessness, even the expected value of a single vote in the Seattle mayoral race. Starting from scratch as an outsider — knowing almost nothing about an ecosystem of organizations, almost nothing about the people they serve — I figured rigor was a reasonable first move.

But something shifted over the course of the year.

The shift wasn’t that I stopped believing in data. It’s that I proved - to myself at least, and maybe to some of you as well - that almost all of the organizations I chose to get involved with are incredibly impactful. They differ much more in how they approach the problem of homelessness and which aspects of that problem they choose to solve, but they don’t differ greatly in efficiency.

Ballard Food Bank feeds people and, in doing so, helps precariously housed families hold onto their housing. Mary’s Place shelters families and children, and reaches people who can’t come to the services through its mobile outreach program. FareStart helps people build skills and confidence that open doors that were previously closed. Plymouth Healing Communities walks alongside people who may never be fully stable, but who deserve a consistent presence in their lives nonetheless. Sound Foundations builds entire homes for the cost of a few trips to Home Depot.

None of these is more important than the others. All of them are necessary if we’re going to make a real dent in this problem. I expected to be sorting winners from losers. What I found instead was a network of organizations each filling a part of the picture that no one else was filling.

That realization changed how I wanted to give.

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Ballard Food Bank is getting another gift from Jen and me as we approach the end of the project. We’ve been involved with BFB since before A Handful of Coins, and I’ve written before about why I think the double impact — feeding people directly, and helping housed families stay that way — makes it such an efficient use of philanthropic dollars. That analysis still holds.

But if I’m being honest, the analysis is no longer the main reason. It’s that we love this organization, and we’ve spent enough time there to trust the people running it, to see firsthand how they operate, and to feel confident that any dollar we give them will be used with care. That’s a more durable kind of conviction than a spreadsheet can produce.

Mary’s Place is getting a gift as well — and for this one, I keep coming back to something I’ve written about before: a moment from a shift in their kids club.

Dinner was wrapping up. The adults were finishing their meals, and the kids — children of maybe a dozen different families, thrown together by the shared circumstance of not having a home — had drifted to the back of the cafeteria and started playing together. They were genuinely happy. Not performing happiness for the volunteers, not distracted by it. Just kids, running around, laughing, in the way that kids do when they’ve found each other and stopped thinking about anything else.

I stood there for a minute watching them and thought about my own kids and their evenings — dinner together (usually), but rarely an opportunity afterward for unstructured, chaotic fun. Someone always has work to do, or homework, or sports to go to, or maybe just wants to veg out and watch a favorite show by themselves. And I noticed, without quite meaning to, that what those kids at the back of the cafeteria had — the spontaneous community of it, the chaos, the freedom to just find each other across the boundaries of their families — was something my own children don’t often get.

I’m not suggesting those kids at Mary’s Place have anything better. They are navigating circumstances that no child should have to navigate, and nothing about that is romantic. But Mary’s Place is delivering something real: a moment of genuine joy, every night, for children who have very few stable things to hold onto right now. An organization that can do that — in the middle of everything else it’s managing — has earned a level of trust that goes beyond what any financial analysis can confer.

Which is why this donation will be fully unrestricted. Earlier in the year we directed a gift specifically toward their prevention work. We believed in it then and still do. But having seen the judgment these people exercise — in the kids club, in the shelter, in how they think about their clients — we’re comfortable letting them decide where this money does the most good.

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Looking back, this year has had a financial element and a volunteer element. I could have done it focused only on the financial — making donations and analyzing their impact. But I would never have built the trust I did in these organizations because I would never have seen how they actually work.

The scenes you witness as a volunteer — the ones that stick with you — aren't available in any annual report.

I’m grateful for the time I’ve been able to spend in this world. I came in as an analyst. I’m leaving as something more akin to a fan.