How to Increase the Resources Available to Charities by $500 Billion a Year  


Since most nonprofits and charities rely on donations and volunteers to help them accomplish their missions, we  thought of a way to boost the donations and volunteer hours for charities by about $500 billion dollars a year.

The idea: Think of all of the charities in your city or town. Most of them rely on volunteers and donations. Now think of all the people in your city or town who donate money or give time. Together they form the pool of volunteer hours and donor dollars in that city or town. For the most part, all of the charities draw from this pool for their needs. If a few charities become more successful at getting money and donations, they do better at accomplishing their missions. Unfortunately, this leaves less for the other charities. So the others have to work harder to get the same amount of volunteers or donations. In other words, money or time that you give to one organization is money or time that you can’t give to the others. So, unwittingly, the charities are competing for the same dollars and volunteers.

Our  idea increases the overall pool of volunteer hours and donor dollars. Since time management workshops can increase the time that volunteers have to give, and money management workshops can increase the money that donors have, charities should offer these workshops to their volunteers and donors. They should say to them: “Here’s a way that you can be more generous to us and the people we help, and have more time and money for yourselves, as well!” That “perk” would be better than many current volunteer perks and appreciation events.

At first, volunteers and donors may initially resist the idea of taking workshops, since they might just want to give time or money, rather than do a workshop or training. But charities need to coax their volunteers and donors by explaining how this is a way to be more generous, and also have more for themselves. Once people understand that increasing the volunteer and donation pool is one of the few real ways to increase the overall good that can be done, they will start to appreciate this idea. (Granted, many charities offer estate planning, but by money management, we  mean something broader and more immediate.)

Charities themselves might resist this idea. That’s because, even if the workshop participants produce more time and money because of the workshops, they might not share it with the charity. They might keep it, or they might give it to another charity. But the workshop can be set up to make it clear to the participants that they are expected to share some of their increased time and money with the sponsoring charity. The way to prove that this idea works is to do an actual study. But how could it not work? If people are generous enough to give time and money to a certain charity, most of them will certainly give more to a charity that helped them create more time and money. Besides the volunteers and donors they already have, charities could even attract people who always wanted to give, but never had enough time or money.

Here’s where the $500 billion figure comes from: The richest one-tenth of the world’s population would be 600 million people, mostly the middle class of the wealthier countries. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume they are all just middle class people. If 50% of these people can save just $100 more a month through money management, that would yield $360 billion a year ($100 x 12 x 300 million). $100 a month may sound like a lot, but in an actual small group situation, Tim Cimino (a genie) once  led a group of participants to trim monthly recurring expenses like insurance and utilities, producing savings of up to $1,500 a year. Now for the other part of the $500 billion: In the United States, about half of all adults who can volunteer do volunteer. Assume that capable adults and teens make up half of the population—the rest are too young, too old or too infirm. Therefore, imagine that only one quarter of the 600 million people volunteered an extra three hours a week, using time gained through time-management. If this time were valued at only $6.75, that would yield $150 billion dollars a year. ($6.75 x 3 hours/wk x 50 weeks x 300 million.) Thus, the total of donations and volunteer time is worth over $500 billion a year.

This idea is so simple idea that we can’t imagine that a charity somewhere in the world hasn’t done a time-management training as a perk for their volunteers or a money-management workshop for their donors. Nevertheless, there’s still a difference between their idea and mine. My idea is to make this a new standard for the nonprofit sector. To have it be known that this is a higher and better way to give, one that yields increased long-term benefits for all—the volunteers and donors themselves, the charities, and the people that the charities are trying to help.

How soon could this happen? As soon as a charity creates a time or money management training and presents it to some of its volunteers and donors, the process has begun. A charity could ask for half of the time or money that is gained during the first year and then track the results. If charities fully embraced this idea and took a year to plan and test their trainings, it is conceivable that within five years charities could have easily trained over half of the potential candidates, yielding half of the $500 billion a year.


Because charities and nonprofits are often focused on the short-term, an additional impetus may be needed for them to embrace this paradigm. This impetus can be supplied by foundations that raise the bar by insisting that charities begin to study and integrate this new paradigm. A recent example of foundations “raising the bar” is their current emphasis on collaboration between nonprofits.

Someone might criticize this idea by saying that most of the $360 billion that people save is money that would have been spent on other things. They might worry that this will shrink the for-profit sector and cause a loss of jobs. But any job loss in the for-profit sector will be more than compensated by two things: First, job creation in the nonprofit sector, and second, an increased safety net that will make the transition easier for those losing their jobs. In other words, because the nonprofit sector is built up, there will be more job training, counseling, and other services available to those in transition. And since the nonprofit sector is more service than product oriented, you would expect a net increase in jobs.

If you think about this idea, you may decide that the benefits aren’t that easy to come by. That’s because a one-time money or time management workshop won’t produce perpetual savings. Eventually circumstances change, and the savings will either disappear, or people will divert more of their savings to their personal desires. The answer to this is the superprogram idea, explained later. It’s an ongoing structure that is designed to maintain and increase the capacity (time, money, energy and skill) of participants. For now, you don’t need to understand superprograms to believe that an ongoing structure would maintain the savings. Just imagine that after the initial time-management training or money management training that the participants meet once a month for a check-in meeting and social time so that their continuing efforts can receive recognition and so they can encourage each other.

Once again, if charities emphasize that this is a way to increase the overall pool of time and money, and thus increase the overall good that is done, it will make an impression on their volunteers and donors. It will also have two spin-off effects. First, it may draw in new volunteers and donors—those who didn’t have quite enough time or money to give before. Second, when charities don’t have enough operating funds, they have to spend more money and staff time on fundraising. Their fundraisers are often in competition with each other (only so many events can happen on a weekend). The more the charities compete for the limited pool of donations, the more they spend in fundraising. An unproductive escalation can occur. But since this approach increases the overall pool, it eases the need for fundraising events, and so there is less likelihood of escalation.

As we said, $500 billion a year more isn’t enough to address all the world’s major problems, but let's compare that amount of money to other income streams.$500 billion is more the total annual US foreign aid budget. It’s more than the annual UN budget. And it’s more than the total donations of the thousand most generous corporations on Earth.—And it’s more than these three sources of funds combined.  While $500 billion a year seems small in light of recent economic problems, other ideas such as "supercharity"  can increase its impact.

So when this upgrade is widely implemented, the 500B idea will have a huge impact in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. 

More: We are currently building a website to implement and promote this idea.  It's at HelpersHelper.Org


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