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Making your money count in Tibet: INFORMATION for DONORS
Most donors to Kham Aid Foundation are greatly interested in how their money will be used and want their donations to have maximum impact on the lives of people in Kham. Few, however, have direct experience of running assistance programs in a developing country, so may not know all that goes into make programs happen. In the following articles we attempt to answer donors' most frequently asked questions and concerns.
(the following articles are on this page)
How do I know Kham Aid Foundation is a legal US nonprofit?
What is your annual operating budget? Where does it come from?
How do you decide which programs to run?
Which programs have the least money spent on administrative overhead?
Why do some programs have higher overhead? Why would anyone choose to support them?
Is there a middle path between these two types of programs?
What if I want to solve fundamental problems of governance and society?
(these articles are on separate pages - use your BACK button to return here)
What about building schools? Why doesn't Kham Aid do this?
What about micro-credit lending programs?
Q. How do I know Kham Aid Foundation is a legal nonprofit in the United States?
A. You can see our IRS letter, or else look us up on Guidestar.org.
Q. What is your annual operating budget? Where does it come from?
A. We spend about $220,000 each year. It comes from individual donors, foundations, and, most recently, from the U.S. Agency for International Development, all in roughly equal parts. Occasionally we get a sizeable corporate donation as we did in 2006 from Marlin Holdings but this is unusual for us.
Q. How do you decide which programs to run?
A. First we identify a need among the people of Kham, then develop ideas on how to meet it. The next step is to look for donors who are interested in supporting the new project. Usually a program will run for several years as a pilot under direct supervision of the president. When all of the bugs are ironed out, leadership of the program is turned over to volunteers or staff.
When we discontinue a program, it's usually because need is no longer there, donor interest has waned, or (rarely) no one can be found to lead it.
Q. Which programs have the lowest overhead?
A.
Humanitarian assistance
programs have the the lowest overhead because of their simple design - just
goods, services, and cash delivered to needy people. Implementation is
straightforward: purchase the items and deliver them to the target population. This type
of program can be run with minimal in-country staff and only a small budget for
monitoring and evaluation.
Examples of humanitarian assistance include Kham Aid’s programs to distribute free wheelchairs, provide relief to disaster victims, and donate equipment and supplies to charity clinics serving poor Tibetans.
The impact of humanitarian assistance is immediate and easy to see. Often, a photograph of a Tibetan using the donated item tells the whole story.
When selecting an program to support, donors should look for the following points:
quality and quantity of materials given,
whether the recipients are well-selected and genuinely needy, and
whether administrative overhead is kept low.
The biggest drawback of humanitarian assistance is that, after the assistance is used up, recipients will be right back where they started. Also, donated items may be misused or fall into the hands of unscrupulous individuals rather than the people who were supposed to get them.
Despite these problems, humanitarian assistance programs are very popular with ordinary individual donors. Occasionally, corporations and governments also support these programs.
Why do some programs have higher overhead? Why would anyone choose to support them?
A. As the saying goes, “It is better to teach a man how to fish than to give him fish to eat.” "Development" programs - in contrast to humanitarian assistance - are designed to be sustainable, that is, to have a lasting impact. Generally speaking, this is done by increasing people’s capacity to earn money for themselves or reducing factors that keep them poor.
To design a development program requires an experienced professional with considerable local knowledge. Implementation can be overseen by (lower-paid) program assistants stationed in or near the target area. After the program finishes, follow-up surveys and other forms of evaluation are important to gauge its success and plan future programs.
As Kham Aid Foundation gains
knowledge and experience, we are increasingly moving into development programs.
These include vocational training in
construction skills,
handicrafts, and
midwifery. We offer support
for
tourism enterprise development. Our
Community Education Initiative
also falls into this category.
The impact of a development program may be difficult to see at first and rarely can be summed up in a single photograph; but if it is well-designed then benefit will continue long after the program itself ends and will far exceeds that provided by short-term humanitarian aid.
Donors looking for development programs to support should seek out
Organizations with a proven track record
Projects that are culturally appropriate
Projects within the capacity of the target population.
If the program involves business development or vocational training, then these should reflect a good understanding of the local market.
Do not expect that sustainable development can be achieved without considerable “soft” costs: staff, travel, consultants, and the like. Sometimes the investment can be as high as $1000/recipient. When you consider that the pay-off is a lifetime of greater prosperity, this is not a large expense.
The drawback of this type of program is that success depends on a stable market. If business conditions, or the natural or regulatory environment change in an unforeseen way, then the results may not be sustainable. Another risk is that the target population may reject the program because it seems too risky to them, they don't understand it, or they do not want to invest time into it.
Programs like this typically cost $5,000 and up. Typical donors are foundations, corporations, and governments.
Is there a middle path between these two types of programs?
A. Yes, there is. One can provide goods or services whose benefit is long-lasting, not transient. A good example of this is education since the benefit of an education is not realized until the child grows up. At Kham Aid Foundation, the following are examples: our Scholarship, Better Schools, and Greenhouse programs.
Also, our
Cultural Heritage Preservation
Program endeavors to protect Tibetan art and architecture in the hope that
it will be useful to, or valued by, future generations.
To run programs of this type, the skills and experience needed by staff are generally less than that required by development and training projects. Post-project follow-up is desirable but may be omitted in the interest of controlling costs. One may also save money by reducing the amount of monitoring. For all of these reasons, education programs in particular are a fairly good bargain - although not completely without risks.
The impact of these programs is potentially large and long-term but depends critically on factors that may be beyond one's control. For example, a well educated child may grow up to be a community leader or she may marry someone outside the community and leave.
Donors should look for
Are the goods or services (education, for example) of good quality? It's no use sending a child to a bad school.
Are the goods or services going to be useful in the future? This is a bigger problem in education than one might expect because China is currently suffering from an excess of college graduates and jobs are not being created fast enough to employ them all.
Is the organization delivering the goods and services efficiently?
These questions can be difficult for a donor to answer. Even the organization running the program may find it cost-prohibitive to conduct monitoring intensive enough to set to rest a donor's every concern. One cannot check every teacher, and classroom in a school, nor can one know for certain whether exams are administered honestly. While one can try to audit a school's accounting books, in Kham it is a rare school indeed whose accountant keeps perfect records (and these may not correlate very well with quality in the classroom). The most easily verifiable outcome of such programs is that the children are indeed in school, and they do attain, after a suitable length of time, a diploma. For many donors, this is satisfactory proof.
For donors demanding the utmost quality and confidence, the best education project is a school built and operated by the charity itself. This, however, is much more expensive than relying on existing education infrastructure.
Education programs are extremely popular among all sorts of people and organizations. On the other hand, sponsors of cultural heritage programs tend to be individuals with a strong interest in the arts and (sometimes) Buddhism, and relatively less interest in more down-to-earth matters.
Q. What if I want to solve fundamental problems of governance and society?
A. A complete answer to this question is beyond the scope of Kham Aid Foundation to provide. Here's a brief answer: one can work with leaders to enhance their ability to lead, make improvements in legal systems, or work to promote civil society (meaning citizens organizing themselves to effect change).
Kham Aid Foundation is not in a position to undertake programs of this type in Kham. We have, however, acted in an advisory role to one local organization, the Tongla Tsewang Culture and Arts Research Association, when they held a conference on cultural heritage preservation. The purpose of this meeting was to raise awareness among the religious community of the need for, and ways of, protecting cultural property such as historic temples, paintings, statues, books, and the like.
Organizations that regularly implement ambitious programs of this type possess a highly skilled professional staff. They will employ a variety of methods, for example study tours, conferences, workshops, research grants, and advocacy. They often work closely with members of the host-country government to develop policy and craft new laws.
The impact of such work can be very slow to emerge but potentially large and long-term. However, efforts may be undermined by politics or opposition from special interest groups.
Typical donors are government agencies such as the U.S. State Department and certain international NGOs such as the Ford Foundation. This type of program is generally very expensive, costing in the tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes much more.