Current e-Journal

Catalytic Thinking Exercise:
Budgeting from a Place of Strength

If the words strength and budgeting feel like they come from different planets, then this week's newsletter is for you.

One big problem with budgeting for community benefit organizations is that accounting wasn’t built for our needs. We’ve simply adopted business accounting and added some different headings.

But community organizations are significantly different from businesses, starting with the goal of our work. For a business, that goal is to make money. For community benefit organizations, though, money is just one of many tools we use to achieve a very different goal - the goal of making our communities strong and healthy.

A women’s shelter had a 1,500 square foot facility housing a store with everything the women needed to establish a new home. Kitchen items and toys for the kids. Professional clothes for work, and kids’ clothes of all sizes.

Everything in the store was free for the women in the program. Whatever they needed, it was all part of helping folks get back on their feet.

All those goods had been donated by folks in the community. And the store was staffed entirely by volunteers, many of whom were graduates of the program itself.

Now let’s look at the financials for this organization. The only place this phenomenal program was mentioned was as an EXPENSE for the rent on the space.

All the resources people had shared? Nowhere to be seen. The asset of the program itself, its impact on those women? Nonexistent. The volunteers who ran the program? Invisible.

What, then, would it take for your budget to tell the whole story of the work you do?

Try this
One of the three pillars of Catalytic Thinking is Radical Strength. The budget is a place for showing the strength we DO have, rather than the wishful thinking and scarcity of what we do NOT have. And the way to do that is to simply include in your budget all the stuff that makes your work strong.

Just as we look for assets to build upon in our communities, we can build our organizations' budgets upon what we already have. And just as it is in our communities, our own assets are not about having a pile of money. They are about the people and stuff we take for granted.

• PEOPLE: This includes your volunteers. It includes your board members. It includes your advisory teams, your pro bono attorney or PR person. Think about all the unpaid people who make your work possible.

• STUFF: In-kind gifts of all kinds, from office space to cans of food to office supplies. Has a local content creator helped you film a PSA for your work? What would be the value of that production if you had to pay for it? Think about all the stuff you rely on to do your work, that you don’t pay for.

This is simply about listing all the stuff you rely on, that isn’t in the budget, and putting it in the budget.

Here’s what that can look like. The example is for a diaper bank, whose mission is to collect and distribute diapers and incontinence supplies for folks who need them.