Can you spare a million dollars brother?

It seems that begging in the bus is much easier than “fundraising,” this new form of polite mendaicity that requires a special training. You can sing all night under the windows of an enterprise or a foundation, but there is very little chance that you’ll get a cent (unlessexcept if your name is Luciano Pavarotti or Ruggero Raimondi).

The UNOG training section recently organized a very good session on how to ask for a handout at a high level. Instead of asking, “Can you spare a dime brother?” we were taught to ask, “Can you spare a million dollars?” It is relatively easy to learn to say it, however the results are quite uneven.

We were told that there are four sources of funding: governments, enterprises, foundations and the wills of old dowagers.

Governments are getting poorer every day, so forget about them. Old dowagers are good sources provided that they are interested in you (or at least in what you are doing), that they remember to write down your name in their will and that they don’t live to be 120.

One of the best sources of funding remains the foundations. They are relatively neutral entities which do not ask you for anything in return and whose unique raison d’être is to spend money. So if you have a good project, do not hesitate. Write down a solid proposal and send it to them. Of course you are not the only one to ask for a million dollars, so if you have some connections, it can help.

The problem with enterprises is that they don’t do anything for nothing. They immediately ask one single question: “What will I get out of it?” As most of us are only good civil servants with no clue whatsoever of what the business world looks like, you can be sure that in most cases we get caught unaware. One doesn’t become a businessman or businesswoman overnight. Either one is or one isn’t, and if you are you don’t work for the UN.

Editor-in-Chief, Jean Michel Jakobowicz