Believing in my own worth

Response to “Introduction: Being a Fundraiser”

This article by Catherine Malotky is a response to “Introduction: Being a Fundraiser” authored by Paul Hanson, Senior Development Officer, which can be read HERE: "Introduction..."

Thanks, Paul, for inviting us last week to do our internal work for the sake of good fundraising. Internal work is hard, but it is necessary for both our health as fundraisers and for the donors with whom we relate. To be healthy, this needs to be so much more than a transaction!

I came into fundraising later in my career, after leveraging my theological education in a variety of church roles: pastor of congregations, teacher of seminarians and lay folks, writer of church curriculum and devotionals, and coach for church workers facing retirement. Though deeply rewarding, none of these roles were particularly lucrative.

My spouse and I were blessed with good parental financial examples, so we lived within our means and gave generously to causes and organizations we care about. That said, we were never going to be capable of transformational gifts. Both pastors who split one job until both kids were in school? We had to be careful, though we never lacked the basics. We had enough.

When I started visiting people who had much more than enough, who were capable of transformational gifts, I had some feelings I needed to deal with. I was face-to-face with people whose vocational choices were far more rewarded than mine, whose right-person-right-time good luck was extraordinary, or whose generational wealth was abundant. And there I was, someone who had watched congregants struggle to keep a roof over their heads or pay their medical bills or recover from a natural disaster. I personally knew people who couldn’t access enough. I realized it was tough for me to be so aware of the contrast. It just didn’t seem fair that some had so much and some had so little, and I saw a systemic bias that was hard to refute, fair or not.

Living in this contrast I came to see more clearly that, in our culture, money reflects a person’s worth. This is a powerful, powerful influence in our world, and it was very hard for me to recognize and counteract, both personally and culturally. I needed to reframe this if I was going to be honest in these relationships. I needed to see beyond the money, or lack of it, and see the person first. Very personally, I needed to believe that I had just as much value as they did in this relationship.

As I worked at this, donors taught me. I found that the generous wealthy are conscious of their good luck (vs. merit), and work to understand how much is enough so that they can redistribute their excess. And I began to both see and believe that my “intrusion” in their lives opened opportunities for them to act on their best instincts to be generous for the sake of a better world.

It’s true that their values and aspirations, because they held the resources, were overvalued in the whole scheme of things. But I believed in the value of the cause I represented, and if we found alignment, more balance became possible through their gifts. I was not begging and certainly not asking for myself, but for the sake of the good that would come from their giving.

I think this point of view—that our worth (mine as the one asking, and theirs as the ones considering the ask) is not informed by wealth—is critical for my own authenticity and theirs. Of course, there were those who were swept up by the money = worth equation, but those need not be visited twice. The kind of generosity we want to catalyze for our causes, our culture and the world, is a generosity that is open and responsive, not powerful and demanding. And I can’t be a part of this kind of generous exchange if I don’t believe in my own worth, no matter what the wealth gap looks like between me and the donor I’m visiting. 

Special thanks to Catherine for authoring this response!

Rev. Catherine Malotky is a retired ELCA pastor, a grateful spouse of 43 years, and parent of two spectacular daughters, who have wonderful spouses and the sweetest children on the planet. She is an active member of Edina Community Lutheran Church.

Catherine and Paul worked together at Luther Seminary as Philanthropic Advisors.