This is a picture of Cali MacEachen presenting a check of 5,000 dollars to the Sojourner House. 

Here we have fellow classmates Jacqueline Gray and Elizabeth Weber presenting a check of 2,000 dollars to Day One.

This is Vinny Baccari handing  a check for a whopping 5,000 dollars to the McAuley Village.

Here we have Bridgette Fiumedora and Conor Murphy presenting a check of 4,000 dollars to the House of Hope charity.

This is fellow blogger Alex MacIssac presenting The Rhode Island Community Food Bank with a check for 2,000 dollars.

Here is a picture of our class and the grant recipients after our ceremony.

Here is a short interview with one of the members of our Executive Board Chris Scagliarini. This was taken yesterday at our end of the year party. At this party we took the time to thank the charities for their amazing work that they do.

Last week (4/20/2017) in Philanthropy Class it was time to make our final decisions of who would be getting the Providence College MAD Board Grant. To start off the class each group gave a short presentation of their individual site visits of the finalists for the grant. We then gave recommendations of which organizations we thought deserved the grant whether it was full funding or partial funding. Our group is usually in agreement about making board decisions; however, this week there was a little bit more arguing than usual because many students felt so passionately about the different organizations that we visited. It took us over two hours to come to an agreement, but eventually we were able to come to a compromise and we agreed that we will be funding the following organizations:

Sojourner House --- $5,000

McCauley Village --- $5,000

House of Hope --- $4,000

RI Community Food bank --- $2,000

Day One --- $2,000

We are excited to be able to fund 5 of our organizations, and we will host them her at PC at our special event on Thursday May 4th where we will present them their checks. 

Today the class took a trip to the United Way of Providence. We were able to meet and talk with the current CEO of the organization. We discussed things like catalytic change and what constitutes it. He also told us the story of how the united way organization changed its way from just helping out their 50 “partner agencies” to helping out smaller groups that will make more of an impact in the community. Our class then went through all of the submitted proposals and decided which ones deserve sight visits and which ones are to be removed.

Last week in our philanthropy class, we started with our MAD board meeting. Last week’s discussion was run by the Evaluation Committee who is in charge of creating an evaluation form that we will use to evaluate the organisations that responded to our request for proposal. As a class we looked at the initial evaluation form created by the committee we worked together to streamline the form into more spreadsheet template in order to be able to compare and contrast the organisations side by side. The board then moved on to discuss planning the end of the year party where we will present the check or checks to the organisation(s) that we will be granting the money. It is an exciting time for our class because the proposals are starting to come in, and it will soon be time to start evaluating. The semester is flying by, and with only 6 weeks left, we are feeling the pressure of making sure that we pick best organisations that fit our criteria and our goal for catlytic change.

After the MAD board meeting we had a presentation on donor intent by four members of our class and a discussion on their research. We heard about serveral cases throughout history where the intent of a donor was not quite followed by a university or organisation. Throughout the presentation our class had a discussion about the several cases that we looked at, and were then able to relate the cases to our class goals. This got us thinking about our own intent with the grant that we will be giving.

This week we will hear a presentation on global philanthropy, and have a group discussion of how global philanthropy applies to our class and philanthropy at large. Stay tuned!

Today we discussed the role of corporate philanthropy. A group in our class gave a presentation in which we discussed a case about Gap’s corporate philanthropy story as well a Ted Talk that reiterates the importance of corporate philanthropy. We discussed within our class what we thought corporate philanthropy meant and came up with a list of the good things corporate philanthropy does as well as the bad. We discussed the corporate philanthropy model and how many companies need gap or extra money so that they are able to survive while doing philanthropy. Corporate philanthropy doesn’t just involve money, it involves volunteerism , in kind donations  and other good deeds.-