The Good People Fund Interview

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Every day you and I get bombarded with negative news. Just like the body becomes what we eat, the mind becomes what we’re putting in. It is important to listen to stories that not only give you hope, but also inspire you and uplift you.

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Hey, if you want to help protect the plant or make sure you like and subscribe to the channel because Great.com’s Philanthropic Project, which is donating 100 percent of our profit towards the most effective Cossar areas, like protecting the rainforest or helping climate change technology to develop. And the topic of today is goodness in society. Where do we find goodness in today’s world? And to understand more about that, we have

invited Naomi Eisenberg from the Good People Fund. So I want to say welcome, Naomi. Thank you. Good to be here. Naomi, what would you say that the problem that you guys are trying to solve is?

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Well, there’s not one problem. We really direct our focus to people who are trying to. Change our world in good ways. They’re all people who are addressing significant issues that are affecting everyone, whether it’s hunger, poverty, issues that relate to refugees program, new programs we’re now working with that are trying to eliminate hatred in our society, programs that deal with people who have disabilities, all of them, all of the programs that we ourselves support have been founded by generally and one individual or small group of people.

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We refer to them as good people.

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They are all ordinary human beings who have decided that there is some issue in this world that they want to try to fix. And they have found creative ways to do that. Most of them are not nonprofit professionals. They haven’t been trained in nonprofit management. They’re just ordinary good people who. Want to do good and our focus is on finding them, identifying them and then helping them in their work.

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Our second goal is to make them more visible so that other people can learn about their work and step up and help them. All of them are working with budgets of very small numbers. Many don’t have staff. They may be working with volunteers, but they’re all extraordinarily inspiring people that make you want to to help.

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So in a way, you could say that the problem that’s resolving is to help create more role models or at least to showcase how many role models are out there who are then in turn trying to solve all the different problems we have as a society, that that is a very significant part of what we’re doing.

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I don’t remember who made the statement, but essentially we want to. People who learn about our work and come to look at it, to say, hey, they did that, why can’t I do that? Whoever it might be, whatever program they might be looking at so that we really want to hold these people out as inspirations for the rest of us to use whatever talents we may have to do. Good. I know you’re called great, we’re just good.

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Then if I heard that you said that you are identifying, finding these people and then you help them to find them, right, to show.

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Yes, how would you go about finding good people in the world today? How would you do that? Well.

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Our focus is primarily on the United States and Israel, where so we have a much smaller and much smaller field that I have to look through and there’s no secret to doing it. It’s basically I do an enormous amount of reading. Sometimes people send me links to something that they’ve found that they think is very interesting. But generally, of the 70 plus programs that we support, we have found we have identified all of them ourselves. And that’s basically just networking, reading and so forth occasionally. If somebody has gotten a significant amount of publicity in a major publication, we wouldn’t necessarily go looking at them because they’ve already made their splash. Sometimes that. Doesn’t result in their getting a lot of attention or a lot of support, but what I’ve also learned is that our grantees themselves are often. Conduits to others who may be working in their community or others that they know about who are doing equally good and impressive work, so that there’s no magic to how we find them. They’re all out. Truly, they’re out there many more probably than we would think.

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And once you’ve found a perfect person, maybe, let’s say, for example, someone doing hosting there.

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An open kitchen for people who are hungry, they will do it on a volunteer basis because they want to help people, right. So you find this person you would do. Are you saying that you are sometimes funding that person to help the organization?

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Once we have identified that person, the first step is to get to know them, meet them.

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Unfortunately, covid has sort of cramped my style a lot because I can’t go meeting people. I have to rely on Zoome for the most part. But generally that first conversation gives me the information that I need, whether this is. This is real, and this is the kind of person that we want to continue to establish a relationship with. It’s a gut that I have developed over twenty five years plus of doing this work. I think that. By and large, there are certain. Core attributes that I would say each of these people holds, one of them is humility. If I detect a little too much ego, that could be a turnoff to me. But generally speaking, when I meet with them and I hear the passion in their voice and I hear the joy that they get from doing whatever it is that they’re doing, and most of the time they’re not getting paid to do it. That, for me, is. That’s good, that’s a good thing. And so then I’ll start to dig deeper into the set up, how are they doing this? By and large, most of the programs that we are supporting have already become more formal in terms of becoming an organization. But occasionally we find somebody who has an idea and has been doing it and. Will step in to. Help them become a more formal entity with so many years of doing this, I have become a mentor to all of our programs because, as I said, they’re not nonprofit professionals.

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They’re just people who are driven to do something good and don’t necessarily know the best way to go about doing it. So we can provide them with that mentoring to allow them, you know, this is what you need. If you have a board, this is what you should look for. This is what the law requires you to do. How do you find a board? What kind of bylaws should you have as an organization for more mature organizations? Sometimes there’s questions. They have problems with board members. How do they handle that? How do we raise money? There’s you know, there’s a million questions. Running a nonprofit organization is not easy. It’s very difficult. And I always say to people who I meet, if you if you don’t want to go to bed at night worrying about where the money is going to come from and wake up in the morning and have exactly the same concerns, don’t do this because as as exciting as it may be and as that as fulfilling as it may be, the reality is that there is still. Hard work and you need money to do know, unfortunately, you need money to do good work and all of the programs that we work with operate on very modest budgets. For the most part, we fund programs that have essentially about a half a million dollar budget. Is the tops most or far below that.

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So what we’re talking about here is. Identifying people who are actually doing it for the cause, not for themselves. You could say once you’ve found those people altruistic, kind of right. Then you would just support them and their mission, support the support that you always, I guess, wanted, but no one ever gave. So that’s the kind of support that I guess you would also showcase their story. All right.

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Yeah, we we we our website is very rich. Good people, fun dogs. It’s a very rich website. It’s filled with lots of material. Probably the most comprehensive piece is what we call our annual report, which comes out every year just at this time because our fiscal year ends at the end of June. So on November 1st, we usually issue our annual report, which is about 40 pages of description, picture, narrative, as well as pictures of all of our programs. And it describes in detail what the program is about.

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It describes, obviously, the founder and what drives them and. We find that people look forward to receiving this document every year, it goes out to about five thousand people on our mailing list and it’s a feel good document and where they’ve just gone out in the mail last week. And I’m sitting here now writing personal letters to about one hundred and something people. And I started by saying that this year of all years, this is a document that will make you feel good and that there is hope and that there is so much goodness in this world, despite the fact that we are living in a global pandemic and in an economic pandemic that this country hasn’t seen in. A very long time, but it’s. It’s just about goodness, that’s that’s the bottom line.

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I’m curious to understand, I guess they would be very helpful if people contacted you directly and say if they have someone that you would like to recommend, then they would write to you. Let’s say that I have a person I cannot believe in. Um, I’m not sure, though, to how to feel if the person is coming from me or not.

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How would people assess you? The goodness in people when it comes to.

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I guess my question is, how do I know if I mean my ego or not, let’s say I’m a person who might not actually might be appropriate or not.

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How do I know that I’m. I think.

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Yeah, I know if I said to you, I know it when I see it, but that doesn’t satisfy you. I think that. It’s what I hear coming out of their mouth I don’t want to hear. I. I don’t want to hear a lot of eyes. I want to hear a lot of it.

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We they.

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It’s it’s not about themselves, it’s about the work that they’re doing. And about whatever problem it is that they’re trying to make better and. Sometimes it’s also unspoken, sometimes it’s just the rapport that you. That you achieve in a conversation with people. I spoke yesterday to a young woman who’s running a program in Detroit that’s a drop in centre for homeless youth, which is an enormous problem in this country and particularly in Detroit. And I asked her. How did she start to do this? Why did she start to do this? Well.

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Her answer wasn’t a whole lot different than many of the other programs that we deal with. She herself.

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Was homeless at one point.

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And many, many times it’s personal experiences that have led these people to do the kind of work that they do. So as I continued the conversation with her and learned more and more about what her life had been like and what she learned as she was in college and she was homeless. She was living in her car and she talked about, you know, once she graduated and she was living in a home with some friends and her brother showed up at the door and he was homeless and she took him in and then some of his friends. And there was this group of six guys sleeping in the basement. They were all homeless and her landlord wanted to evict her. I mean, there’s a whole long story to this ultimately. She very quietly shared.

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That.

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Her brother ultimately ended up committing suicide. And you know that. Part of the conversation just startles you and leaves you. Breathless and, you know, immediately what’s driving this woman and how revealing it is. So when I heard that when I heard the story from her.

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You know, I haven’t yet looked at financials and so forth, but to me, she has got a call on the phone there.

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Know who it is.

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Now, it’s a spam call that comes every day at this hour.

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It’s.

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You know, whatever she said, it was perfect, it was absolutely perfect, and in every one of our programs, there’s a story behind it. Some of them are extraordinarily poignant like that, and some of them are. Just good stories. There are a lot of people in this world who are driven to feed people, you know, I’m not driven, it’s not what drives me. But I know so many of our programs that involve food were started by people who feel this extraordinary compulsion to be sure that people have enough food to eat, that it is a God given right to be able to have enough food. And you can hear that in your conversations with them.

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And I understand better when you explain that, so I’m hearing when people have to focus on the collective contribution or the collective results. And also when people have lived through the experience themselves that I don’t want other people to do, they have to go through the same thing. That is an indicator. Yeah. What would people do then if people would recommend you to someone, how do they reach out to you?

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What to do? Well, basically our rule is that we find programs on our own like recommendations. Now, I’m not going to say that if somebody doesn’t, if someone sends me an email and says, you know, I I just learned about this. It’s not that I’m not going to read the email, I will, but there’s a ninety five percent chance that that’s all it’s going to be, is that I’m going to read it and I’m going to write back and say thanks so much for sharing this. And that’ll be it. And a very small percentage of the times that that happens, it’s something that I will start to dig deeper and look at.

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Have you been having experience from people who have tried to get funds when it wasn’t the real thing and stopped?

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I would say. That we have a ninety nine point nine percent. Success rate in I don’t I don’t think we’ve ever funded anything. We would never find anything that isn’t real, honestly, because we do a lot of legwork. I have. A personal relationship with every one of our grantees, and they know, I think, to a person they would say. Even if you didn’t give us money, we would want to maintain this relationship. Because, you know, running a nonprofit organization is a very lonely business. And when you are constantly looking for more funds, typical funder’s. Don’t necessarily establish. Real relationships with their grantees. There’s a certain. There’s a certain. It’s not a disconnect, but this person has money and this person needs it. So there is already a chasm there. We don’t look at it that way. Yes, we have the money, but. I take all of our grantees and I really believe all of them are friends, and if for some reason we stop funding a program, the relationship doesn’t necessarily end. They know that they can come back. They can contact me just to say hello, or they can contact me to say, you know, I’m struggling with such and such. What’s your feeling? How should I handle this problem or that problem? So there’s an equanimity in the relationship. Just because I have a checkbook doesn’t make me better than they are, and I think that they would all say that that’s what they are. That’s how they feel about working with us.

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Hmm. So the relationship is very important than this. It’s all about relationships. Have we missed any vital part to understand or organize? The Good People fund how we missed something vital.

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I think we know, it’s about the people.

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It’s about the good work that they’re doing. I think it’s, you know, we ourselves operate in much the same way as the programs that we’re looking to support. I’m the only full time employee of the organization. I have a part time administrator who works. We have a part time consultant who does marketing for us. I didn’t have to learn how to

work at home. Last March, when everything shut down, because what you’re looking at has been my office for almost 13 years. Have it moved? And, you know, we try to maintain fortunately, our overhead is covered by donors. Contribute specifically to cover overhead, so donors realize that. Nearly 100 percent of what they’re donating is going to be used to help our programs.

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And as I said, we’re in Israel and in the United States.

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What would you want people to do after hearing this, Cynthia?

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Oh, I’d love it if they went to our website, which is good people fund dogs and just tool around. It’s filled with

beautiful pictures. It’s filled with great stories. The best place to land is on our annual report page. And then the new two thousand twenty twenty report is smack there in the middle and it’s bright and cheery and it’s set up in a flip book and you can just go through it. It has beautiful text and beautiful stories. I hear so many times from donors that when they want to feel good, they pick up that book. It’s in many places it sort of becomes a coffee table book for a while after it comes out. You know, it’s a lot to read. So people just pick it up and look at it a little bit and put it down and go back to it. It has an extraordinarily wide variety of programs. That’s one of our one of the most important parts of what we do is that we really provide, if you’ll pardon the expression, a smorgasbord of programs that run the gamut of, as I mentioned before, from hunger to women’s empowerment to refugee issues. And we also act very quickly. We have something we call the forces. We act with speed, the scope of our programs, the oversight that we have over our programs and. The fact that we screen them carefully and that accountability is important, you know, we don’t just write a check. And say goodbye, it’s a check and you stay in touch and you report back to us. I normally spend two weeks in Israel every year, which won’t happen this year. It takes that long to see all of our programs and to have meaningful conversations with them. And I travel through the United States to most of the areas where we have a core of programs in the East Coast, West Coast, a few in the middle of the country and. That’s that’s the good people find in it.

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In a nutshell, I would like to end this interview by asking you if you. If more people could understand how to repair the world, what would that be? What would you want people for more people to understand?

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I think what people should understand is that they have within themselves certain talents. Certain. Skills that they can use. To repair the world, you know, the expression in Hebrew is tikkun olam, which is really repairing the world. Every one of us has the ability to do a piece of that. You know, our tagline is small actions, huge impacts. I never look at the glass as half empty. It’s always half full because we prove every day that a small amount of money. Or even a small action can change things, and it’s hard to sometimes get your head around that when things seem so overwhelmingly. Difficult, but I think that if everyone stopped and thought about it. What it is, what skills they have. Sometimes I ask kids, what are you good at? What do you like to do? What in this world makes you angry? Then you can use the answers to those questions to kind of hone in on where you might be able to make a difference. We’re not going to solve world hunger. This organization is certainly not going to solve world hunger, but whether we’re going to help more people have food on their table. And so it’s taking your little piece of the world. And making it better.

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