Giving Back: Discover your values and put them into action through volunteering and donating

Giving back is using your time and money to make the world a better place.

Along the way, you'll discover a new wealth:

• Friends who share your vision
• Skills you develop while volunteering
• Opportunities to work together with your family
• Gratitude for what you have
• Insight about what’s important to you and how you can impact the world
• Getting to see your children grow in compassion, leadership, and kindness

Giving Back is a how-to guidebook that supports you in discovering your values and putting them into action. It walks you through the process of finding volunteer projects that match your values, and helps you think through your strategy of giving back. Donating strategically means maximizing your gift’s impact by finding an efficient organization and taking advantage of tax benefits. Giving back is also something you can do together that strengthens family bonds, builds a legacy, and helps your children grow into their own. The book offers volunteering ideas appropriate for different age groups and tools for collaboratively choosing ways to give back.

Outline of Chapters

Ch 1: A basic introduction to my views on giving, why it’s important, and what you can hope to get out of this book. Some different motivations for giving and excuses for not giving, how your (or your child’s) understanding of giving might develop over a lifetime.

Ch 2: A description of the benefits of involving your family, and guidelines for the Listening & Learning Conversations that you’ll have during the process.

Ch 3: Everything you need to get started with your first volunteering experience, including questions about what you want to do (along with a dose of reality for what you’re likely to be offered) and a list of websites for finding possible projects, as well as tips on finding projects not listed on the Internet.

Ch 4: Questions to clarify your thinking about donating money, with different guidelines to consider, such as how much you’d like to give, how to spread it around, and giving anonymously. Websites to ensure the places you give to will make good use of the money. Comments about two tough groups of people asking for money: relatives and panhandlers.

Ch 5: Considerations for involving your children in volunteering projects, along with age-appropriate ideas for children from five to eighteen. Information about volunteering vacations and a gap year of service.

Ch 6: Teaching children about the importance of sharing financial resources with those who have less. Ideas for encouraging giving, such as gift matching and birthdays for charity.

Ch 7: Taking stock of the volunteering you currently do, with questions to uncover your giving passions and to get you thinking about the causes that matter most. A prioritization exercise to help you allocate your volunteering time, and a skills/desires assessment to help you maximize the satisfaction you receive from volunteering.

Ch 8: A library of templates you can apply to think creatively about making a significant change in the causes that are important to you.

Ch 9: A strategy to help you find the organizations working on the causes that are important to you, and a discussion of the ways metrics can be used (and misused) to evaluate their effectiveness. A checklist of things to look for in choosing which organization to work for, or if you need to start a new nonprofit yourself.

Ch 10: Evaluating your satisfaction with your volunteering strategy over time.

Ch 11: Topics related to financial gifts: matching gifts (where yours is being matched by an employer or you’re doing the matching to inspire other givers); ways to maximize the tax benefits of your giving, including donor-advised funds (DAFs); giving cars or your professional services; estate planning for gifts after your death; and added options for wealthy givers.

Ch 12: A summary, with time for reflection and celebration.

Steven Ketchpel, Ph.D., studied computer science at Harvard University and Stanford University, culminating in a Ph.D. from Stanford in 1998. His research work led to sixteen publications in the areas of e-commerce, software agents, digital libraries, and user experience. He cofounded web customer experience management company Vividence in 1998, working in various technical leadership, development, and research capacities until its acquisition by Keynote Systems in 2004. He returned to Stanford as a visiting scholar in the Reuters Digital Vision Program, collaborating for a year with the Grameen Foundation’s Technology Center on the development of the Mifos system of open-source software for microfinance. Since 2005, he has continued to work with small technology firms, helping with data analysis, product definition, and R&D. A self-funded sabbatical during 2011 made possible the writing of Giving Back, his first book. The material for Giving Back comes from Dr. Ketchpel’s experience in working with and volunteering for nonprofit organizations. His first volunteer experiences were part of his years growing up in Connecticut, where he was active in Boy Scouts and the Order of the Arrow (a Scouting service organization), as well as in a Congregationalist UCC church. Applying the entrepreneurial insights of leverage and scale led him to focus on empowering others, and conversations with supporters of United Campus Christian Ministry @ Stanford (where Dr. Ketchpel was a director and fund-development committee chair) showed the impact that giving back had in people’s understanding of meaning in their lives. The inspiration for Giving Back is to encourage more people to find and pursue the passions that simultaneously enhance life’s meaning, strengthen family bonds, and make the world a better place. Dr. Ketchpel lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.