Giving Charities Green: A Funded & Practical Guide to Taking Your Charity Green

Its time for your charity to embrace and embed environmental sustainability into your organization. This book will walk you through a proven process that was successfully embedded into one of North America's largest and oldest charities - the YMCA. It will help to proactively navigate obstacles, source funding and help provide tools and tips you need. I will help move your organization to become Sustainably Green.

Charities and Not-For-Profits (NFPs) have a unique struggle to balance mission with dollars raised. When adding anything new to the already overflowing plate, it stresses this balance, and it is too easy to dismiss as "off-mission". All charities have a mission - its reason for doing what it does, to make some positive contribution to their community - that must remain the core focus. There is also the struggle with the fact that this mission needs money, dollars, time, support...and that relies on asking all types of people for time, treasure and talent. Many charities have avoided going green because they perceive this as a "distracting initiative" that will take the focus off the mission. They just don't understand the impact, and the unknown amount of work and the "distraction" is too daunting.

You ARE ready to make a change. You KNOW there is a better way, you just don't know how. You are a charity, you have no "extra" money, no expertise, no time - but people keep asking, keep offering ideas, keep offering to help. It feels like you are walking down a dark corridor with little bursts of light on one idea or another...but how does it fit together? Everything is about businesses, how does this affect a charity? What is the first step, and where are we going? You picked up this book because it not only says it will help to explain this, but to actually improve your fundraising efforts...pinch me, right?

I have wrestled with these questions. I spent a lot of the first part of my career in the private sector, in both the US and Canada, working in, managing and running businesses. I am an engineer, so I need to build a system, develop and evolve it, then test it. I am a father, and want my sons' generation to enjoy this planet. I am a philanthropist at heart, so I want to share this system for others to use. Having spent a lot of time volunteering for charities as a child and adult, and now in my ninth year working for the YMCA in Toronto, Canada, I get it. I started down that dark hallway, didn't know what door to open, which person to trust or where to start. This is my perspective, my system (with a lot of help from a lot of people) and what worked for me, interlaced with my life stories that offer some context and motivation. The results have exceeded my expectations and have stumbled onto something that is actually rather spectacular. I hope you agree.