by Connie Clark

At eight years old, while watching Captain Tugg--the local venue for Popeye cartoons--I became a fundraiser. Captain Tugg promoted Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA) carnivals, backyard events children could run and host. Using a kit provided by MDA, kids could make a few dollars for the cause. With the help of my parents, I sponsored two neighborhood carnivals. We probably raised about $5.00 each time. I felt a sense of great accomplishment and purpose, just as I did when filling my "mite box" with pennies each year for the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief. I loved putting the penny-stuffed cardboard box in the alms basin.

The Gospel-based moral lessons I learned at church and from my parents became real for me when I raised and gave money. In giving to people in need, and encouraging others to do so as well, I found a rare area of consonance between those Bible lessons and "real life." There was, and is, meaning and joy in asking for money and in giving it.

Today I am a professional beggar, a fundraiser. As a communications consultant specializing in fundraising and marketing for not-for-profit organizations, I urge people to ask for money. I help them figure out how best to do it. And I craft letters, brochures, and other materials aimed at getting the best response.

While fundraising and charitable giving have always seemed good and natural things to me, it is not so for everyone. In 15 years of professional fundraising, I have run into scores of not-for-profit leaders stuck in a quandary. While they are responsible for the financial health of their organizations, they abhor fundraising. They hate to admit there is a need. They would rather chew nails than ask for money. They understandably want to uphold our culture's standard of being in control, effective, and above all, self-sufficient, corporately and individually.

Further, there is a kind of cultural recoil among many educated people when it comes to marketing and its philanthropic equivalent, fundraising. The money part of charitable activities can seem tawdry-- reminiscent of the high-pressured, fast-talking salesperson. Sometimes this is in fact the case: a small minority of fundraisers has made the rest of us suspect by using inappropriate and unethical tactics. But most often our discomfort with fundraising comes from a different place: our dislike of being vulnerable and needy.

I understand this, because I know that I prefer to give rather than to be given to, to be an agent of largesse rather than a recipient of it. As a giver, I have power and security. As a recipient, I have obligation and an outright admission of need.

When we ask for money, we cannot be proud. We are admitting need, whether it is our own need or that of others on whose behalf we are asking. We are admitting our limitations-- that we cannot, on our own, fulfill these needs. We are opening ourselves up for rejection and even anger, as we ask others to face their feelings about money, security, responsibility, and trust. In asking for money, we are blatantly not in control. Even with our professional techniques well-honed, we cannot predict results. It is a great opportunity for surrender of hopes, fears, and attachment to results. And therefore fundraising is a great occasion for grace.

Transforming grace breaks through when we risk asking and receiving--a risk significantly lessened when one undertakes these tasks on behalf of others rather than for oneself. This may be why so many people have started a fundraising task with fear and loathing in their hearts, only to find the work to be blessed and blessing.

Such a transformation occurred when a friend recently took on a fundraising assignment from her church. She was to visit several fellow parishioners and ask them for substantial gifts for the church's building program. Dreading these calls, my friend took them to prayer, not asking for specific results but for God to be with her and the people she was visiting.

"Those visits were so wonderful," she said. "People gave more money than anyone had thought they would, and it was 'found' money--a bond that yielded more than expected, or money freed up from refinancing a mortgage. Grace was definitely operating in those visits."

Another friend--a professional fundraiser who works for a church organization--told me she sees her work as a true calling. She knows that both amateur and professional fundraisers have the privilege of helping people identify their reasons for giving and ways to give; she believes she is helping them live out a spiritual calling sounded repeatedly in the Gospels. Through her exhortation and encouragement, people become willing to give up their money and to take part in an enterprise that aims to enflesh God's compassionate love for all creation.

What we miss so often in doing fundraising is that this whole business is aimed at giving to us, the fundraisers, too: When we are aware of our deep source in this risky venture, we become more joyful, freer to risk, freer to live out in prayer and action our roles in the priesthood of all believers.

My husband makes it a practice to give money to Washington's "street people" (a modern euphemism for the term "beggar"). One night as he prepared to give a beggar some money, the man held out his hand and simply said, "Surprise me."

As fundraisers, we are beggars, deprived of our comfortable self-sufficiency. We hold out our hands expectantly, knowing that our loving God is waiting to surprise us, if only we will ask.