As the head of an organization with the mission of giving money, I spend some portion of my days trying to get more money to give. Just like any business, we want to be smart about what we do and efficient in how we do it, and we want to grow so that we can do even more. You can see, then, why the Forbes list of living philanthropists who have given away $1 billion or more caught my eye. A billion dollars. Billion with a “b.” Even after TARP, that’s a lot of money.
Seeing this made me wonder what The Home Depot Foundation could accomplish with resources of that magnitude - what would we do differently? The question honestly had me stumped. Even if we multiplied the amount of the grants we are currently making 10 times over, or even 100 times, we would not be able to eradicate the needs of our communities, which span issues as broad as housing, education, health care, economic development and the environment. In fact, we wouldn’t even be enough to fix one of these problems, although it would certainly go a long way.
For us, ensuring that everyone has a place that they can call “home” is our primary focus, which we see as a basic essential. But even if we could meet everyone’s basic necessities, we still wouldn’t have created the kinds of communities we want people to live in. For communities to thrive, we need residents to feel connected - to their surroundings, to each other and to the generation following them. While grants from various foundations focus on providing the immunizations, the education, the job or the home, those things are not really the primary goal. Instead, these are just the means to the end of supporting the creation of a successful life - however an individual defines his success.
And in the end, it’s not really about the money (although more would always be better). Our work is really about supporting people and communities so that they have the resources to accomplish the goals they have set for themselves.
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