A majority of people have a burning passion and a deep drive to want to help others in need. Many others sailing on the same boat, believe they have a ‘calling’ and do feel a strong need to dedicate all of their time and lives to good causes in order to make a difference wherever possibly they can. In fact, having a ‘deep drive’, or a ‘passion’ or having a ‘calling’ to become a part of a ‘problem solver’ is usually the main reasons why people are motivated and ambitious to establish and run their own charity organisations and help solve the numerous global sustainability problems. Even though this post is not about how to start a charity, there is an article on Forbes that gives an overview on how to start a charity.
However, starting charity organisations is not as easy as it may sound. Just in like any other profitable business organisation, starting a charity organisation involves a lot more than just a passion to help solve problems. It involves tenacity, a lot of hard work, knowledge and skills. A majority of people who had good intentions at the initial stages of starting a charity organisations have had to give up along the way while others ended up in more trouble because of difficulties and obstacles they didn’t expect to experience. I came across this 3 minutes Wall street Journal video where Veronica Dagher, a columnist focused on wealth management, financial advisers, personal finance and philanthropy for Wealth Management at WSJ.com, discusses how to overcome the four major problems that cause charity organisations to fail at the initial set up stage. These major problems include, a lack of enough research, understimating the power of documentation, lack of proper ‘papers’ ( including insurance), lack of well qualified and skilled members on advisory board and the biggest of all is lack of sufficient funds.
More detailed information and related article can be found here
