Breaking a Promise

Felicia is the twenty-eight year-old Founder of a national, non-profit organization that works to end violence by working with elementary school children. Her organization forms partnerships with schools, families and young adult volunteers to help create safe schools and communities.

Herself the victim of violence at an early age, Felicia felt unsafe, angry and helpless for many years. At the age of 10 she even contemplated ending her life. She describes her righteous anger and yet can remember still believing that things could be different:

And then, just some of my own experiences with violence growing up, without going into details, just not feeling safe for significant parts of my life to the point where I wasn't sure if I wanted to be alive. So just this real sense of helplessness and anger at a fairly young age, and that is really interesting. I was ten, and had really decided that life just wasn't so great. So I was sitting there contemplating not living anymore, and I remember sitting there and thinking that life is like this big equation and that for everything bad that happens on this side, something good is going to happen on this other side and I wasn't going to check out until I got to the other side of the equation. And, this again, I was in fourth grade so I must have been nine or ten. This really strong feeling, not of entitlement because I didn't feel I was like someone else owed me something, but it really turned into the sense of righteous anger that this isn't okay, that this is not my fault, and that things have to be different because it is wrong.

Often, the victims of violence grow themselves to become perpetrators. According to Felicia, it is in part with the help of very committed and sensitive mentoring that she did not follow this more typical route. It is also clear from this passage that, in spite of her trauma, she maintained a belief that good existed in the world and she had an early determination to find it.

Felicia was raised as a Unitarian Universalist and plans on becoming a minister. She believes that things "bigger than us" call to us, and "that is holiness." Faith and spirituality are both very important to her work; she believes we all struggle and can't survive without hope.

Keeping a non-profit organization running is difficult, and finances are typically a challenge. Most leaders like Felicia depend on the financial assistance of individuals and on private and government foundations to fulfill the organization's needs. Finding a balance between serving a mission (like ending violence) and pleasing funders can be especially difficult.

Some years ago, Felicia needed to raise money quickly. She spoke to a funder who agreed to a challenge grant: if she could raise $20,000 from other sources, she would give her an additional $20,000. She went out, under the premise of this challenge grant, and raised $20,000 from other funders. When she got back in touch with the funder who offered the challenge grant, the funder said that she had "changed her mind". Felicia was then faced with the ethical decision: should she tell the other funders the challenge grant had been reneged on, or should she keep quiet and keep the money? Here's how she explains the situation:

We needed to raise some money fairly fast. I talked with a woman about doing a challenge grant. We sent in the proposal, but she never said yes. Then she went [away] for a couple of weeks. So I started fundraising, and [the challenge grant] helped us raise probably $20,000 we would not have raised otherwise. [Then she called us and said that] she is not doing a challenge grant. Do I go back and tell those folks that she changed her mind? I probably should. I am not going to. I just don't have the time, and it's not worth the energy, and it's hard. So there are a lot of things like that that govern my day to day work.

Felicia will undoubtedly be doing good with the money she raised. Was it wrong for her to keep quiet?