cc  >> Additionally, we'd like  to thank our media partners,  Wisconsin Public Television,  for taping today's lecture and  for providing that through  their University Place channel.  Today, I am very pleased to  introduce Jodi Bender Sweeney.  Jodi counsels nonprofits on  a full range of resource  development needs.  Her specialty is helping  education foundations develop  and grow to meet the extra  budgetary needs of school  districts.  She was a founding member and  continues to serve on the  advisory committee of the  National School Foundation  Association.  Until recently she served as  president of the Foundation for  Madison's Public Schools, an  organization she founded in the  year 2000.  The foundation raises funds for  creative and innovative projects  in the city's Madison Metro  school district and is  considered a national model for  innovative programming such as  the Individual School Endowment  Initiative.  With a goal of $100,000, the  foundation raised $900,000 in  its first year and more than  $4 million in the first seven  years.  Her career includes service as  manager of community relations  for GATX Corporation in Chicago  and ten years as program officer  for the Madison Community  Foundation.  Jodi is author of "Are You Ready  for a Capital Campaign?  which was published  in Nonprofit World magazine. 

 And I've asked her to talk with  us about developing this  movement, the need for it and  why communities are starting to  think entrepreneurially about  how to fund public education  efforts.  So with that, please join me in  welcoming Jodi Bender Sweeney.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you, it's really fun  to be here.  I have kids your age  so this is really fun.  I hope they're all in class  as we speak.  I'm really old-school and I  brought handouts instead of  PowerPoint because I wanted you  to have a copy of this which  I'll talk about in a little bit.  Yes, thank you.  If you could pass those out that  would be great.  >> Absolutely.  >> Typically, when you think  about entrepreneurs and  entrepreneurialism I think about  business. 

 What we're going to talk about  today is something that is the  fastest growing segment of  entrepreneurialism in the  nonprofit sector.  A little bit different than  business but if any of you are  thinking about careers, the  nonprofit sector is growing  incredibly fast and there tends  to be lots of jobs in it.  So you might want to just keep  that in the back of your mind.  I want to start with two  questions.  How many of you graduated from  public high schools, as opposed  to Catholic or private?  Great.  And how many of you have been  asked to make a contribution to  your high school?  Any of you?  We're not that advanced in  Wisconsin yet.  The whole innovative idea and  the entrepreneurialism I want to  talk about, as Jeanan said, was  the public school foundation.  Just like private schools and  like colleges and universities,  we need to raise private money  to continue the extra curricular  things, the things that aren't  in the regular district budget.  When all of you graduate from  here and go on to be incredibly  rich and successful you can bet  that the UW Alumni Association  will be asking you to make a  gift to the university to help  provide the kind of  opportunities that you're all  getting now.  I would like to predict that  your high school will also be  asking you for a gift, your  public high school, which is  something that as you saw isn't  happening a whole lot yet. 

 But which is growing really,  really fast.  So I want you to be really rich  and really successful so that  you can give to both your high  school and the college.  I want to talk for just a minute  about the quality of public  education now.  And if you've read a lot about  this or if any of you know about  it, it is declining rapidly and  that is helping to move the  school foundation movement fast,  very quickly.  I want to quote a couple things  from The World is Flat, Thomas  Friedman's not most recent book  but his second to most recent  book.  Which I thought would be kind of  interesting for you to know to  talk about where we're at in  public education.  A recent Goldman Sachs study  concluded that China will be the  largest economy by the year  2045, replacing the United  States as the superpower in  terms of the economy.  China and India today, combined,  graduate 950,000 engineers a  year.  Appropriate for this building.  That's compared with 70,000  engineers graduating in the  United States. 

 So you think about what that  means for the future of this  country and the future of where  things are going to be developed  and where we're moving forward,  that's kind of scary.  We need to find more money to  put into engineering and those  sorts of things.   The National Science Board  report recently showed that the  number of 18 to 24 year old,  your group, who received science  degrees has fallen to 17th in  the world.  Where three decades ago we were  third.  So you, again, can see sort of  where we're going with all this.  The technology leadership that  this country has is the one  that's building the jobs for  tomorrow.  The 2004 task force showed that  the amount of money that we are  putting into technology and  innovative development of  leadership in that area declined  37% over the last few years.  So we're not putting money into  education.  The Chinese, the Indians from  India and the people from  Poland, the Poles, are not    racing us to the bottom.  They are racing us to the top. 

 They don't want to work for us.  They don't even want to be us.  They don't want to be Americans.  They want us working for them.  Those are the countries where  the really innovative things are  happening in education that is  developing the whole research  and technology.  That's where people are going to  want to work in the future.  They are pouring tons of money  into education in those  countries.  Japanese kids, Chinese kids go  to school six days a week.  They go to school from 8:00 in  the morning or 7:00 in the  morning till 5:00 at night.  We don't do that in this country  so we need to be thinking about  that. 

 The Thomas Friedman quote that's  my favorite and I know Britney  Spears is a little bit out of  date, remember this book is a  couple years old.  "Young people in China scalp  tickets to see Bill Gates.  In China today Bill Gates is  Britney Spears.  In the United States Britney  Spears is Britney Spears."  And you can change it to  somebody a little more updated  than Britney Spears.  But we have a different way of  doing things in this country  that is not serving us well in  terms of our education.  The bottom line is there is jut  not enough money in regular  district budgets to keep a  really world class education for  everybody single kid in this  country.  And that's the whole idea of  raising private money.  The whole idea of the school  foundation.  Probably not a lot of you watch  Oprah but she did a special a  couple months ago and she showed  two schools outside of Chicago,  one more inner-city, one in the  suburbs.  And the dichotomy of what kids  were offered in those schools  was really shocking. 

 One of those schools had  up-to-date gym, fabulous science  labs, everything, every  technology.  The other school had very few  textbooks that had all of their  pages in it.  So we're really creating  different classes and we're  creating some huge future  problems for ourselves in  education.  And the school foundation  movement is trying to address  that.  There are a number of issues  that come into play with all of  this.  Policies issues, political  issues, and the group I'm  working with is trying to bring  some real entrepreneurialism to  all this to bring some business  ideas to it.  Some of the policy issues that  are going on is that there is a  huge movement to reform public  schools.  You'll see it in the Gates  Foundation grant.  You'll see it in Annenberg  Foundation grants.  And if any of you know the  Walton Family Foundation which  is all the money behind the  family that started Wal-Mart,  they are funding charter schools  enormously. 

 They are putting millions and  millions of dollars in charters  schools.  Charter schools are great but  they are not the standard public  education that you all got.  Did any of you go to a charter  school at all?  That's not the standard norm in  this country.  The school foundation movement,  and it's important to know this,  is working directly with the  school districts.  The Madison district which I  worked at, and we're trying to  help reform every public school  or to help sustain every public  school not to reform it.  In the United States there are  13,500 school districts.  Madison is just Madison.  There's one in Sun Prairie.  They're all over the place.  They're all different sizes and  right now there are about 5,000  school foundations in the  country. 

 They vary in degree of success  as to how they were established.  Most of them were established  over the last 8 to 10 years.  Many of them raised $25,000.  They do a couple of little  things and then they give the  money back and they don't really  build systemically.  One of the things we'll talk  about later is a whole  initiative that a group that I'm  involved in is working with the  UW Center for Nonprofits, part  of the School of Human Ecology  to help change all that.  In addition to raising money,  school foundations really are  trying to rally support around  public education.  Every business is going to  employ somebody that comes  through our public education  system.  If kids can't add, if kids can't  use correct grammar, that's  going to impact all of us.  The other thing that every  neighborhood really needs to  think about is sometimes the  price of housing is driven by  the fact that the schools, the  houses that are in the  neighborhoods with really great  schools tend to have higher  prices than those that are in  neighborhoods without great  schools.  So it really impacts all of us. 

 It's not just kids.  It's not just their parents.  Schools really drive the economy  of the entire community.  One of the things that I want to  talk a little bit about as  Jeanan said, was the Foundation  for Madison Public Schools.  About eight years ago then  superintendent, did any of you  go to Madison schools?  Really only one of you?  Really?  I'm surprised.  About eight years ago the person  who was then the superintendent,  he left last year, Art  Rainwater, who was a brilliant  guy for a lot of reasons.  Asked if I would conduct a study  to see if Madison could do a  school foundation.  It was pretty much cutting-edge  at that time.  There were school foundations  around but there weren't a whole  lot.  And I was asked to do this  because I was consulting with a  variety of nonprofits all over  the place. 

 But I had never done a school  foundation.  I'd never even heard of a school  foundation and frankly I thought  it was kind of silly because I  thought tax money was going to  cover everything.  The study was fascinating.  The wealthiest, most  philanthropic people, as you  probably all know, one guy here  gave $200 million to build the  Overture Center.  We have enormous wealth in this  community.  And a lot of those people,  excuse me, said this was the  dumbest idea they'd ever heard  of.  Taxes cover public schools.  Why do we need to raise private  money?  Universities can do it, that's  great.  But public schools don't need to  do this, it's nuts.  So we decided to do a very  different kind of model and  instead of going to the wealthy  people to ask for gifts first we  went to current and retired  teachers because they  understood. 

 They understood that eight years  ago where Madison public schools  were was a day at the beach  compared to what was coming down  the pike in terms of budget  restrictions, in terms of  ability to fund any kind of  innovative programs, to do  technology, to offer laptops to  kids, all of that stuff.  And so we asked those retired  teachers and those current  teachers if they would give  first.  Which is very usual in  fundraising to ask people  without a great deal of wealth  to give first.  And they responded amazingly.  We got $10,000 pledges over five  years from a variety of teachers  and retired teachers, none of  whom had made more than about  $50,000 or $60,000 a year in  their whole life.  Huge gifts but they really got  it.  And we raised, as Jeanan said,  our goal was to raise $100,000  and we raised $900,000.  We went back to all those people  with enormous resources.  Yeah?  >> I had a question.  Are the teachers allowed to  donate to a specific school or  did the money go right to --?  >> Very good question. 

 >> Can you repeat it?  >> Sure.  She asked if the teachers were  allowed to give their own school  or if it just went into the  district and then went into the  whole budget.  It's a great question.  What they did was, and let me  answer it in two parts, school  foundations are independent.  They're connected to the school  district but they're not really  part of the school district  because nobody wants their money  to go directly into the district  budget which is this great big  hole of $300 million.  So gifts at that point were made  to the foundation specifically  unrestricted.  What we developed about three  years later was we saw the exact  same thing that you just pointed  out.  That people really had an  affinity to their only school,  their own high school, where  they were teaching.  And we developed something  called the Individual School  Endowment Initiative Which has  won awards all over the place.  And everybody was able to build  an endowment fund for their own  school. 

 And I'll talk about that in a  minute.  But that's a wonderful question  because you're right they cared  enough about the general idea to  give unrestricted but we learned  that not everybody was able to  do it.  And I will take questions.  We wanted to hold questions to  the end so that we can make sure  we can get your questions and  Jeanan will go around with the  microphone but if somebody wants  to ask something please do and I  will make a point of repeating  it.  So the first year we raised  $900,000 and then we went back  to all those wealthy people and  said what do you think about  this.  And as she said we raised  $4 million over the first year,  we've now raised about  $6 million.  That's a lot of money coming in  one district and it's happening  all over the country.  The other thing we did that's  interesting was we developed an  honorary board.  Those are people who didn't come  to meetings, who didn't have any  policy say but they were people  who the minute somebody saw our  letterhead we had instant  recognition.  We went to the first lady,  Jessica Doyle who had been a  teacher in the Madison district. 

 We went to Brad Whitford.  Does anybody know who Brad  Whitford is?  You have to be older than you  guys to know who he is.  Do you remember the show West  Wing?  Ring a bell?  Or he was on a show with the guy  from Cheers recently.  An actor and very philanthropic  we asked him to come on.  His name meant something to  maybe my generation.  John Wiley, your former  chancellor, thought this was a  great idea and came on and was  incredibly helpful to us as we  got started.  And David -- who grew up and  went through the schools and we  had a list of about 15 people.  It was amazing to me as we went  to those people and talked about  this, they got it.  And nobody turned us down.  Everybody offered to help us. 

 And all we did was ask for the  use of their name.  And to use on the letterhead.  But then we went back to them  and little by little we asked  them to things.  When we wanted to do an event to  honor teachers throughout the  district that had done specific  things, we went to Jessica Doyle  and we told her about it and she  said why don't you just use the  executive residence.  An incredibly generous gift from  her and teachers got a huge kick  out of it.  They were celebrated and  teachers aren't usually  celebrated.  We knew Brad Whitford was coming  into town because his wife was  getting, who's Jane Kaczmarek,  was getting an award from the  UW.  And we asked him if he would do  a luncheon for us, changed all  of his plans, he was great, did  a luncheon and I stood there and  held up his tie out of the salad  as he signed autographs and then  handed us a great big check.  We got really good support from  all sorts of people.  I want to talk a little bit  about some of the programming we  did. 

 The first was the Individual  School Endowment Initiative.  Do you all know what an  endowment is?  I won't use, I'll try not to use  any lingo and if I use any,  raise your hand and tell me you  don't know.  An endowment is a fund that is,  you never spend the principal of  it.  It is sort of a big savings  account.  Ours are held at the Community  Foundation here and you only  spend the interest of those  funds.  A few years ago that was great,  right now it's not really  exciting to be spending the  interest because there's very  little interest.  But we build a long term  sustaining fund for every single  one of the schools in the  district.  There were 47 of them.  It was fascinating to me one  night we went around and there  was one school in sort of a  wealthy part of Madison and we  said we need $5,000 to start the  endowment fund for your school  and they said, sure, we'll right  a check out of the PTO and a  couple of other people will  write some checks and we had the  money that night.  We drove across town a school in  a very different financial  district and the parents looked  at us like we asked  for $5 million. 

 They were just like $5,000, you  want $5,000?  That was just a fortune.  So what we did is we brought  banks, we brought businesses, we  brought sponsors in to adopt  those schools.  One business adopted a school  and every year gave it $10,000.  A bank adopted another school  and they sent their employees  and did all sorts of mentoring  and all sorts of stuff.  As we got this thing rolling  what we realized what we needed  something to make this is little  more exciting and we got one  individual in our community who  nobody knew about it was great  because I found this great donor  who wasn't very well known in  the community.  And he gave us a quarter of a  million dollars.  He sat there and wrote us a  check.  And he said every time some  school raises $5,000 I will give  them $5,000.  And then he funded all the  expenses for the program.  The thing took off like  wildfire. 

 Exactly what you, I presume,  were aiming at was the fact that  people like to give where they  feel most attuned.  So the schools that where  somebody had graduated it was a  great way to go to alumni, we  went to grandparents, we went to  parents.  If you graduated from eighth  grade we had $5 gifts.  We did all sorts of things.  That initiative alone raised  $1 million in a couple years.  And every single one of the  schools has a fund that they can  go back to every single year and  fund things specifically for  that school.  The other innovative program  that we did, it started in  Boston and it's now very  successful in New York.  New York has, I think 4,000  schools and they do all this on  one day.  It's something called Principal  for a Day and you pick community  leaders, the kind of people who  have no idea what's really going  on in a school everyday and you  ask them to shadow the principal  for that school.  So we had doctors, we had the  mayor, we had very well dressed  CEOs sitting in kindergarten  chairs, serving lunch, doing the  announcements, all sorts of  stuff. 

 People the got a huge kick out  of it.  And we always had waiting lists  to do this after the first year.  Then we brought everybody  together and talked about what  was really happening in public  education in the community.  Nobody had any idea.  Most of them hadn't been in  school for 25 or 35 years and  they thought it was fascinating.  There's one school, Shorewood,  over on the west side, where the  kids speak 27 different  languages.  Think about teaching a class  where kids are speaking 27  different languages.  The foundation found funding to  do all sorts of things to make  that easier.  So we developed some nifty  innovative kind of programming.  And this thing really took off. 

 It became kind of a model for  other foundations across the  country and I started getting  phone calls and decided that it  would really be fun for me, it  would be, frankly, much more  lucrative and really interesting  to go out and do this with  school foundations all over the  country and that's what I've  done for the last couple years  is help them either start or  help them revitalize.  And I've done things as diverse  as a little bitty community in  rural Iowa, it's very small.  The downtown is one street.  And we're raising $16 million  for a couple of new buildings  for the kids in that school.  And Flint, Michigan, which if  you drive through downtown  Flint, Michigan, it looks the  pictures of Baghdad we see on  the news.  It is boarded up.  It is bombed out.  It is frightening what's going  on in communities like Flint.  But we're raising money there to  help kids in school because  people understand that if they  don't fix the schools in that  community they aren't going to  be doing much more.  All of this work by myself and a  couple other people throughout  the country. 

 We've pulled together a group of  about 10 of us who are really  developing a whole initiative to  help school foundations.  One of whom is the past  president of the National School  Board Association.  It's amazing she can open every  door in town which is every door  in the country which is  wonderful.  I was trying to find out how to  get us and our ideas, which I'll  talk about in a minute, in front  of the Obama Education Team  because nothing's happening   these days without Obama and all  that money that's out there.  And I called her and I said do  you know any way that we can get  in front of Obama's bunch?  And she said, yeah, I'm having  breakfast in about three weeks  with Arne Duncan who's the new  head of education under the  Obama administration.  She's, we just keep her on a  pedestal and use her ever way we  can.  What we are trying to do is  raise both the standards for  school foundations and the  profile of school foundations.  Had any of you heard about the  whole concept of public school  foundations before you walked in  this room?  No?  Okay.  We got a lot of work.  And thank you all for being  here. 

 That's kind of cool that you've  never heard of it.  We're doing two different models  to build all of this.  One of them is the whole model  of community foundations.  About 25 years ago people  decided that there needed to be  endowment funds, community  foundations in communities  across the country.  It was started by the Ford  Foundation.  And they put some challenge  grant money out there to do  that.  It was not quite 25 years ago it  started at zero and one grant  from the Ford Foundation and the  community foundation movement is  now $31 billion in assets.  And every year across the  country community foundations  give $2.6 billion, with a B,  dollars back to communities  across the country.  We would like to be doing that  for school foundations 25 years  from now.  We'd like to be pouring billions  of dollars into the school  foundation. 

 We're also using a model, or a  series of models, that have come  from what I call the dot-com  millionaires.  There are people all over this  country who've made fortunes,  like Paul Allen who's with  Google, all sorts of people like  that, and believe we've kept  track of every one of them, who  just made a fortune and now they  are doing philanthropy, now they  are doing foundations to give  money back to schools.  Bill Gates is probably the  biggest.  He's one of the biggest funders  of education in the country.  You read a lot about what he's  doing in Africa and other places  but he's really give a ton of  money back.  What dot-com millionaires are  doing is totally changing the  face of philanthropy.  They are bring all the  techniques they use very  successfully in business and  nonprofits and they're funding  all of that.  They're throwing out all the old  rules of the traditional  foundations that make you fill  out all these forms and jump  through all these hoops and  they're just giving out money.  It's not quite that easy,  particularly these days with the  economy, but they're doing  things very differently.  So we're trying to use some of  their really innovative  techniques as we develop this  whole initiative. 

 We're trying to use very  innovative things and empower  the foundations that we're  working with.  Trying to solve old problems,  how do you bring money into  schools with all sorts of new  ideas.  We're developing partnerships  rather than trying to do things  on our own.  It's amazing what you can do by  leveraging different groups and  putting them together.  We have a nonprofit entity and  we also have a for-profit  entity.  And we're combining those.  That's the kind of new thinking  if you know anything about, or  if you care anything about, the  nonprofit world it's become very  entrepreneurial, very for-profit  driven so there's enough money,  there's earned income money to  support the nonprofit mission.  We're also trying to bring  national attention to this whole  movement.  If none of you have heard of it  we need to be talking to kids  your age.  You're the future leaders, we  need to be getting this idea out  in front of them. 

 And we're trying to create  synergy among all the school  foundations so that they all  work together.  The idea behind all of this, if  I say the term pink ribbon do  you know what I'm referring to?  Does anybody?  The concept of the pink ribbon?  Breast cancer.  Okay.  Pink everything.  You can buy a pink dishwasher.  You can buy pink anything now.  And that money goes to  the Susan G. Komen Foundation  which funds breast cancer  research.  Because of all the cuts in  national funding for breast  cancer research in the NIH  Susan G. Komen is now the  largest funder in breast cancer  research in the country.  They do the Race for the Cure  and all sorts of stuff.  You can go drive a BMW at the  local Zimbrich dealer or any  place you want and on one day a  year and a dollar for every mile  you drive goes from that dealer  to Susan G. Komen. 

 They get 75 requests a week to  partner with them because every  company who partners with them  and uses that pink logo is  incredibly successful.  Their sales go through the roof.  I don't know if you've seen it  on TV but the Yoplait yogurt if  you lick the lid and put it in  an envelope and mail it.  Yoplait yogurt sales went  through the roof when they did  it.  Ford, not that it helped Ford  that much, but Ford a couple of  year ago did really well by  working with Susan G. Komen.  So the idea behind this piece  that you got and I want to talk  a little bit about what it took  to do this.  This logo is to develop the pink  ribbon where all the money goes  back to school foundations and  to schools across the country  through those foundations.  And I thought I might talk just  to a minute about what it took  to do this.  What we wanted was a symbol that  looked like kids, look the like  excitement and hopefully  eventually will be instantly  recognizable.  If you see pink you think breast  cancer. 

 Hopefully when you see green  raised hands you will begin to  think about schools and giving  back to school throughout the  country.  We developed this logo, we  started to run it through the  trademark process.  And if any of you want to be  entrepreneurs, the trademark  process is something you're  going to need to know about, the  whole patent and trademark  office.  We ran it through.  We had a different name for it  at that time.  It was called Raise Funds, Raise  Hands.  And there is a group in Texas  that is all the CEOs of the big  corporations that are  headquartered in Texas and they  have a group called Raise Hands  Texas.  Their logo is a yellow sign that  looks like a street car sign  with kids on it.  We didn't think there was any  correlation, we had run it  through, we looked, whatever.  The patent and trademark office  stopped us. 

 We went to the raise funds Texas  people and they said we just  don't, they had huge groups of  attorneys in Dallas, and they  said we don't want to deal with  this so forget it.  We are not going to allow you to  use Raise Funds, Raise Hands.  So that was thousands and  thousands of dollars.  It was months and months of  going through the patent and  trademark office and we got  stopped dead in our tracks.  So we did this with a little bit  different color and we came up  the with the name Create  Excitement for Public Schools,  paid thousands and thousands  more dollars to attorneys and  started this through the  process.  And this has gone through.  We own this logo.  We own this name.  We did it in black and white.  We did create excitement. 

 We did public schools.  We do everything we can think of  so we can use this all over the  place.  So this will eventually,  hopefully become as well known  as the pink ribbon.  It's interesting in the patent  and trademark office if you, the  minute we use this, right now  because you guys have seen it is  considered in the flow of  commerce so I own it.  Whoever puts this through, and  it's the Create Excitement  group, owns this and it's in the  process, but you always run it  through and get the trademark  and all that in case you are  ever challenged.  Also when you run it through the  process you know who might be  out there and challenge you.  So if you're ever thinking of  being entrepreneurs and starting  your own company the patent and  trademark office is a huge pain  in the neck but you need to do  it.  And I will also tell you that my  husband and I have funded all of  this because we really believe  in this.  We haven't even tried to go out  and raise money until we  actually own this and could use  it.  We think this is pretty cool so  we've tried. 

 What our hope is is that public  education is like apple pie.  How many of you went through  public education, and we're  hoping that it really resonates  with people that we need to give  money back to public education  and that it is a massive market  for any company that wants to  get involved and do any kind of  cause related marketing because  you're touching kids, you're  touching parents, you're  touching grandparents, you're  touching teachers, you're  touching everybody who ever went  through public school and you're  touching every community so we  think it's an incredibly pretty  broad market.  The other thing that we've  realized about the whole school  foundation market is there's a  huge variety of success and not  success among all of them.  And there needs to be some  really incredible training for  all of them to move forward.  As I've said before, we've  linked with the UW Center for  Nonprofits which is part of  School of Human Ecology, which  manages this course, and we've  developed a very specific three  part tool kit where there's  three different levels of  training.  We're going to use really  interesting technology through  the UW system, part of the same  kind of technology that is  taping this today.  So we can do very cost effective  ways of getting into every  single school foundation all at  once.  And then we're going to bring  them together one time a year on  the UW campus.  So hopefully this summer we're  going to do a pilot project and  you will have school foundation  people from all over the country  doing this.  The tool kit is the for-profit  piece of it. 

 It will be sold and much of the  cost of all of that will be  going back to the nonprofit.  Remember I talked about  for-profit/nonprofit kind of  model.  So that they will come together  and produce all sorts of money.  Harvard is doing this, it's  called their Leadership  Institute and they are doing  this with groups of nonprofits  across the country.  And the group that has funded  this at Harvard has at least  done some initial talking to us  about funding it for school  foundations here.  I'm way early but I'm finished  to I would welcome your  questions and to talk about  anything you'd like to talk  about in terms of the process of  trademarking this and  for-profit/nonprofit, all of it.  >> I'm going to walk around with  the mic and of course folks just  raise your hand if you want to  ask a question.  I would encourage you to do  that.  Jodi could you just share with  us, just so we have a little  better knowledge of this, the  types of programs that these  foundations are seeding.  It's not a hot lunch program. 

 It's not some of the things that  you might typically think happen  in a school.  >> It's anything that's creative  and innovative and outside of  the regular school budget.  There's some good examples, the  Kern Foundation in this state  funds the project Lead the Way.  It is very innovative  engineering programs.  And they couldn't do it all, I  mean, they give you a seed money  grant.  Madison was the first place that  raised private money, most it  comes out of the district.  Madison we needed to raise  private money, and now other  districts across Wisconsin and  other parts of the Midwest our  developing really innovative  engineering programs.  There's something called STEMs  science, technology, engineering  and math.  Those programs are largely being  funded through school  foundations.  So we want to do really  innovative things. 

 When we were in Madison we did  grants every year and we made  them kind of fun.  They were a little corny but  they were really fun.  We did them like Publishers  Clearing House and nobody in the  school other than the principal  knew we were coming.  And we had great big checks.  These were $10,000, $20,000  checks.  So we had big checks and  everybody connected to the  foundations, the donors, the  board, whatever, we would get on  a great big school bus and we  would go around and give the  checks.  It was wonderful.  The media came, it was all over  the place.  Teachers got a huge kick out of  it because really nobody  celebrates teachers and what you  hand them $10,000 to some  program in the school, the kids  are yelling, the teachers are  yelling because there is no  money like this.  When we first started talking to  teachers and we said we're going  to bring you private money one  teacher said to me I could  really use new chemistry  beakers. 

 They were thinking in terms of  $100,000 gifts or $10,000 gifts.  So we had some paradigm shift  thinking to do.  But really innovative kind of  stuff.  >> One of the things that  happens with nonprofits, of  course, especially as they get  started, they learn how to get  started, how to engage the  stakeholders that eventually  will provide them with money or  support or things along that  line.  Talk with us a little bit about  the basics of friend-raising  versus fundraising and what the  difference means.  Friend-raising versus  fundraising and how important  that was and is really to your  effort.  >> Fundraising is a good example  is when you send out a direct  mail letter to somebody and you  ask them to give you $100 at the  end of the year.  When you sit down with somebody  and ask them to invest in what  you're doing with a $100,000  gift or a $50,000 gift you  really need to do some  friend-raising first.  You need to cultivate them.  You need to find out what  they're interested in. 

 Somebody who cares about  athletics is probably not the  same person who cares about  funding the music program, who  cares about funding the  engineering program.  So you really need to find out  what those people's interests  are and then you cultivate them  and you invite them to dinners.  You do all sorts of things to  get them interested enough to  want to invest $100,000 in you.  Part of this whole tool kit I  talked about is this whole  process where you start with a  direct mail letter and you move  people sort of up to where  they're giving you a gift every  year and then they give you a  major gift and then hopefully  they leave you a gift in their  will.  But you really need to really  make friends with people.  That's why all of you, I hope,  will be getting letters from  your high school sometimes soon  when you come back to a reunion  asking you give because we need  to start making friends with  kids who are your age because  you're the people who are going  to be making the money in the  future.  >> Hi, Jodi.  I had a question regarding  applying this endowment  fundraising model to larger,  metropolitan areas.  Are you finding more of a  challenge with those areas where  the budget is a little more  stretched and it's more  expansive?  >> Ever district's budget in the  entire country is stretched.  But when you go into Chicago,  Baltimore, Milwaukee, some of  those kind of big cities, the  problems are absolutely  enormous. 

 And the budget needs are  enormous.  The best model for that was New  York City.  They got Caroline Kennedy to  chair this whole effort and she,  of course, knew everybody in  town and she got Sarah Jessica  Parker to donate all of the  clothes she wasn't using from  one year and they had a tag sale  in Central Park with Sarah  Jessica's Parker's clothes.  They raised a ton of money.  But they really made the case  for really starting at the  bottom and how much needed to be  done.  They raised $100 million in a  couple years.  But they got people into the  schools.  They did the whole Principal for  a Day program and when they  started people said the problems  are so huge that this is a drop  in the bucket.  We're not going to be able to do  it.  A few years later with a $100  million they had done a lot of  stuff. 

 But they really linked donors  with things.  So it's happening with big  cities.  There's a lot more of the reform  movement in big cities.  Rather than supporting what the  districts are doing, they're  trying to reform what the  districts are doing.  About, I would guess it was  about five years ago now there  were a group of us who started  this National Association of  School Foundations and we were  meeting out in Palo Alto,  Stanford funded us to come  together, and we were meeting  out in Palo Alto and it was  January and it was awful here  and beautiful there so I was  happy to be there.  And the New York Times came out  that morning and they said for  the first time foundations had  supported more K-12 initiatives  than college and universities  initiatives.  And it was because Gates and  Annenberg and some of those  foundations were pouring  millions and millions of dollars  into those inner-city  schools because they realized if  we don't straighten that out  we're in big trouble.  Did that answer your question?  Okay.  >> Jodi and I have talked about  this in the past and I think it  would be an important thing for  the students to understand, as  well, because they may hear it  in the future.  All of this sounds like a great  idea but in fact, there are some  who are adversarial to this idea  thinking that we shouldn't be  investing and developing an  entirely new funding mechanism  nonprofits to advance public  education. 

 That, if by doing so, we will be  giving the tax rolls a leave, if  you will, for investing.  Can you speak to that issue?  >> It's less so now as school  foundations are becoming more  and more successful, but  absolutely people are worried if  school foundations all over the  country started raising $100  million, or whatever their size  equivalent is, would they give  the legislatures in those states  a reason to not fund, to de-fund  education.  We're seeing such huge problems  in schools and the press is  really making the case for us  that there just needs to be more  and more and more money.  So we're finding less of that  and we are also, as we do all of  this friend-raising, we are  really creating a donor-base of  people who really care about  this but it was a huge paradigm  shift in thinking.  As I said some of the really  people who understand  philanthropy, who understand  charity in this city said, they  were people I knew, and they  said you've done a lot of dumb  things in your life but this is  the dumbest; trying to raise  money for public education, it's  silly.  They came around, one person in  particular said I wouldn't give    to this if you paid me.  It's just silly.  Within a year he had gotten a  private foundation where he sat  on the board to give us  $300,000.  People really understood it.  But we had to go out and make  the case. 

 The press is it making the case  for us but school foundations  across the country really need  to do a better job of getting  this in the media.  The need is out there.  How we can fill that need, we're  not doing as good a job as we  should.  That's part of what this  initiative is all about.  >> I'm just going to look out in  the audience one more time and  I'll ask my final question  unless anybody else has one.  You have a captive audience of  18 to 22 year olds and how would  you recommend they can be  helpful in advancing the  movement, it being as new as it  is and their being close to it.  >> One of the things I wanted to  close with is I wanted to ask  you all a question.  If you saw one bottle of water  and another bottle of water and  one of them you knew it went  back to some charity does that  influence your buying decisions?  Does it matter to you?  And just be honest.  If something's giving charity  money back and some of it's just  all going for profit, do you  care?  Yeah?  Maybe?  Yeah?  If you saw it going back to  public schools what would you  think?  Would you think it was a good  thing, would you think that's  what taxes go for?  Would you buy something that you  would typically buy in a  Starbucks or whatever that you  typically buy and one cup of  coffee gave money back to public  schools and one didn't, would it  alter your buying decisions at  all?  >> To go along with that I kind  of wonder is there a risk that  this money would kind of make  this school a commercial school?  And I'm buying a school that's  being sponsored by Pepsi it's  like I'm buying from Pepsi  school.  >> There are a lot of concerns  around cause related marketing. 

 Many schools all across the  country no longer sell Coke or  Pepsi in their vending machines.  That is beginning to be wiped  out.  Flint, Michigan, still does it  because they desperately need  the money and it's getting about  $100,000 goes into the Flint  school districts, Flint schools  because of Pepsi.  But there is a movement across  the country not to allow those  kinds of products in schools  with kids.  Obviously you'd never do  anything with alcohol, you'd  never do anything with tobacco  in a grade school, you don't  want to do Enron Field.  If any of you know Enron Field  put their name all over  something and paid millions of  millions of dollars to get.  Well that sign, obviously, had  to be taken down.  So there's a lot of caution to  it.  And I want to get back to your  specific question in a minute.  One of the problems is the  disparity among schools. 

 Some communities where people  are buying BMWs, if BMW is  giving money back to that  school, that district is going  to raise a whole lot more money  with that program than  an inner-city school  where virtually nobody would be  buying a BMW.  So you've got to be careful  about that.  There are a lot of people who  say we shouldn't commercialize  anything to do with nonprofits.  It's the wave of the future.  There isn't enough contributed  money.  About 80% of the contributed  money comes from individuals.  About 10 to 15 comes from  corporations.  But this kind of cause related  marketing is so hugely  successful that it is the wave  of the future.  But I agree with you we have to  be really careful about how it's  done, that it doesn't, there are  no strings attached to it where  kids have to buy something to  get this money, where it is  simply a public relations  campaign and the money comes to  schools.  The other part of your question  it looks like?  >> So what kind of safeguards  have you set up so it's not  happening with your  organization?  >> We've absolutely--  It's okay, I was afraid mine  would go off--  is that all the types of  businesses that we will  and will not work with,  again, that there are no  strings attached, that there is  no disparity or that the  disparity is controlled. 

 Obviously there are going to be  some regional things.  But the real big one is that  there are no strings attached  and that the way that those  kinds of gifts are recognized is  very much controlled.  >> Any other questions for Jodi?  Well, you can see that it is a  very, very exciting movement and  you've heard about it certainly  from one of its founders just as  it's getting started and really  sweeping the nation so please  join me in thanking  Jodi Bender Sweeney.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Thank you, all.