What is the best way to give out money?

If you give it a minute to think about (I'm sure that many of us have done this in the past) this can be quite a complicated question to answer.  I always remember chatting with my friends about what they would do with the money if they won the Euro Millions or a sudden windfall from a great, great aunt twice removed who they didn’t know they had (like that C4 TV programme Secret Family Fortunes). 

I’ve always thought it interesting that after the first thought of 'I'd go shopping' or 'I'd buy myself a 42" plasma screen, an x-box and every game on play.com' people almost always come to the topic of giving money to others - Sometimes family, they'd pay off the parents mortgage or buy them a holiday to Barbados - or maybe they'd give more broadly  - they'd buy the local pub and give everyone free drinks - Personally, I would pay off all my friends' student loans so they could all get on with what they want to do in life rather than being saddled with debts meaning they have to grow up and get a 'proper' job rather than exploring all the wonderful entrepreneurial ideas they have and should explore.  Almost always, people appear to want to use the wealth to, in some way, help others.

But where does it stop and how do you decide?  My idea, for example.  How many friends would I give money to?  How do I choose which friends are most worthy of having their debts paid off and which aren't? – I could end up in a quandary of 'who are my real friends?'.  I could lose friends if I didn't give it to someone and they knew they had been left out of the beneficiaries, but if I look at the number of 'friends' I have on my facebook page, I couldn't possibly give to all of them (some of them I don't even remember, but they must have been there somewhere!) or the greedy part of me says 'I'm the one who won the millions in the first place, aren't I?  I should keep it all!'

I've been asking myself this question since April this year – when I started work at the Young Foundation on this new, exciting and interesting programme 'The Youth of Today'.  My colleagues and I have been charged with the task of giving out £1million – not to friends - to third sector organisations (like charities and non-profit organisations) - who are going to make the biggest social impact possible by providing young people with leadership opportunities.  There are so many good people and organisations out there, all doing amazing things or even people who haven't started to do amazing things yet, but have brilliant ideas to do amazing things.  How do we go about deciding who is worthy of the money from The Youth of Today and who has to keep looking…?

One of our first thoughts was if we're giving out money that is someone else's money (as it is in this case) we have to treat it as if we're giving out our own money.  For me, that means that it has to be really REALLY beneficial to as many people as possible and we have to know that it isn't going to go to waste.  If I was giving my own money to something, I'd want to make sure that it was going to go to make a real impact and that I wouldn't be giving it to someone who would just go and spend it in the shops or fritter it away and have nothing to show for it at the end.  I also think that it needs to be fair. If I was going to give money to my friends, I wouldn't want to pay off one friend's loan one day, but then refuse another friend.  It wouldn't be fair.  So, we thought, what we need is criteria to decide who to give it to.

We've been thinking about it long and hard and now, finally, we've come up with our criteria for the fund (you can see it on our pages on the website in detail but here is an explanation from my point of view about how it came about). 

• Number 1 - It can't just help one person get where they want to go, it has to help lots of people.  There are so many things wrong with the world that we live in and so many young people that care about all that stuff, we should do something about it.  Young people have told us that they want to work on the issues that they are most passionate about, so this can be an opportunity to let them.  It's a win-win.  We can help people get leadership opportunities and they can have an impact on something they are passionate about and make a bigger difference in the world!  Idealistic stuff, eh?
• Number 2 – We thought about all the projects that are doing great stuff already.  Although its good, we don’t want to just continue to fund stuff that is already taking place.  That isn't what we are here for.  We want people to break away from what is being done already and come up with new exciting ways of doing things that will be even better!
• Number 3 - When it's broken down into individual amounts we can give out (£5,000-20,000), that isn't a huge amount of money to make a really big impact on lots of people, so it has to be an idea that has the potential to make more money.  It's like this money has to be a springboard, a first step on the ladder for an idea to get it up and running.  We also think people should think about the environmental impact they are having as we want to preserve the world (improve it, if we can!) for generations in the future.  It is young people now that should take a big role in this; we can make an impact on our current leaders who, quite frankly, aren't doing a good enough job of it.
• Number 4 – We came back again and again to the idea of wanting to reach and benefit as many young people as possible… we want ideas that can grow and grow and grow to all parts of the country and the world (domination here we come!).  This means we need ideas that can be copied by others and this means we need people who are willing to share their ideas around for the benefit of others as well.  If I paid a friend of mine's debts off, I would want them to have the same courteously to someone else in the future if they were in the position to help – isn't it this goodwill that makes the world go round?  And this finally brings us onto the last one…
• Number 5 – If I was going to give my money to my friends, I would give it to them because I can see the potential in them and what they would do with it, I would know they had the skills and knowledge to make it happen and I would trust them to use my money wisely (or I wouldn't give it to them!).  This counts for the Leadership Fund as well, we want people who are committed to making it a success and who will spend our money as carefully as it if were their own.

Now we've got these criteria sorted, we are looking forward to all the applications that are going to come flooding in over the next month before the deadline (31 July 2009).  If you know of a project that should apply, please spread the word to them about the fund and encourage them to step forward.  If they don't ask, they won't get!  Oh, and if anyone knows how I can choose which friends to give my Euro Millions to (when I win) let me know, I'm still struggling with that one!