Should We Constitute the Greek Chorus Foundation?

And if so, should we send Taya to graduate school?

Good Afternoon:

I promised you better images of yesterday evening’s sunflower planting at and projections on the Russian embassy in Washington DC. Well, here you go. Thanks again to everyone who turned out.

---

On today’s #DogShirtTV, we discussed a radical question: Should the Greek Chorus create a charitable foundation? The discussion is available here and began when the estimable Anastasiia Lapatina showed up towards the end of the show and told everyone about her friend Taya. By show’s end, we had agreed that the estimable Holly Berkley Fletcher would serve on the board of the foundation, if we decided to put it together, and that the estimable Andrew Steele would serve as its counsel.

So what’s going on here?

As folks will recall, over the winter, the Greek Chorus—as the audience for #DogShirtTV has dubbed itself—bought a lot of batteries and generators and electric blankets to keep people warm and in electricity in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and elsewhere in Ukraine. The total amount raised and spent was on the order of $130,000—all routed through my personal accounts, not through any charitable organization.

When the project was done, Nastya and I both felt we should start a charitable organization to do future such projects. Running all of this activity through my personal accounts was fine in an emergency situation like this winter, but it is suboptimal as a regular way of doing business—chiefly because it deprives donors of the charitable tax deductions they would get if we did this through a 501(c)(3).

We had some initial conversations about the subject—and then our lives got busy and we occupied ourselves with other things. Truth be told, we both needed the break.

That break ended this weekend, during which we had a conversation with Taya—whose full name I am not using only because I see no reason to discuss her life in public unless and until doing so is necessary to help her with the matter at hand. Taya is a young official at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. She previously worked at the international Red Cross and is interested in continuing her career in policy work on reform matters leading to Ukrainian NATO and EU accession—and transatlantic cooperation more generall. Toward this end, she wants to go to graduate school and has been accepted into a prestigious program that involves one year in Belgium and one year at an American international relations school. She is the only Ukrainian accepted to this program this year.

Now if Taya were a citizen of an EU member country, there would be numerous financing possibilities for this sort of education. As a Ukrainian, however, the program is wholly out of reach for her financially given the level of aid she has been offered.

So I proposed on the show that we create the Greek Chorus Foundation to provide rapid-response charitable support for worthy Ukraine-related causes that slip through other cracks.

And I proposed as well that we make funding the first year of Taya’s graduate school—which will cost about 30,000 euros that will need to be raised by September—the first test case of the viability of the foundation. My thinking here is simply that this is an intervention that will make a big difference in a person’s life, that the amount of money is known and contained and well within what we have already shown as a group we can raise. While we will later have to raise money to pay for her second year, that is a ways off; the immediate ask is discrete and very manageable. So it seems to me a good test case for the concept. Can we help build Ukraine’s future as a viable state in the international democratic community by helping Taya pay her tuition? I think we can do it.

I suggested something else as well: that all major strategic decisions of the Greek Chorus Foundation should be made by vote of the Greek Chorus. One of the reasons the battery fundraiser was so effective was that people in the Greek Chorus got invested in it and wanted to be involved. So it seems to me that having a foundation that we all collectively run—Nastya and I will administer it as volunteer staff, implementing a kind of collective will—is important to keeping people engaged and involved and invested in the projects.

So I am hereby submitting the first three such questions to the group—for now constrained to Greek Chorus members as defined by being a paid subscriber to #DogShirtDaily—for consideration.

First, should we take on the project of running a foundation?

Second, if so, should the foundation’s first project be making sure that Taya can go to graduate school in September?

And third, am I defining Greek Chorus membership the right way for voting purposes? I am doing it this way, to be candid, because it is easy to administer technically. I limit the polls to paid subscribers, and only paid subscribers can vote. But I’m open to other ways of defining who the stake-holders in the foundation are.

---

Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is a baby macaque, sent my way by the estimable Alicia Wanless, who photographed it at the Iwatayama Monkey Park in Kyoto, Japan:

.