why this info

The Michael Paul Wein Charitable Foundation

"Underpromise and Overdeliver"

why this info

The Foundation is frequently asked why must we give you all of this information? This is a lot of work for us and we have never had to do this before. Why now? For this question, there are many, many, many reasons and we will attempt, below, to give you as many as we can think of. If you believe that these reasons do not apply to you, we thank you for your time and we can both move on in other directions.

In no special order, these are our reasons. Because:

if you wish to accomplish your own mission in the years to come, you need to be able to plan, and planning includes financial planning, and financial planning requires reliable and fully disclosed descriptive financial information.

your own directors or trustees or management or volunteers, whether or not they currently realize it, need this information to properly accomplish their own work

failure to plan is like planning for failure.

we ask for nothing that any reasonably well-run organization does not normally create for themselves

anyone interested in your organization is entitled to know more about your organization

this includes not just those who wish to give you money, but those who volunteer to work for you, your own employees, those to whom you yourselves give money, those who are considering giving money to you, various tax authorities, your own advisors, in short, all who come in contact with your organization (what we prefer to call "your constituents")

information, to be useful to most of your constituents, should be complete (full and open disclosure) and comparative (so that readers find a context within which to understand information).

there are many laws that govern organizations such as yours and among them are Mexican and USA tax laws and most of these laws require much of what we are asking for. For more on the USA tax laws, see IRS Regulations

there are laws (chiefly USA and Texas laws) that govern our Foundation and they require that we obtain all of what we are asking for

the Better Business Bureau suggests that any person giving a contribution to any charitable organization ask them to offer certain information. We are not nearly as strict as the BBB and we have reduced their requests to a very tiny fraction of what they ask for, our requests being more suitable for a San Miguel organization.

At present, we are a one-person administrative Foundation and in effect much smaller than you. We are willing to invest money and time in you but we require cooperation and information from you.

Most importantly, this is the beginning of a process wherein we hope to get to know your organization. We have pledged to have a minimum of us$2,500,000 (and will probably have even more) in our endowment and we hope that you share in the (forever) annual grants that come from that endowment. It would be foolish, no, actually stupid, for us to just hand out money without having some controls over how it is granted, how it is used by the grantee organizations, and what their plans for future use might be. In this process, you will find that the input to us from you gets easier as the years go on and at the same time the grants from us to you get larger and larger.

We have asked for nothing that we do not (with even more limited personnel than you have) do ourselves. We have instituted controls so that even with the death of our founder, this Foundation will continue and all grantees and our own trustees will work under self-perpetuating controls that guarantee that we will do what we promise to do on this web-site.

What we ask for in the preceding paragraphs is called accountability. Accountability is the key ingredient of TRUST. We are accountable to all of our own constituents (including you and your organization) no less than that we require you to be accountable to all of your constituents (including, but not limited to, us).

For more information, see the following links:

	funding and see how we can guarantee paying your future grants
	history-estimates and see how our estimates used for the above funding are extremely conservative and understated
	BBB & public accountability and see how our requirements are minor compared to what the Better Business Bureau recommends they be
	beliefs and see how our "reason for being" revolves around all of this
	Our trustees and see what our own trustees must do to insulate you from problems

Send all e-mail to mpwinsma@gmail.com with any questions or comments about this web site. SPECIFY EXACTLY (using copy and paste) (and mentioning this page name) what your question or comment refers to. Note: in the event that the above information is no longer accurate, see the newer web-page listing various subsequent changes to this web-site after the founder's death.
Copyright © 2000-2005 The Michael Paul Wein Charitable Foundation, Inc