Seniors Establish Alternate Gift Fund

The annual Senior Gift Fund will once again have competition this year.

Two students launched a campaign yesterday that aims to provide charity-minded seniors with an alternative to donating to one of the world's wealthiest universities.

The Alternative Senior Gift (ASG) will allow seniors to donate to a needy charity rather than--or in addition to--writing a check to Harvard.

"I do not think the Senior Gift is a bad thing," said Joshua A. Edelman '00, co-founder and co-president of the ASG. "But I do think that they monopolize the discourse of charity giving on campus."

Edelman and Greg A Novak '00 decided to form their organization, noticing ads for the Senior Gift Fund in which the Class of 1999 challenged the Class of 2000 to exceed last year's record-breaking donation.

Disturbed by the thought that many students who otherwise don't donate to charity would give money to the Senior Gift Fund simply because of its high-profile campaign, Edelman and Novak said they wanted to create a valid alternative.

"I would venture to guess that for most students, the Senior Gift campaign is the only charity they donate to in the course of their senior year," Edelman said.

But Harvard hardly counts as needy, they said.

According to Novak, the Senior Gift campaign misleads students into thinking that their contribution goes toward a specific program or campus improvement.

The class gift is "a drop in the bucket for Harvard," Novak said, since the University regularly receives donations hundreds of times larger.

" I think it's misleading to tell seniors that their money makes a meaningful impact," he said.

The Senior Gift has ranged from $23,573 to $68,036 in the last few years. The Class of 1999, 60 percent of whom donated to the campaign, broke recent records for donations and participation.

According to ASG's website, however, $10,000 of the Class of 1999 campaign came from a single donor, and the average amount raised annually by the Senior Gift in the past decade has been a mere $37,600.

Novak also said that the Student Gift Fund spends a large amount of money on processing gifts and rewarding its donors. The ASG website says that open bar banquets for volunteers, prizes for House competitions, advertising and processing are some of the larger costs of the Senior Gift campaign-- costs that annually amount to thousands of dollars.

"In fact, if one tallies the expenses of the Senior Gift campaign, the already small impact of the donations of the senior class becomes yet tinier and possibly negative," the website says.

And while $68,000 may mean little to a University with Harvard's endowment, that same amount makes a big difference to many charities, Edelman said.

"Harvard is a marvelous institution, a very worthy recipient of donations, and I have had an amazing time here the last four years," Edelman said. "But it doesn't need our $20."

Instead, ASG recommends giving to charities like the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Phillips Brooks House Association and Get Ready, a non-profit organization started by members of Harvard's Class of 2000 that aims to help inner-city youth gain access to higher education though SAT prep, college guidance and community involvement programs.

Students will also be able to choose their own charity, even if it's not listed on the ASG web page. ASG will pass the donation on to the charity in the name of the Class of 2000.

"Donors who give to ASG choose where their donations go," said Edelman, who believes this feature is central to ASG's goal of starting a dialogue about charitable giving on campus.

According to the ASG site, all donations made through ASG will go into a separate account at Cambridge Savings Bank. ASG also plans to make donation records public in the near future, according to the site.

Donors will be kept anonymous. However, names will be posted by request, although amounts and names will be kept separate to "maintain the integrity of the public record without causing donors any anxiety associated with putting amounts next to names," the website says.

Although ASG will not take any part of the donations to pay for its own expenses, students will be able to allot a dollar of their donation to cover ASG costs.

Novak says that although he's expecting a "major publicity blitz" from the Student Gift Fund in the coming weeks, he hopes that students will take the time to learn about ASG's efforts.

Some, like Sinead B. Walsh '00, have already learned of ASG through word of mouth and e-mail messages.

Walsh, who said she likes the idea that ASG will send her donation to a charity of her choice, plans to give money either to UNICEF or to a grass-roots AIDS project.

"The best thing [about ASG] is that it does not prevent anyone from donating to Senior Gift, but it gives students options," Walsh said.

Walsh will not be giving to the Senior Gift, she said, because even though part of her donation may go towards worthy causes like financial aid and scholarships, she believes that Student Gift volunteers spend significant amounts of money on marketing.

"It's quite an extravagant process," Walsh said, citing dinners and parties that the Senior Gift has sponsored. "That does make you think that not all of the money is going where you want it to go."

ASG is not an official student organization, since its application to become a campus organization was denied earlier this year. It has had to request postering rights from the Radcliffe Union of Students.

So far, Edelman said he has not been given a specific explanation for the denial of his application.

"They [the office of Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth '71] said they had some concerns about the name of the project, that this was the sort of program that might be better done through some of the already existing organization on campus," said Edelman.

The name has been previously used by other campaigns, although Edelman said that he and Novak chose it before learning that it was not original.

In 1996, seniors Megan L. Peimer '97 and Ezra W. Reese '97 established an Alternative Senior Gift fund, asking students to withhold their donations from the University and hold them in private accounts until Harvard hired more women as tenured Faculty.

University officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.