transparency awards

The above is just transparency of annual financial information. In addition, the "open and transparent" organization should be encouraged to show, by verifiable narrative means, just what it is doing and how it is operating. After all, with so little overlap of mission in this town, why would anything have to be hidden? Competition is not existent except in the fund-raising aspects and the acquisition of volunteer help and even in these two competitive aspects, I would think that the persons who do volunteer and do contribute funds would be more likely to do that for the more transparent and openly honest organization.

Look around you in the world today. A good case could be made for the theory that the lack of transparency is the root cause, or a secondary cause, or even a minor but definite part of the causes for most problems in government, in politics, in profit-making organizations, and certainly not overlooking NGO's inside and outside of Mexico.

And, as a supplementary definition, the following comes from the Founder's estate papers:

"A few more SPECIFICS about what I mean by TRANSPARENCY: The financial statements should include, among so many other possible things, disclosure of the payments made to insiders (basically Gringos) in the form of salaries or other perks, the separation of all overhead (with details and totals) from all “mission” expenses (also with details and totals), and the expenses of fund-raising and the net funds raised by each fund-raising category, all of this presented in COMPARITIVE formats (with at least two completed years and a third future year with projected information), all of this presented in ONE currency (either pesos or dollars with the other being converted to the one currency), and all of this with footnotes for disclosures that otherwise would leave a reader uninformed without them – all in the format shown on our financial-examples webpage."

We would hope all applicants for grants from us respond to all of the above by using our templates which do everything for you except fill in your own unique information and other responses.

The following describes a failed attempt by this Foundation at a contest in 2005 intended to promote transparency. It is left below (online) "for the record" and nothing more. Interestingly enough, our attempts over many years to promote transparency finally bore fruit by 2008 and starting in 2008, 100% of our grantees were well along the path to partial if not complete transparency.

These awards were offered (and distributed) in 2005. They are no longer offered. The Lions Club (winner of a us$1,200 award in 2005) had its entry prepared by an individual that left town shortly afterwards. As a result of a lack of continuity, The Lions Club was not able to have someone else in their organization prepare (see below for information regarding "improvements from year to year") better financial statements in 2006, which is and was the whole reason behind our offering such awards. However, we are happy to state that the Lions Club finally, in 2009, overcame this problem and (hopefully) will remain an on-going grantee.

These awards will be made to ANY non-profit charitable organization in San Miguel (other than to our current ongoing grantees, however, see note 1 below).

The purpose of the transparency awards is to encourage greater transparency in the presentation of financial and other information from organizations that solicit funds from the public. We will not only grant three monetary awards, but we will also publicly endorse organizations' transparency methods and their reporting to the public. If that aids the organization in their fund-raising efforts, so much the better. In addition, all award winning organizations will be shown on this web-site (see table at bottom of this page).