The following is a history of the Founder's charitable efforts, divided into the following three periods:

Founder's charitable efforts prior to the forming of this Foundation

When the Founder finally realized that he was no longer afraid that he might be destined to become a "bag woman" (question: is "bag person" a generally understood term?) after becoming successful in his own management consulting practice, he started giving ever larger annual donations to New York City and USA charitable organizations between 1978 and 1995.  As a consequence, when he moved permanently to San Miguel (in 1995), it was an easy transition to start giving donations to La  Biblioteca Publica, Patronato pro Ninos, Feed the Hungry and other very worthwhile organizations here in San Miguel.   He was then approached by the Executive Director of Patronato pro Ninos as part of the latter's attempt to increase PpN's share of all SMA expat charitable contributions.   The Executive Director of PnP was able to get our Founder to promise to continue his contributions BUT also promise to leave (as a bequest of his after-death estate) 50% of the proceeds from the sale of his Suspiros #14 home (purchased in 1996 for about us$500,000) to PnP.   The Executive Director of Feed the Hungry also encouraged this promise as FtH also hoped to participate in an identical fashion (i.e., current contributions were to continue AND the other 50% of the house proceeds were to go to FtH, too).  Next, they both encouraged the Founder to create a Foundation to give permanence to this promise.  Our Founder asked what was he to get in return since tax deductions are mostly minimal (the Founder had and still has no other tax deductions and currently got a Standard Deduction that already equaled half as much as the proposed tax deduction, all without this additional effort on his part to create a permanent Foundation).   The answer was to "perpetualize your grants to us" after he died, really nothing else.  For lack of any better reason, the Founder decided this could help institutionalize a need that he found in San Miguel and wrote about way back in 1997 (see beliefs)  The legal entity, which was originally to be called "Continuity and Transparency", was to be formed by the 3-part efforts of these two Executive Directors and the Founder doing all of the administrative work (legal and tax work) themselves.  The Founder and the FtH Executive Director fulfilled their obligations, but the PnP Executive Director (for reasons known only to him) reneged on his promise (his promise being only the comparatively simple) of providing a copy of his organization's Certificate of Organization and its By-Laws -- something he was required by IRS regulations to provide to anyone who asked for it anyway, and later actually did so after months of protesting -- as both a format and provision guidelines for this Foundation's own legal documents) so the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship of SMA was recruited to replace the PnP as one of the three original Trustees.  As a result of all of this, the Founder then promised to leave the proceeds from the sale of his house to FtH (50%) and UUFoSMA (30%).   Other than a continuing current share of any income from rentals (see apartment for rent), this was to be, at that time, the only promises to the organizations represented by these two Trustees.

Early efforts in forming and incubating its existence and early charitable work

The three Trustees (the Founder and the Trustees provided by both FtH and UUFofSMA) were able to create the MPWCF and/or provide processes and requirements for its operations.  As the Founder's estate grew (see both history-estimates and funding), more and more assets were available for both his estate's other individual beneficiaries and the endowment for the MPWCF.   Changes were made in the founders estate documents so that gradually the MPWCF endowment grew from about us$500,000 to us$2,900,000 (and possibly more).  First the minimum was increased from us$500,000 to us$1,000,000 and then the Founder's sister's and brother's bequests were changed from direct bequests of principal to merely income from life-estates with the principal reverting to the MPWCF after each sibling's death.   Then bequests to other beneficiaries, if they did not outlive the Founder, were also changed to revert to the MPWCF.   All during the time of these changes, difficulties with gossip (malicious and otherwise) in this town caused so many other potential grantees to misunderstand what was available to them and what they had to do to obtain it.  The Founder's original purpose in creating this Foundation included the perpetualization of his beliefs of transparency and continuity and the need for organizations to fulfill their parts in making these beliefs a reality in San Miguel.  The original Trustees aided in getting organizations to understand how this benefits the organizations themselves and is a necessary ingredient to their own survival.  Today, in 2011, transparency is a thriving factor in most San Miguel organizations (even the ones that do not receive grants from this Foundation) and continuity is beginning to take root in our grantee organizations as well.  La Biblioteca Publica has always been and still remains a constant reminder of what bad things befall organizations that do not incorporate continuity into their administrative plans.

However, somewhere along the way from 2000 to 2010, FtH (in spite of the efforts of one of our own Trustees, the ex-Executive Director of FtH) fell out of the program (see the FtH entry on the webpage "specifics").  We were repeatedly promised compliance and we continued to give annual grants to FtH for years in spite of their non-compliance. Finally we stopped making grants to them.  As recent news in 2011, we now expect to enter a new era at FtH and we promised, in return, that if FtH begins (and continues) to provide us with the essentials of our requirements for all of the years between 2011 and at least the last three years prior to the time of the Founder's death, we will re-commence annual donations to their organization after his death (although we will make no grants to them until that death).  These annual donations, assuming that FtH meets the requirements that they promise to meet, will at that time (post-Founder-death) resume in a position at least comparable to the UUFoSMA (meaning both will receive annually 25% to 30% of the grants we give each year after the Founder's death).

The early agreements with the other organizations that were to work hand in hand with the Founder in creating and nourishing the Foundation to its current status

“Underpromise and Overdeliver”

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