A Word from the Music Arts Director

By Nancy England

As you know, Music Arts works hard to bring you and others in Oak Ridge and the surrounding area the very best in music instruction. This takes money, and we appreciate your donations to our annual fund drive, which especially helps our scholarship students.

In addition to our annual fund drive, we’ve been applying for grants that will help us develop better programs. Keep your fingers crossed – we’ve applied for a Tennessee Arts Commission grant to help us enlarge our Summer Intern Program, which gives some of our more advanced students (of all instruments) the opportunity to get some experience teaching music, with the supervision of our professional instructors, while giving young beginning students the opportunity to sample music lessons for 10 weeks in the summer, for a low price. (For more information without a run-on sentence, check out Activities in our website, MusicArtsSchool.org.)

As a nonprofit organization, Music Arts is registered with the IRS and our financial and organizational information is available to the public. There is a national data base, GuideStar, which generates and distributes extensive information about more than 850,000 American charitable nonprofits, including Music Arts.

There are several organizations that use this information to offer you the chance to donate to your choice of these charities, online, through a secure server. One in particular, JustGive.org, has been selected by the Music Arts Board of Directors for linking on our website. Visit us online at www.MusicArtsSchool.org, click on the button link at the bottom of our front page ....who knows, maybe you’ll [ahem, ahem]!

There are several advantages to this method of donating. Those of us who have used the internet to support various causes, as I have (political, environmental, social, you name it, my money has been flowing to them!) find that it’s relatively painless to punch in a credit card number knowing that the server is secure.

With JustGive.org, you can set up an account which will keep track of all your donations throughout the year. Pretty handy at tax time, if you claim your donations as deductions (and JustGive.org will send you a receipt each time you donate).

Wonder if that Fraternal Order of Nesting Cuckoo’s Benevolent and Protective Society is real? You can use the JustGive.org data base to check on the validity of any outfit you’re considering. Hey, you can even pry into our financial statements! After all, we’re open to public inspection.

You can make a gift donation in another person’s name and have that person notified automatically. This is particularly appropriate for people’s birthdays, holiday giving, or as an expression of bereavement. An example: For Christmas, I gave my daughter Julie and her husband Raja a receipt for a pig I’d bought for someone in Indonesia, through Heifer, International. They loved it! Son-in-law Vance thought that the rabbits I’d given in his and Jean’s name were one of the best presents I’d ever given them! And Sandy “received” a flock of chicks that actually went to Cambodia.

Set up an account for your kids! The JustGive.org menu lets them not only give money, but also see some worthwhile suggestions as to how they can help others through their own personal (non-monetary) efforts.

JustGive.org won’t disclose your name, email address, or other personal information to the charity without your permission and gives its assurance that it will never sell, share, or disclose any personal information about you. And their credit card processing company, Wells Fargo Bank, is not authorized to retain, share, store, or use your personal information. They also encrypt your data so that it’s unreadable to anyone who might wrongly intercept the information. The only fee they deduct is 3% of the donation, to cover the credit card company’s fee.

Marilyn Vos Savant has said that “Profit is what we have left after we make a donation to a worthwhile cause."
-- In the end, whether through giving or receiving, we all stand to benefit.

. . . . . Nancy England