Free to the partner is not free to run: inside the General Fund
· The SFG team
Statloba For Good gives a lot of work away. E-learning platforms, fundraising strategy, websites, digital transformation, social media audits, in-person clinics. For the partner, it is free or close to it. For us it has a price, and the General Fund is where that price is written down.
The annual target is $108,000, in five categories. People and Time, $12,000. Tools, Platforms and R&D, $14,000, covering hosting, software and AI API costs, lightweight operations tools, research, and the partner websites we build and keep running. In-Person Clinics, $12,000, which is the line that paid the $4,966 of international trainer costs for the Nepal clinic. Unrestricted, $5,000. And the largest single line, Our First Full-Time Team Member, $65,000.
That last one deserves the scrutiny it will get. It is salary plus employer costs for a Program and Operations Lead: project management, partner well-being, social media, and keeping what we have built from quietly rotting. Today that work is done by volunteers in the margins of their own jobs, which is why we can be honest that some of it is done late and some of it is not done at all.
Most nonprofits present a number like this as a percentage and hope you do not look. We would rather show it as a line item and explain the trade. A volunteer-subsidized organization is cheap right up to the point where it cannot answer a partner's email for three weeks. Paying one person properly is the difference between an organization and a group of people meaning well.
The General Fund is also what lets us say yes. We do not take on new partner work until it is funded, which means an unfunded General Fund is not an abstraction: it is the next organization we have to turn down.
It is itemized like any other project on this site, and it is fundable line by line, monthly or one-time.