Charities: love is about the distance travelled!

OK, so today, for Valentine's Day, I want to talk about love, and what I think it should mean for charities. No, don't go away, I'm not going to get soppy or corny. Well, not much, anyway. A couple of weeks ago, I was on holiday in Madeira. No, that's not the romantic part, though the sunsets were pretty lovely. No, while I was there I read a beautiful book, Stoner by John Williams, the bittersweet life story of a downtrodden but dignified and almost heroic literature professor. So, why I am telling you about this book? Well, about halfway through it, there's a line about love that took my breath away: In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another. Beautiful, isn't it? But why is it relevant to charities? What I think Stoner learns is that love is about change. It is about the journey. It's not a fixed image, frozen in time. We each develop as our love grows. And similarly, the work of our charities needs to be about love, and specifically this version of love. What is it about our causes that makes us passionate? What will change if we do our work well? What would happen if we didn't exist? In short, our charities' work needs to be about the distance travelled in delivering our missions. It is all about the impact. No othe