The bottom line - Shawn Loughlin editorial
Last Saturday, my neighbour Jeff Peters and I hosted The Blyth MS Ride, which is a ride we founded back in 2017. After expenses, it looks like the ride will have raised nearly $2,000, which puts its five-year total (the event was held in 2017, 2018 and 2019 before returning in 2022 and again in 2023) in the neighbourhood of $8,000 raised for the M.S. Society of Canada.
Do you know how I know that? Meticulous bookkeeping. I have surely mentioned this before, either in this space or in person to some of you, but I am not to be trusted with math.
As someone who writes for a living, it’s a natural assumption that I might be bad at math, There is a theory about brain orientation (the old left brain vs. right brain thing) that most people are either creative or functional and organized. So, someone like the film director David Lynch, who is just pure creation, might be described as being right-brained, while accountants, scientists and others might tend to be more left-brained.
So, back to the ride. I have a notebook (as well as an e-mail trail) associated with the ride since Jeff and I created it, though the first two years were really more about team-building for our fellow MS Bike cyclists than about raising money. It details all of the revenue, as well as all of the expenses. That all might sound pretty standard, but really, it takes a lot of work for me to keep it all straight.
Furthermore, it has not been uncommon over the years for me to be approached by people who question local groups or events in regards to money raised vs. money donated, sure that a few bucks here or there may have fallen off the back of a truck, as it were, on the way to the bank. With that in mind, it has been important to me to keep thorough records. That way, if anyone questions whether Jeff or I have used the money we’ve raised to buy a new pair of shoes, rather than to donate the M.S. Society, I can show them what’s what.
On a side note, that is a shame. The first shame is that people so closely (and often, needlessly) scrutinize those who work so hard to raise money for charity, while the second shame is the work of bad actors (who actually do embezzle charitable donations or get loosey goosey with their expenses) results in the aforementioned critics often having a point.
Anyway, back to the math of it all. I have never been great at it. Back in Pickering, I went to a high school that did not offer many English or writing courses above the standard, requisite ones. As a result, I was forced to round out my later semesters with science and math courses that I didn’t want to take and was destined to fail. Although, there was that one year that I dated a girl who was very good at math and, as a result of being on the baseball team, I would often miss math class. I would fail tests spectacularly, but my homework was always top-notch. No, this isn’t a rite-de-passage high school sitcom from the 1950s, and no, my teacher never did figure it out.
Then, when I got to J School at Humber College, my math remained poor, despite me having a bit of a leg up on my classmates. (I worked a retail job for much of high school and all of college, so I had a lot of cash register and nightly deposit experience that helped.)
So, there were times that my fellow journalism students and I would huddle over a document and try and figure out the math. How many journalism students does it take to figure out a math problem? All of them, and they likely still get it wrong. That’s why I’ve always admired financial journalists. They’ve bridged the gap... somehow. Good for them.