For the past few months I've been working with a group of volunteers, usually on weekends unfortunately. This is not a normal group of volunteers -- they are volunteering because they have a certain amount of hours they must volunteer for as apart of one of those cult-ish personal empowerment/leadership seminars. The type that stress upfront payment and embed mob hard-selling skills into their program so that it will continue to exist. Because it is "transformational and life changing, and allows you to become the person you've always wanted to be."
Anyway, this group concluded their time with my nonprofit's house with a multi-tens-of-thousands dollar donation that they put together for us. Not of their own money, although the money received without explicitly asking for a charitable donation receipt for taxes were likely to the tax benefit of the company that runs this program.
As is customary with volunteer events that take place on my property, I gave them a short feel good speech, about how they showed more enthusiasm than most other volunteers I have, and how the goodness of their persons positively influenced my homeless clients and whatnot. It's not wholly untrue; I gave them a horrible but necessary multi-week manual labor project and they did it with a smile on their faces. As a result, they paid for my enrollment in the introductory course of their "cult."
I don't want anything to do with this. But after they kept me on the phone for 30 minutes as I paced around a grocery store, saying they would do whatever it took to have me go because of [flattery], I agreed to. It's free for me and I'm interested in how they operate. It's less than a week long and doesn't conflict with work or school. I'm not the type that can be suckered into paying for the next, longer, more expensive "module" or go around recruiting people for them.
This is where my ethical question arises. I want to use this to my advantage for networking (many of these people are successful individuals who feel stalled in their career), and for people who inevitably move on to the next and more expensive courses, which involve the same type of charitable fundraising. I want go in there with a "look at what I'm doing for charity/poverty/homelessness already, put your money where your mouth is" attitude to the benefit of the nonprofit I created, which is not the nonprofit this last group donated to.
This probably makes me a pretty bad person. But I know many of the individuals in my introductory course will pay for the next one. They're going to search for a charity to raise funds for at some point in this more advanced course. Why shouldn't it be my nonprofit?
I'd be interested in hearing what you smart Hubskiers think about this. Am I morally bankrupt for seriously considering this?