If You Wish to Help with a Donation!

Dear visitor of this page!

As you see on our Who We Are page, there are many ways in which you can contribute to our work.

We would love arriving at a system where volunteers commit a certain number of hours per year to support our work, or, that those who wish to contribute with funding, can do so.

We wish to repeat here that we are independent of any ideological, religious, political, or material agenda. At the core of our work is the use of transdisciplinary approaches for generating and disseminating knowledge about human dignity and humiliation. We are committed to a wide range of knowledge creation and dissemination. Our motto is Unity in Diversity. All members of our group work pro bono, donating their time, and sacrificing whatever financial means they have at their disposal to develop our HumanDHS initiative. Most of our donations represent sharing within our network. We take great care in giving priority to our aim to bring more dignity into the world and having everything else serve this goal. We believe that also money should serve, not lead, both in our network and in the world. As a result, this "here you can donate" page is not prominent on our website, and we refrain from packaging our work as commodity. We even refrain from promoting our work as "free" or "gratis," because even such strategies foreground monetary value. However, this does not mean that we underestimate the utility of finance, and financial support. Relegating money to a place of service does not mean negating its usefulness and value. We would therefore extend our warm gratitude to you who has contributed to our work with your financial abilities.

This page enables you to contribute with a donation if you feel for it, either by using the PayPal button further down, or by sending us a check.

Allow us to briefly explain our philosophy and vision with respect to donations in a little more depth:

The primary aim of our network is to work on issues of human dignity and humiliation. Since this field is very new, our members come from diverse backgrounds and employ diverse methods to work on creating a more dignified world.

Most of our core members sacrifice greatly to help build our network, both in form of money and time (Evelin Lindner, for example, works for free and thus donates a professor's salary each year, since 2001). Our vision is to sustain our network and its members for years to come, and we have innovative plans to create funding for our work through dignity-creating initiatives - from our World Clothes for Equal Dignity project to our Office Cockpit project. We wish to be able, in the future, to pay salaries to those who work full-time with us (so far, everything we receive is donated for free), we wish to pay adequate remuneration to part-time contributors, as well as build a scholarship program for our doctoral students who work on dignity and humiliation, particularly those from developing countries, just to name some examples. Please see our vision for the future.

However, since we are not yet there, we have often discussed an obligatory fee system for our network. Yet, we have always decided against it and count on voluntary help for now. There are many arguments that speak against an obligatory fee system, even against a tiered system (where students or people from less privileged parts of the world would get a reduction). The conclusion of our discussions has always been that our vision is to create a new world, promote a new paradigm, and this means, among others, that we do not wish to contribute to commodifying everything. That would violate the very core of our vision. We do not wish to create "products" or make the network a "job program." If you look at the publications section of our website, you see, for example, that all of the papers are available for free. It is our intention to keep it this way, so people, especially those with economic disadvantages and from developing countries can have open access to this information. We have furthermore noticed that we need people to join us because they feel enthusiastic about our work and wish to invest their love; a monetary reward alone does not suffice as motivator, it may even select the wrong kind of motivation - as is well-known, love cannot be bought.

Yet, at the same time, we have many activities and programs currently underway, and planned in the future, which are in need of funding, as mentioned above, from the work done daily by our core staff, to our conferences, to our research projects, to the scholarship program for our doctoral students, or our hope to develop our World Dignity University initiative.

Clearly, we face the dilemma that everybody has to grapple with who wishes to promote a new paradigm. New paradigms should not be anchored in old paradigms, or, to be more precise, anchoring new paradigms in old ones must be avoided as much as possible if the new paradigm is to have a chance to be seen. However, living a new paradigm without a supporting culture and supporting institutions is difficult.

We therefore depend on your voluntary and spontaneous support.
Any amount you can give to help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for taking the time to read this page.

If you would like to make a contribution to support the work of HumanDHS, please click here:

Or, you can also click on this link.

You may also send a check (made out to "HumanDHS") to:

HumanDHS
Attn: Dr. Richard Slaven (HumanDHS Business Manager)
16 Northview Court
Lake Oswego, OR 97035
USA

HumanDHS is a non-profit tax-exempt organization (501c) in the US. Our tax exempt number is: 02-076-0075. All donations are tax deductible as allowable by law (please see our announcement of our non-for-profit status, September 2007, for the state of New York, and in 2009, for the state of Oregaon).

Please let us know, if you we can honor you and express our gratitude to you by including you as one of our sponsors in our Sponsors page!


 

 

Plans and Ideas

Human Dignity and Human Studies Don Klein Award
We would like to honor our beloved Don with awarding a prize to those of our members who distringuish themselves in the spirit of Don. The details of this prize will have to be designed in the future. Anybody who wishes to support this idea, please come forward!

Donating profit
Please see Stephanie Heuer's offer to donate 100 % of the profit of her book. Also Ragnhild S. Nilsen wishes to donate a certain percentage of the profit of some of her seminars, seminars that express our vision. We are very grateful to Stephanie and Ragnhild and it would be great, if you could take up their ideas!

Providing the means for securing additional funding
We think of establishing a funded position for a network administrator who could assist in generating the materials needed (writing applications, etc.) to secure external funding for our projects. Please see as an example two projects that aim at mapping the experience of humiliation in specific contexts, however, for which we so far failed to secure funding:
1. Refugees and Humiliation
2. Terrorism and Humiliation
Your support is greatly welcome!

Supporting participation in Network meetings
Many Network members and others interested in participating have been unable to do so because of travel and other costs. This is especially true for people from certain developing countries. We wish to build up funds for our meetings, so that people can attend who otherwise do not have the means to do so.

Public Policy
We wish to find a way to measure humiliation in societies so that we can show to policy makers that humiliation is relevant and needs to be included into public policy making (see also our Public Policy for Equal Dignity project). Ultimately, all institutions (from marriage to the United Nations) need scrutiny and restructuring so as to prevent that they have humiliating effects.
Carrying Large-scale surveys, however, are very costly. Your ideas are greatly welcome!