A clarification… we’re using PayPal for our online donations. And we’ve had a good number of donations come in over the web. Very helpful! Then the online donations fell off. I thought it was because I shifted my focus away from soliciting online donations. Well, no. What appears to have happened is the following:
PayPal sent me a note saying (my paraphrase, of course) “Hey, you’re a charity and we gotta verify you’re a charity.” (Never mind the fact that we allowed you to collect donations and withdraw funds up to this point.) “While we’re waiting on this you can’t access your money.” “Ok, fine”, I thought, “I’ll get to it when we’re ready to transfer the funds.”
Well then Paul Kroon, a former student of mine from Ursinus College with whom I worked closely for years, and his fiancee Aileen Dalton strolled into Artisans Cafe in Phoenixville and we had a very nice visit. During our conversation Paul mentioned, much to my surprise, that he had tried to use the online donation link and was denied. Oh, my! We really need the donations! Time to act! So I went to the PayPal site and discovered that yes, they had removed the ability for people to make online donations until I get some paperwork to them. (Oh, this fact may be buried in my unread emails at some point. My bad. Hey, I’m trying to run a new College over here!)
SO… I’ve been working on responding to their requests for information. It’s a long story and I certainly don’t need to bore you with the details. If I were in my less-than-centered mode I’d go off on PayPal right now. And the whole corporate structure as well. In short, it seems we’ve created a society that has too little respect for our humanity and that adds far, far too much stress in our lives. It is my sincere hope that we will come together to build an environment that fosters more of a sense of peace and well-being in the world. It’ll take time, but it’s worth the effort now. Our way of working on this is through education.
We really, really do need your donations. Things are really tight right now and we appreciate your support. And I’ll let you know when I’ve sufficiently jumped through the PayPal hoops and online donations are active again.
SO, for now if you wish to send a donation to support Sphere College, please send a check to:
Sphere College
P.O. Box 1024
Phoenixville, PA 19460
And if you’re in the East, stay cool—it’s hot out there!
Sphere College Project 
July 7, 2010 at 12:49 pm
Oh the woes of PayPal. They honestly were a fairly decent service in the early ebay days and such, but as the integration with ebay got deeper and the usage of PayPal increased, they were suddenly in the position to micromanage all of the financial traffic burning through their site. I’ve all but ceased using ebay because of the holds that are put on seller’s money (read: weeks) and their ridiculous fees. With the ability to create an account and store money with them they are basically a bank without any of the checks and balances, or from what I can tell on their site FDIC backed, which really can’t lead anywhere positive for those invested.
Alright, I got my one Internet rant out of the way for today.