this can easily turn into projecting your own attitudes towards money onto someone else´s actions.
taking the example of paying for buddhist teaching vs dinner, there are infinite ways in which someone may come to a conclusion about what to spend money on. a concept of worth may well not be involved at all. say you think money is dirty and corrupting (plenty of people do) – that might just as easily explain someone´s reluctance to pay for buddhist teaching. why would you want to give a teacher you respect something dirty and corrupting?
or, think of the limits people can put on what they´re willing to spend on themselves. should i buy myself a €2 or a €5 sandwich for lunch? if someone, for example, doesn´t think they should spend €5 on a sandwich for themselves, how much more difficult would it be to spend the money on teaching for themselves? it might be that they won´t pay for dharma talks because they think it´s worth too much, rather than too little.

creating a transaction that is completely satisfying for all parties involved can be a difficult, delicate process. and, though i strongly favour voluntary contributions over mandatory ones for dharma teaching, i think the "stick a donation box by the door and hope for the best" strategy can be a cop-out – a way to avoid a difficult, delicate process.

so, how do you design transactions that are satisfying for all parties?

for the zen centre with money troubles mentioned above, my first thought i was to introduce Very Expensive Coffee. you want to give the teaching away freely – so it´s best not to design a money transaction that stops you from doing that. but the coffee? it doesn´t matter if the coffee (or one kind of coffee, or whatever) is out of someone´s price range, does it? so, you make up a story that a big cup of coffee now costs €10. or €20. or €5. or €50. and you make it crystal clear that the price of the coffee bears no relation to the cost of making that cup of coffee. that spending €50 on a cup of coffee is clearly not about the coffee, but about giving €50 to the centre in a purely voluntary, clearly generous and faintly ridiculous manner. and label the coffee Very Expensive Coffee. and make it crystal clear where the money goes. and make it easy to get more information on where the money goes. it may be difficult and delicate getting it right (and this example, as well as being completely half-baked takes no account whatsoever of the actual circumstances of the centre in question. like, if it has coffee making facilities…), but it can be a wonderful process inventing something that works, a valuable learning experience refining it, and – if you pitch it right – an absolute joy to find yourself spending €50 on a cup of coffee.

one thing i would use in devising transactions like this would be to find out what stories people have about the money. what the money means to them.
then i might see how shifting all the possible different variables affects those stories. cash or cheque. wooden donation box or metal one. donation box by the door, or in the loo. reminder envelopes sent to your house asking for cash, or never mentioning it ever.
and if a centre is struggling for money it´s just as likely that they have designed their transactions to discourage giving as much as the attendees are actively choosing not to give. i once worked with an art gallery who actually had a dustbin for a donations bucket. what signal does that send about how your money will be treated?

incidentally, if you are having difficulty in this area and would like help working out how to charge in a way that is satisfying for all parties, you can get in touch with me. i sometimes host workshops and give lectures on money and i´m happy to do a Skype call to talk through tricky issues like this.

I pay about $20 a week to help keep a sitting group going where I live–we rent a room at a Unitarian church–but we're VERY reluctant to ask others for donations. We don't even have a basket out most nights, and we hardly ever mention that two people are footing rent for the whole group. We don't want to offend. A lot of shadow and reluctance going on there.
Hmmm….

But I prefer to approach this problem from the other side, namely the regular practitioner, whether member, or participant, or non-affiliated.

The abbot lives on an $18,000 annual stipend, and otherwise supports himself by doing carpentry and other design-type work. There's a box with wooden slats on the left when you walk in. People drop money in there, and of course members send in monthly donations. At the end of every program, the timekeeper will mention that donations are welcome and needed.

The prospect of this particular abbot living in poverty in old age is very real–that's as clear a downside to the current system as you could imagine. It is quite unfair. Here's a guy who has spent his entire adult life teaching and practicing the dharma. He lives on $18,000 a year. Meanwhile, the center he founded is in financial trouble. The place feels like you've entered a Japanese temple. But this is Georgia, not Japan, and the center's base of financial support is tiny.

What strikes me is the apparently limited range of options for this center. I wonder what else it could do, in terms of a revised model for dealing with money challenges.

If it were to scrap the donation model altogether and require people to pay a fee upon entry, my guess is that this would turn off the vast majority of newcomers and could even provoke negative reactions from a great many existing students–precisely because of the reluctance and shadow that Hokai mentions. I could be wrong about this, of course, but I think it's very common for newcomers in particular to be extremely wary of any mandatory fees. Spirituality is supposed to be free, right?

Some fees seem to be commonplace. Any Friday-through-Sunday dharma event that I've ever attended has cost at least $100. Retreats have cost several hundred if not more than $1,000 for decades now. Beyond raising the cost of formal membership, weekend events, sesshins, etc., and/or parking someone at the door to collect money upon entry, what else could/should the center do to deal with its money challenges?

Fee-based stuff online would be one option. More aggressively marketing of the stuff available in the little store at the center might be another. The abbot could institute a per-hour fee for meditation instruction, or start holding more fee-based outreach events around town. As soon as one contemplates a model in which very little, if any, dharma is offered for free, however, the risks become clear enough: charges of economic elitism, or of being interested, not in the enlightenment of sentient beings for its own sake, but in making a profit.

It is a very tricky business. Maybe the first step is simply combating the culture of shadow and reluctance? Once that is overcome, however, will rip-off artists come out of the woodwork? Do the traditions offer enough help on "due diligence" to avoid getting ripped off, or does another culture need to be created and reinforced, one in which students are neither stingy nor gullible?

I couldn't agree more. It seems to me that if someone is unwilling to address the issue of money and dharma, or is unwilling to see any money change hands for the dharma, then they are fundamentally refusing to support the dharma. This is usually at great odds to what that person believes his or her values demonstrate; and that's why it's great a conversation is taking place here to bring these 'invisible forces' into the light for consideration.