5 questions to spark & direct your generosity
This week’s newsletter—coming at you a bit early in honor of today, Giving Tuesday, is about giving back, and boy have you all given back to me this year. I am so deeply grateful for the money you invest in subscribing to this little engine that could, and also the investment of your precious attention and insights in the comments section. Thank you for sharing newsletters with others and for all the love and support you’ve anchored me with this year. If you’re not a paid subscriber, and it’s in your capacity to be one as we head into the new year, I’d be so grateful for the signal of your appreciation and investment.
It’s that time of year, when, if we can, so many of us think about how to give back. It’s such a deeply cultural and familial prospect. If you watched your caregivers write checks or drop cash in the collection plate, it likely seems normal to you. If you didn’t, it can feel like an uncomfortable or foreign move. But here’s the thing: you get to create your own family traditions, your own relationship with money, your own definitions of risk and generosity.
So this time around, instead of just letting this season pass in a flurry of gift buying and maybe a compulsive donation here or there (trust me, I know the feeling), how about doing it differently? How about setting aside some time to reflect and give back in a more intentional way?
The first thing you might enjoy doing is listening to this week’s episode of How To! (the podcast I co-host). It’s with Grace Nicolette of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and it’s a refreshingly practical conversation about end-of-year giving for regular people like us (as opposed to those with family foundations or huge amounts of money).
End-of-year giving will never right the wrongs of this very broken world. That’s not the point, so don’t talk yourself out of giving just because that is the clear truth. Pursue sharing your resources anyway, because it’s the kind of person you want to be with other people, and because doing nothing also won’t change anyone’s material circumstances.
I also wanted to offer is a series of questions, rooted in your own affective experience of the world and context of abundance and moral imagination, for figuring out where you might choose to give this year:
How much did you make this year? What is 10% of that? (Many faith traditions recommend giving at least 10% of your annual income, which probably feels like A LOT to most of us, but maybe it isn’t as wild as we imagine? Try it on for size, even as a thought experiment.)
What are three things fundamental things you are most grateful for this year? Examples: food on your table, a roof over your head, access to a doctor when your kid had that terrible flu. What organizations could you donate to that support other people to get access to those things?
What are three things in your local community that enrage or break your heart? Examples: the number of people who are unhoused, the quality of the playgrounds at the parks, the quality of the public schools. Who or what organizations are working on those issues?
What are three headlines this year that have most gutted you and made you wanna turn away from the news entirely? Examples: Epstein, Gaza, Annunciation Catholic Church shooting. What are the root causes that led to those headlines? What national organizations or international organizations are working on them that you could donate to?
What is one artist or publication or organization creating more beauty or delight in the world that you can support? Thomas Merton said, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” I don’t know about you, but both are sounding like exactly what I need, what we all need, right now.
Finally, I want to encourage you to think collectively if you’ve got the energy for it. At the very least, you can share this newsletter with friends and tell them where you are thinking about donating in case they’d like to pile on. Sometimes we need to be reminded that “people like me do things like this,” and we’re too busy to wrap our heads around where we might send our own donations. Make it easier on your friends.
The other thing you can do, if you’ve got a bit more energy for it, is create a giving circle. We lead one with two different families for many years when we lived in Oakland focused on meeting the fundamental needs of our neighbors and it was a real joy. We would meet quarterly at our homes over a simple meal and learn from a local organizer, executive director, or advocate about their work and then pool our money to donate to them (we used Grapevine to make this administratively easier). It lead me to feel so much more connection to the direct service organizations and leaders in my own community, not to mention a bunch of wonderful neighbors. (By the way, most religious communities do this already, so this is also one more reason to find a community that fits your values and beliefs and invest in it.)
In some ways, our little community here is a giving circle, as every time I interview someone for Examined Family, I donate $250 from paid subscriptions to an organization or person of their choice in honor of their labor. (Stay tuned for an end-of-year post where I announce our total giving this year and remind you where we collectively donated. Here was last year’s.)
Another collective experiment in generosity that’s a little more wild is something I created many moons ago called the Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy, written up here in The New York Times. When I got my first book deal ever, I decided to give ten friends $100 and ask them to give it away in some creative way and then meet me at a bar in a month to tell the story of it. What I thought would just be a one-time thing became a reverse pyramid scheme of sorts and spread all over the country and the world. I haven’t hosted one in awhile. Maybe 2026 is a year for reviving it?
Related posts:
So tell me, what other ways do you have of figuring out where you want to donate? Did you learn this from your caregivers growing up, or did you have to invent new rituals and/or conquer emotional resistance within yourself to go for it?
I'd have to say my intense commitment to working on promoting universal flourishing, with a particular focus on marginalized people, was launched on reading things in secondary school, like Jacob Riis and Jane Adams and Jane Jacobs, rather than because of what my family did. We also never belonged to a religious community or discussed something like this with other families.
My doctoral work in my early twenties was more or less in this area.
But in the present, or in parenting and family life, what we have long done is that I make monthly contributions to a few things that feel imperative to me, my husband always donates to the schools we attended, and then on Christmas Day we meet as a family to review our donations over the last several years and volunteerism in the present and we discuss as a family where we want to put a certain amount of money for the year. My husband determines how much we can afford to give that year, and each of us comes prepared with research and advocates for our choices for our family contributions.
Often someone has ideas but hasn't done the research, so I will typically do some back up research and present some specific possibilities that fit the concept.
Once the decisions are made, my husband does the actual check-writing.
Generosity
multiplies goods, goodness, grace.
“Think collectively.”