Category: Generosity

The gift economy and commerce

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

In biblical times, money was treated in radically different ways depending on whether you were dealing with someone inside or outside the tribe.  For example:

To a foreigner you may charge interest, but to your brother you shall not charge interest.

– Deuteronomy 23:19,20

Within the tribe, it was forbidden to make money on money you gave to someone (this is the genesis of usury laws).  It was known and understood that what mattered was the collective wealth and well-being of the tribe, and so there were established norms and expectations around the giving and receiving of gifts.  It was known that as a recipient of a gift it was your job to return what was given to you or its equivalent, whether to the person who gave to you or to the next person in the tribe who had a need.  This is how the needs of the members of the tribe were addressed. Gifts flowed in a circular fashion.

Outside the tribe, on the other hand, all bets were off.  You could lend, charge interest, even ask for a goat as collateral if this would help ensure payment.

I visualize it like this: within the circle, we have the gift economy; outside of the circle we have commerce.

Without judging what is good and bad here – indeed without commerce where would we be as a world? – it’s simple to observe that, year after year and century after century, the purview of commerce has gotten broader and the space for the gift economy has shrunken:

What was once the tribe became the extended family became, at least in the West today, the nuclear family.  Community ties weaken, religious ties weaken as many (but certainly not all) parts of the world become more secular, and the gift economy, the economy where generosity and helping first and asking questions later, gets whittled down so much that it’s just a speck in an ocean of commerce.

The irony of course is that, thanks to the amazing power of commerce, we’re wealthier than we’ve ever been.

Which means we have a choice.   Our first, most obvious option is to separate more and to insulate.  We can shop online and hide from the world; we can only associate with people who (socially, economically, politically) are just like us.  We can have Google and Facebook give us search results and friend feeds that systematically reinforce our beliefs.  Indeed there’s a great gravitational pull in this direction.

Our other option, the one that’s been nagging at us and sneaking up on us oh-so-quietly, is to recognize that what we desire most of all is to connect with others, to break down barriers and rip out the insulation, to experience the world and people and one another in a fuller, richer way, and to use our own wealth to heal the world.

The success of Generosity Day this year and, I’m hoping, in years to come is proof of the hunger for the second path, the one that leads to openness and connection, the one that allows us to take all our wealth and power and opportunity and build a different world, one in which we use our great capacity for change and for wealth creation to help one another.

In the end both paths will have to co-exist, but the false promise that’s being served up is that the first path alone will be enough.  It won’t.

Generosity excerpt

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

From a reader who was kind enough to share this story.

When living in NYC I, like many others, was constantly bombarded by people asking for money, spare change, food if I happened to be carrying some.  And like many I turned them all down.

I found myself working in mid-town for a year and on my way to the office each day I would pass a young homeless man just leaning again a non-descript building.

Nondescript man against a nondescript building not asking anyone for anything.

For the next six months I would give him $10, $5, $20, whatever I had with me, usually 2-3 days a week.  On the days I had no cash I would buy him a sandwich and drink.  It got to the point where I would ask him what he would like from deli and go get it.

He never said thank you, never bothered me if I was not able to give him anything.  Other than the sandwich order we never spoke.  To this day I wish I could have done more.

“To this day I wish I could have done more.”  That’s the part of the story that gets to me almost as much as imagining this silent relationship in which the giver is asking for nothing in return.

Was it ever mine?

~ Sasha ~ 7 Comments

The experience of giving isn’t an objective one:  our relation to the money we give and the attitudes we bring to bear directly impact our own experience and on our practice.

So much collected teaching and wisdom about giving rests in the religious traditions, and I’m just beginning to explore what this ancient wisdom has to teach us about modern giving.

All the major faiths place great emphasis on giving – how could they not, as giving binds a community together, keeps it coherent, ensures a level of well-being for members of the community and stability for the whole community.  In the Jewish tradition, one gives the maaser (1/10th of one’s wealth and 1/10th of one’s income) as tzedakah; this translated into the Christian tradition of tithing.  Islam has a similar tradition of zakat, the laws of which are specified in the Qur’an.

In all of these traditions, giving is completing the circle in one’s relationship with God.  Our abundance is a reflection of the blessings we have been given, and when we give we are returning some of that abundance.

Whatever your faith (and even if you not religious) there is wisdom here.  If we are in a position to give, we have been blessed with good fortune.  We have the honor of being in a position to help another.

How different this notion is from a sense of scarcity, of needing to learn to let go each and every time we give.  I find this notion freeing.  We approach giving with the knowledge that what we are giving away was never ours; we approach giving with a sense of humility and with the knowledge that good fortune has played a role in our own good circumstances, and we are passing on a bit of that good fortune to another.

Generosity excerpt

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

A friend sent this in as a non-sequitur in another conversation we were having.

The other day I was coming out of a coffee shop and decided to give a homeless man a $10 bill…what can you get for $1 these days?…I feel like I’ve been giving $1 since I’ve had discretionary income…I subconsciously never accounted for inflation/cost of living increases.  He thought I made a mistake and said: Ma’am, I think you made a mistake.  Did you mean to give this to me (assuming I meant to give him $1).

I replied: I absolutely did.

Nice.  And kinda shatters the whole angle of the panhandler who is trying to pull one over on you, doesn’t it?

I hesitate to share too many examples of giving to people on the street when talking about Generosity Day, since somehow that’s a lightning rod for what I consider to be a distracting conversation (namely: “should one give to people on the street?”).  At the same time, the immediacy and humanity of giving (or not) to someone who is standing right and front of you and asking for help is, I think, something we cannot shy away from.

Do you have more generosity stories to share?

Fundraising with Generosity

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Katya Andresen, who writes the awesome Nonprofit Marketing Blog and is also one of my co-conspirators for Generosity Day, made a great point on last week’s generosity economy post:

I have been thinking a lot lately about the latest research on the mind – and our mirror neurons – which shows the extent to which we’re hard wired for empathy and, by extension, generosity…Yet giving to charity isn’t growing at the pace of other elements in our generosity economy.  I think one aspect is that many of the people in charge of unleashing generosity (fundraiser, namely) have failed to fully understand and embrace this landscape.  We as a sector must engage with supporters in a more meaningful, connected and GENEROUS way ourselves if we hope to inspire the generous actions that come to people naturally…rather than treating them like walking wallets.

In many ways, this observation was the nagging worry that led me, two years ago, to my generosity experiment: I was spending my days talking to people about connecting with their passion, about being bountiful in their thinking, about being generous, yet I hadn’t moved my own relationship with generosity forward much in the three years I’d been doing my job as a fundraiser.  And without that connection, I didn’t feel like I could do my job in an authentic way.

Sounds good, you may say, but let’s get real for a second.

OK let’s.  For example, I just talked to a colleague who is getting on an international flight on Monday for a fundraising trip.  If she doesn’t raise $400,000 next week, a branch of her nonprofit is going to be shuttered.  With that looming, how hard is it going to be for her to see those potential funders as anything but walking wallets?

The answer is that it’s hard.  Really hard.  But it’s the only way to be really successful.

The first thing we need to do is reframe what we’re doing here.  Last week I talked to the new class of Acumen Fund Fellows about how to mobilize resources behind their ideas.  I started the session with a a free association around the word “fundraising.”  They were wonderful and honest, throwing out words like “storytelling” and “connection” but also a healthy dose of “hitting up your friends,” “draining,” and “begging.”

But here’s the big secret: great fundraising is a fair deal for everyone involved.  You (the fundraiser) are connecting people to their passions and giving them an opportunity to do something great in the world.  You are helping them express their dreams and maybe, just maybe, connecting them with an organization that will be transformational in their lives.  You are giving them the chance to change the world.

Of course what you have on offer won’t be for everybody.  But that’s OK.  For the people who you do fundraise from, you are offering something of (at least) equal value to the donation they are giving.  In fact, by definition that’s what they’re saying by giving to you!

Approaching fundraising with generosity, to me, is about approaching each conversation with the attitude: “let’s figure out what great things we can do together.”  It’s not about your need, not about separating a well-meaning person from their money, and it’s definitely not a zero-sum game.

Best of all, it is incredibly empowering to wake up and realize that, as a fundraiser, you have something of great value to offer.  If you can couple that feeling of empowerment with a spirit of generosity, I promise it will transform your fundraising, transform how your donors experience you, transform your ability to connect great, meaningful, powerful ideas to the resources they need to come to life.

Thanks, Katya, for the inspiration.

 

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P.S. This post is about fundraising but there’s nothing special there – most of these conclusions apply to more traditional sales and business development when done the right way.  The greatest salespeople bring joy to their work, and the knowledge that they are making their customers’ lives better.  The thing they’re selling – and their attitude – is a gift to the customer.

Generosity and empathy

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

David Brooks wrote a powerful column on Friday, a mini-diatribe against empathy.  Apparently, empathy education is all the rage, the premise being that exposure to others’ difficult situations will lead to more right and moral action.

The catch, says Brooks, is that it doesn’t actually work.  Empathy alone does not get people to engage in moral action when there’s a cost to taking that action.  Worse, empathy alone may give one the sense that one is attuned to problems without having to do the hard work of acting to make a difference.

Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments.

Tough words indeed.

While empathy alone is, apparently, flaccid in its ability to illicit action, a burst of good feeling does produce changes:

In one experiment in the 1970s, researchers planted a dime in a phone booth. Eighty-seven percent of the people who found the dime offered to help a person who dropped some papers nearby, compared with only 4 percent who didn’t find a dime.

Brooks implies that this is a short-term effect, and what drives sustained action isn’t feeling alone but some code (moral, ethical, religious, military) on the part of the actor.

So here’s the generosity reflection: I’d argue that being wildly, inappropriately generous has two potential effects, if you’re open to them.  The first is short-term, a kind of giddy euphoria that washes over you when you’re generous.  That may lead directly to more right action.  And the second (drip, drip, drip, over time) is an integration into one’s “code” (whatever it is, and wherever it comes from) of generosity as a core operating principle, an integral part of how we describe ourselves to ourselves.

Plus, I like the fact that it’s about action.  We talk so much about what we need to do, and talk is inevitably cheap.  The only way I’ve found to really change my behaviors is by actually changing my behaviors.

Generosity economy

~ Sasha ~ 13 Comments

In the ultimate world-colliding evening, last night I attended the graduation for the Class of 2011 Acumen Fund Fellows.  These 10 Fellows, selected from 700 applicants from more than 60 countries, are a humbling and inspiring assembly of talent, commitment, grit, drive, and empathy, and they spend a year working with Acumen Fund investees in India, Pakistan and East Africa as a training ground for lives in social change.

Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conference and all-around deep thinker and mind-bender, gave the Fellows graduation speech, and he led it off saying, “Thanks to a nice talk featured on the TED.com website last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about generosity and the role it plays in our lives.”  I couldn’t feel more humbled, or more honored, that Chris took the time to reflect on generosity – he’s the one who helped us all understand that taking the most incredible, insightful, and (at the time) exclusive content in the world and giving it away for free was the right business strategy and the right thing for the world.  He’s the ultimate generosity inspiration.

Chris started off talking about the evolutionary and biological bases for generosity, and all the research that has been done on the value of reciprocity, especially amongst pairings of individuals and groups that have reason to believe that they will have multiple encounters over time.  But he went further and shared research from experiments in which one subject was given $100 and had the option to give away any amount of that money, with the knowledge that the amount given away would triple.  Many subjects gave away all $100, and, even better, many recipients then gave back $150 to their donor.

Generosity begets generosity.  Trust begets trust.

At the same time, it’s incredibly easy to break the cycle – all you need is one shirker and the whole things spirals into a “no trust” equilibrium.  But the cycle can be broken: someone can take a generosity risk and reset the system.

At any moment, we have the chance through our individual actions to transform others’ behaviors.

Going further still, Chris observed that the best way to create generous action is through transparency: tell people to behave however they want to behave, but add the caveat that how they acted will be publicly known, and people act much more generous.

Transparency transforms behaviors. 

Chris’ final observation is that we can be generous in infinite ways, not just in sharing our money but in sharing our thoughts, our ideas, our wisdom, and that today the friction around sharing what we have to give has reduced dramatically.

It’s easier than ever to give (= spread ideas)

And suddenly we arrive at the big conclusion (not Chris’ exact words)

Increased transparency (e.g. living in a Facebook world) + frictionless idea-sharing (e.g. living in a blogging, YouTube, TED world) = We are living in a generosity economy

Discuss.

The screwdriver

~ Sasha ~ 8 Comments

Last week, while on vacation in the South (a few days before hurricane Irene upended our plans), I’d managed to pull down a venetian blind in the house we were renting and I needed a Phillips head screw to fix it.

I made my way to the hardware store, picked out five screws of varying sizes, and told the owner that I’d like to buy a cheap screwdriver to screw in one of these screws.

Rather than sell me a $10 screwdriver and charge me another buck for the screws, he lent me a screwdriver and asked me to bring it back.  I then reached into my pocket to pay for the screws and he said, “Don’t worry about it.”

That just about made my day.

And it got me thinking, again, about generosity, about how our analytic minds mess with us so much when we are steeped in so many intelligent discussions about philanthropy and the best ways to practice it.  It’s easy, when we are talking about giving to others, to critique generosity and soft-headed or impractical.  But I bet there’s not a person out there who, when someone is irrationally kind to them, stops to say, “well, that didn’t make an awful lot of sense, and that person shouldn’t have been so generous to me.”

It’s like the old adage about comedy and tragedy: comedy is seeing someone walking down the street fall into a manhole; tragedy is when I stub my toe.

When we talk about ourselves, and our own experiences, there’s no amount of generosity that feels like too much.  When we talk about others, everything is supposed to be bounded and thought out and make sense.

Generosity is a way of walking through the world and spreading joy.  Nothing more, nothing less.

It’s up to you to decide how much you want of that in your life.

Keith Ferrazzi on trust, vulnerability, and deliberate relationship-building

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back, gave a fascinating talk yesterday at The New York Forum (event livestream is here – the Forum is from June 20-21st, my panel is this afternoon).  It was a broad brush conversation about how human beings build connections with one another, and Keith gave a passionate argument in favor of being more intentional about how we build relationships.  (bonus: if you want to dig into this stuff, check out Keith’s Relationship Master’s Academy.)

Keith’s headline is that we should all have a “people plan” – a listing of the top 25 relationships that are most important to our long term success, and a commitment to investing substantially and intentionally in these relationships.  And here’s the part that I loved: Keith argued that the only way to be successful in investing in these relationships is to lead with generosity, to enter every conversation thinking about “how can I help?”  This is the polar opposite of figuring out what we can get, the opposite of thinking about how to close the sale, and (of course) the opposite of figuring out what we can GET.

The other big idea I was left with was that, as life becomes increasingly virtual and as job tenure decreases, the natural building of relationships that used to happen in business is disappearing.  For example, Keith shared a story of IBM getting rid of all of its sales offices – the expectation was that this would both decrease costs and allowing salespeople to have much more time at home and better work/life balance.  What they didn’t foresee was how much was lost – the intangible connective tissue of shared stories, the decompressing and complaining about customers or about management, the informal mentorship that used to happen at the local Bennigan’s on Thursday nights.  The result: the company scuttlebutt is that IBM, which used to stand for “I’ve Been Moved” (to the next regional office) now stands for “I’m By Myself.”

Keith’s suggestion is that, especially for the generation (mine) that didn’t grow up in a social media, online world, we have to make much more deliberate attempts to create connection, to be vulnerable, to create an environment of trust as a precursor to the “business at hand.”  Keith shared that at Cisco, a major user of Telepresence virtual conferencing, they have implemented personal/professional “check ins” in the first 5 minutes of all Telepresence meetings, because the natural swapping of personal stories that happens at the start of in-person conversations actually doesn’t happen when we have virtual conversations.

Just one example, and I’m not sure I’d follow this one to the letter.  But I love the broader idea: that if we want to innovate, if we want to have tough and real conversations about big strategic decisions, if we want to dig in to areas of uncertainty, we will be much more successful if we make deliberate investments in creating bonds of trust, no matter how far away our colleagues or our customers sit.

Every day it gets easier to skip this step: to fire off emails to people we barely know, focused on the tasks they need to complete; to hold global conference calls in which most people say almost nothing; to never, ever, pick up the phone to a key colleague sitting far away, not with an agenda, but just to talk and see how things are going.

By skipping these step, we skip investing in trust, and we relegate ourselves to exacerbating global/local tensions, where trust and rapport exists for workers in the same office and global bonds – far from being stronger, thanks to all of this technology – keep on getting weaker.

Closing the loop

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

In asking for help, you are often giving a gift to someone – exposing your own need and vulnerability (which can be hard), and giving them an option to shine.

You are not necessarily incurring a debt of any kind, but instead (when you ask in a genuine way for a genuine thing) are giving someone the chance to be generous.

You have the same opportunity to be generous in return.  Sure, you can thank someone.  Much better, though, is to let them know how their help helped – be very active here, very specific, and share your success, bathe them in that same warm glow.

You’ll feel better and they will too.  Otherwise, they might feel like all they’ve done is howl at the moon.

In asking for help, you are often giving a gift to someone – exposing your own need and vulnerability (which can be hard), and giving them an option to shine.

You are not necessarily incurring a debt of any kind, but instead (when you ask in a genuine way for a genuine thing) are giving someone the chance to be generous.

You should take that same opportunity.  Sure, you can thank them.  Much better, though, is to let them know how their help helped.  Share in your success.  Bathe them in that same warm glow.

You’ll feel better and they will too.

In asking for help, you are often giving a gift to someone – exposing your own need and vulnerability (which can be hard), and giving them an option to shine.

You are not necessarily incurring a debt of any kind, but instead (when you ask in a genuine way for a genuine thing) are giving someone the chance to be generous.

You should take that same opportunity.  Sure, you can thank them.  Much better, though, is to let them know how their help helped.  Share in your success.  Bathe them in that same warm glow.

You’ll feel better and they will too.  Otherwise, they might feel like all they’ve done is howl at the moon.

 

Otherwise, they might feel like all they’ve done is howl at the moon.