Tag: Generosity

Labor versus work

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World for that last couple of weeks.  It is providing context and depth to my intuitive understanding of generosity and gift-giving, helping me to appreciate the rich history of gift-giving, which, I had forgotten, forms the social underpinning of most societies throughout history (except for today, of course).

Hyde is very specific with his language, and in his chapter on The Labor of Gratitude he is quick to clarify the difference between “labor” and “work.”  There’s enough great stuff here that the right approach seems to be to quote liberally:

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will.  A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor.   Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.  Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that we didn’t do them.  Paul Goodman wrote in a journal once, “I have recently written a few good poems.  But I have no feeling that I wrote them.”  That is the declaration of a laborer…

…One of the first problems the modern world faced with the rise of industrialism was the exclusion of labor by the expansion of work.”

Labor isn’t better than work, but it is characteristically different, its product is different, the conditions for creating it are different.

The simple question for reflection is: will your success (short and long-term) and happiness require you to labor or just to work?  And if labor is part of the equation, do you create the conditions in your life that will allow you to labor?  Are you not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor?”  Has your work grown so much that it has essentially crowded out every last moment you had to labor?

This is one of the big fights of the modern era.  Email, meetings, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, jokes from your buddies, news and TV and, of course, all the actual work you have to do….these mountains are big and growing, and we’ll never finish scaling them.

I for one feel like I’m in the trenches every day, fighting to labor.  Some days I win, a lot of days I lose.  But I’m positive that I have to keep on fighting.

You?

Norms, tipping, generosity and scarcity

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Buy a sandwich from the deli, or a hot dog from the guy on the street, and the rules of the game are clear.  You’re told a price, you pay cash, done.

Reroll the tape, but this time you pay with a credit or debit card.  Depending on the machine they’re using, there might be a spot for “TIP _______” and you find yourself wondering whether and how much to tip for that same sandwich.

When a friend emails you about a cause that’s dear to him, there a normal set of responses you have to that situation – nothing, something, it’s up to you, but the steps you take follow a well-worn path.  Same story if you’re, say, at a Wall Street firm and a colleague asks you to buy a table at the benefit where she’s being honored – the numbers are just bigger.

On and on we go, hurtling through life with shorthand response to situations, because that makes things so much easier, because it feels like the only sensible way to process everything that’s coming our way.

But, just to be clear about what’s going on here, that shorthand is a function of norms, previous practice and social expectations.  Scarcity and real economics have very little to do with how we act.

The fun part – a piece of Generosity Day – is turning these norms upside down to see what that feels like: a $20 tip on a $5 taxi ride; telling the hot dog vendor to keep the change; telling your waiter that you’ll also pay the bill for the couple sitting next to you; agreeing to help a person who emails you out of the blue even though you don’t feel like you have the time.

My bet is that breaking these norms feels totally outrageous, that your heart races a little when you do it.  That’s the feeling of acting differently.  Then, when the rush passes, your head has the chance to process how glib you often are with that extra $20, but right here and right now, at the hot dog stand, handing over a $20 bill for your $5 hot dog – and not getting the change back – feels ludicrous.  Let the introspection begin.

One reason to give this whole thing a try is as an exploration of the norms and limits you’ve set around your life and your actions.  They may be just right for you.  Or your generosity experiment might afford a glimpse into how you could behave differently all the time – whatever “differently” means to you.

Today: T-shirt, Causes, and Volunteer needed

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

We’re just three weeks away from Generosity Day, and we have a lot of fun things in the works!  You’ve probably already seen the great Generosity Day t-shirts by our friends at Selfless Tee, so we wanted to remind you that TODAY is the last day to buy them for guaranteed delivery by Valentine’s Day (they make amazing thank you gifts to your volunteers, or to your spouse or your co-worker or just for you!).  You can get them here: www.selflesstee.com/generosity

Also we’ve quietly launched a Causes page for Generosity Day, so if you haven’t yet please sign up for the cause and take the Generosity Day Pledge: www.causes.com/generosityday.  (and tell us what you think about the site via email to generosityday [at] gmail.com).

Finally, we’re on the lookout for a virtual volunteer.  It will probably be around five hours (potentially more) of work to help get the word out about Generosity Day, just over email.  We probably only need one person so if you’re interested please send an email to: generosityday [at] gmail.com with one paragraph about what you love about Generosity Day – or just leave a comment on this post. (Note: it’s also OK to comment and NOT volunteer).

Wearin’ generosity on your sleeve

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

So here’s a cool idea – there’s a Generosity Day t-shirt, and you can get yours today. The shirt is lively and fun and a conversation-starter.

I like the idea of the shirt being an instant Generosity Suit that gives you generosity superpowers.  You wear it, you’re reminded that you want to say yes….so you do.  And that makes you, and the people around you, a whole lot happier.

Super Generosity Powers, just for the price of a t-shirt.  Can’t beat that.

And the sooner you get one, the sooner you have an excuse to talk about Generosity Day when people come up to you and say, “Hey, nice t-shirt.  Where’d you get it?”

Think about the fun uses:

  • Give them to your kids and start a conversation about all the different ways to say “Yes” around the world
  • Buy a stack of them for your donors as a thank you gift for saying YES to your cause
  • Or for your fundraising team for knowing how to get people to YES day in and day out
  • Or maybe for your hubby so that he has no choice but to say YES the next time you ask him to take out the trash

The fabulous +acumen chapters together with Selfless Tees made this all happen.  $7 from each shirt goes to Acumen Fund if you buy in the next two weeks.

Please spread the word by sharing this link: http://www.selflesstee.com/generosity (how cool is that URL?!)

Walking by the candy stand

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I never noticed the giant candy stand in the subway station, right past the turnstile, that I’ve walked past twice a day nearly every day for the past five years.  Never noticed that I could grab a drink or a candy bar or a magazine, even though I’ve had more than 2,000 chances to do just that.  The place didn’t register because I’m always rushing by it either on my way to or from work.  My head’s down, there’s a crowd, I’m focused on other things.

Generosity Day (sign up here) is a little more than a month away, and I’m reminded of the original moment that kicked this whole thing off for me – the homeless person I walked by with my head down.  The guy I didn’t notice because I was busy doing other things.

A lot of the online conversation about my generosity talk on TED focused on giving to the homeless, as in “does it make sense to give to the homeless?”  That’s really not the point.

Rather, the point is that it’s high time we pick up our heads or, better yet, get out of our heads and really see the world around us.  The point is that there are other human beings around us every day who are craving our acknowledgment, our support, our attention, our generosity – just as we crave it from them – yet we’ll never notice them if we let ourselves keep on walking by.

To me the first step in leading a generous life is actually stopping to notice the full world around us – and notice it in an open way, a non-judgmental way, a way that’s not governed by fear or by separation.

Heck, if I can walk by a guy selling Twix bars (I LOVE Twix bars!!) every day for five years, then I’m pretty sure that I need to let go of the tunnel vision.

The simple act of stopping and noticing is how we begin.

3 Thoughts on Generosity

~ Sasha ~ 6 Comments

The guys over at 3ThoughtsOn.com asked me to write one of their inaugural posts on generosity.  They describe the site as “An Outlet For Renegade Thinkers focused on introducing innovative and adventurous individuals taking intentional steps toward positive change.”

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Before December 2009 I’d barely given more than a passing thought to generosity.  This despite the fact that my work at Acumen Fund is all about fighting global poverty and that, as a nonprofit, we’re supported by donations.  That fact that I spent a lot of time asking others to be more generous and to connect to a higher sense of purpose wasn’t causing me to reflect on how generous I was (or wasn’t).  If anything, I felt I’d “given at the office” by virtue of what I’ve chosen to do with my life.  It took an experience of not giving to someone who asked for help to send me back to the generosity drawing board, and I’ve been thinking about generosity every since.  Starting that day, I conducted a month-long generosity experiment to see what it felt like to say “yes” for 30 days to every request for help; and later, together with a few friends, I helped create Generosity Day on February 14th, 2011 as a reboot of Valentine’s Day.  Here’s what I’ve begun to understand:

Generosity is first and foremost about human connection

When someone asks you for help, the first decision you make is whether to stand tall in the face of that request and that person.   When we don’t stand tall it’s often because our heads, our infinite ability to analyze and rationalize, our fear that we someday might be in a position of real need all scream at us to run and hide.  What could be more terrifying, more honest, or more simple than seeing that someone standing right in front of is in need and that we are in a position to help?  What could be more powerful than choosing to act?  Generosity starts with this basic acknowledgment of our shared humanity.  It honors the fabric that binds us to each other.  It recognizes that that the person asking me for help is just as human as I am.

Generosity is generative

Generosity begets generosity, which means that our power to act and to create a shift in the world is unbounded.  We know that when someone discovers a few extra quarters in a vending machine they are much more likely to be generous to the next person – to pick up papers that someone has dropped or to help them solve a problem.  There literally is a multiplier effect of generous action: one generous act begets another.  Our opportunity, then, is to create a shift not in one or two actions but instead in the place that generosity holds in our self-image and, ultimately, in how we walk through the world.  This is why we started Generosity Day in 2011 and why we’re doing it again on February 14th, 2012 – to create huge ripples throughout the world, to show people what’s possible.

Generosity alone is not enough

Generosity is nothing more and nothing less than the foundation upon which we build. We won’t solve the big problems of the world just by opening our hearts.  That is a dangerous dream, because the stakes are much too high.  Yet without generosity too many doors are closed, too much judgment creeps in.  Without generosity empathy is not given a space in which to grow and we experience the terrible misfortune of undervaluing the gifts we have been given.  In so doing we run the risk of forgetting that each of us has something important to offer in creating solutions big and small.

To me, generosity is an active orientation towards the world and all its messiness.  It is a refusal to walk by, to shut down, to pretend that if we just keep our heads down everything will turn out OK.  It won’t, at least not without all of us.

The more you think the less you give

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Leon Neyfakh at the Boston Globe just published a nice article about why people give to charity.  The bottom line seems to be: the more people think and the more information they’re given, the less people give.

So, for example, from Neyfakh’s article :

Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton and coeditor of the book “The Science of Giving,” found that simply giving people information about a charity’s overhead costs makes them less likely to donate to it. This held true, remarkably, even if the information was positive and indicated and the charity was extremely efficient.

AND

The best approach for a charity raising money to feed hungry children in Mali, the team [Deborah Small at Wharton and George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University] found, was to simply show potential donors a photograph of a starving child and tell them her name and age. Donors who were shown more contextual information about famine in Africa — the ones who were essentially given more to think about — were less likely to give.

The first question we can ask ourselves about these findings is: what exactly is someone doing when they decide to give?  It is a rational, maximizing decision or is it first and foremost (as I would argue it is) an act of passion and a statement of purpose? Based on what we think is going on, we can decide whether or not to be surprised that our rational mind tends to curb generous actions.

Borrowing from another corner of human behavior, I’d observe that we don’t spend the most when we’re told all the specs of what’s under the hood (RAM, processor speed, CD/DVD features, etc.); we spend the most when we’re sold a dream and a story about who we are and who we can be (the iMac).  Having all the specs gets us comparison shopping online and buying at CompUSA, trying to save another $20 with a mail-in rebate on a $999 purchase.  The story and the dream gets us to buy an iPad when no one could ever convince anyone that what’s missing in our life is a “tablet PC.”

And so, once we’ve realized that our surprise is misplaced, what are we to do with the (still residually troubling) finding?

We want a philanthropic “marketplace” in which the best ideas win out, in which the organizations that are most effective and that are making the most change in the world attract the most donor dollars.  Yet, armed with information from psychologists and behavioral economists, we fear that the same forces that are creating a needed pull to nonprofit accountability could inadvertently be undermining the generous action that is the lifeblood of all philanthropy.

(Side note: for another day, there’s a whole conversation here about whether accountability inadvertently undermining generosity is another way to describe what’s going on in the evolution of the impact investing space).

So how do we fight this?  How do we keep generosity alive?

I can’t help but come full circle back to my original generosity experiment, to see what happens when I graft these new findings onto my original, not fully articulated instinct that I needed to make a shift: steeped in the culture of “new,” “better,” “higher impact” philanthropy – through my work at Acumen Fund and as part of the social enterprise space – I felt the foundation of my own giving was buckling under the weight of all the left-brain analytics.  Nothing was ever good enough, impactful enough, scalable enough, anything enough.  I needed to (and continue to need to) reinforce that foundation with a practice of generosity that was as powerful, as forceful, as robust as the added weight of my demands for nonprofit excellence.

I’d this a step further and argue that those who are beating the drum for increased nonprofit and philanthropic accountability owe it to themselves and to the world to ensure that we are cultivating and advocating for a deep and abiding spirit of generosity in everything we do.  As a start, I invite you all to be active participants, on February 14th, 2012, in Generosity Day.

Where we all hope to arrive is a practice of giving that starts and ends with generosity – with each and every step infused with all of the right, tough questions.  The challenge from the research is that, in practice, this is incredibly difficult to do.

But rather than advocate either for turning off the brain or for throwing the generosity baby out with the bathwater, I’d suggest that we have some old traditions that hold the answers we seek.  Tithing is, at its core, a pre-commitment to give and a recognition that there’s strength in a common bond and a clear expectations about the individual actions that create a strong whole.

We too can pre-commit, we can decide in advance – whether because of our faith, because of a sense of shared ownership, or because we understand that if we are in a place to give then we have been blessed – that we are going to give a certain amount every year.  We can lay that foundation of generosity and make it strong by sharing the commitment with others who engage in the same practice as we do.  And then we can get as wonky, as robust, as analytical as we like about where we are going to give the money, with, I hope, the space to retain every last bit of joy and abundance that giving entails, no matter how smart it is.

My dream for advocating for more generosity in the world isn’t because, alone, generosity is all that we need.  But it is and always must be the foundation for everything that we do, the intention that underlies each and every action.

Service Space – generosity video

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Some beautiful reflections on generosity from Nipun and the guys over at ServiceSpace (the creators of SmileCards).  Nipun’s post over at DailyGood is definitely worth a read too.

 

What you create with a generous act

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

John Tierney wrote a smart piece in the Sunday New York Times about the salubrious effects of gratitude. He write, “Cultivating an ‘attitude of gratitude’ has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners.”

The far-reaching effects of gratitude make it sound like a wonder-pill that could be sold on QVC: “THIS simple book will describe the AMAZINGLY EASY STEPS that will help you sleep better, feel less anxious, will lower your blood pressure AND help your marriage!!”  I’m sure the first 1,000 of those would sell out in minutes.

On a more serious note, what I found intriguing was the omnidirectional impacts of gratitude: something as simple as keeping a gratitude journal (listing five things you’re grateful for, one sentence each) made people more optimistic and happier, and they “reported fewer physical problems and spent more time working out” (wow);  students who had been given help fixing a broken computer were more likely to volunteer to help a complete stranger with a task; writing an essay about gratitude made students less likely to retaliate when they received criticism.

This harkens back to the circular – as opposed to reciprocal – culture of gift-giving.  As Lewis Hyde explains in The Gift, there is strong cultural norm in many traditional societies in favor of gifts flowing in a circle.  In the Kula ceremonial exchange of the Massim people of Papua New Guinea, for example, “male” red shell necklaces worn by women move clockwise around the islands of New Guinea, and “female” armshells worn by men move counterclockwise around the island (sometimes traveling hundreds of miles before complete the circle).  Since you never give to a person who has given to you, and vice-versa, the notion of group membership is reinforced and the undertow of reciprocal obligation is kept at bay (e.g. “I’ll buy a table at your benefit dinner if you buy one at mine.”)

With this perspective, we can deepen our understanding of what happens when one engages in an act of generosity.  In the narrowest sense, someone is helped.  Broadening a little, the giver, especially if she is conscious of and reflective about her actions, will, over time, be transformed through the repeated act of giving.  Most interesting – seen through the prism of the research on gratitude – engaging in a generous act creates a chain reaction of ongoing good action and good feeling: another generous act done by the person to whom you were generous; an increase in well-being; less likelihood of retaliation when that person is wronged…and on and on we go.

This is what’s really going on when we act generously.  The person to whom we are being generous, whoever she is, is not some sort of passive, faceless “recipient,” and the power of that generous act does not dead-end with the her.  It ripples out.  It spreads into her lives and into the lives of others.

And so what we know intuitively is supported by the research: if we can get a big enough number of people to make generosity integral to how they move through the world, the shift that begins with them will multiply.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The best way to give thanks

~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

Next week is Thanksgiving in the United States.  I’ve always enjoyed the holiday since it’s focused on family and on gratitude, without a lot of gift-giving hullabaloo or commercialization (the Macy’s Day Parade notwithstanding, though that’s pretty fun too).

Generosity Day 2012 is also less than three months away, on February 14, 2012, and I know many of you are ready to roll up your sleeves and jump on the front lines to spread the word about Generosity Day.

Here’s an idea: start now.

More specifically, what better way to give thanks than by giving?  What better way to show gratitude than by helping others?  What better way to get ready for Generosity Day 2012 than by doing a mini-generosity experiment of your own?

Try it next week, for the week or just for one day.  Consider it your Generosity Day Dry Run, so that you can speak with gusto and authenticity when the big day arrives.

Start on Monday so you can arrive at Thanksgiving Dinner with stories to share.

Imagine families coming together and swapping our personal generosity stories, which people can take away and bring home with them, planting the seed of this idea far and wide.

As a bonus to everyone else in this community, share your reflections, experiences and stories by:

–          Commenting on this blog post

–          Emailing generosityday [at] gmail.com

–          Tweeting / sending Facebook updates using the #generosityday hashtag

We’ll share – with permission, of course – some of these stories in the lead-up to Generosity Day 2012.

And if you want to sign up to get special Generosity Day update sign up for the Generosity Day Google Group here.