Tag: Generosity

5 tough questions

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Today is the second annual NextGen:Charity conference.  To commemorate the conference, Ari Teman, co-founder of the conference along with Jonah Halper, asked me to respond to five questions about innovation in the developing world, leadership, faith, blogging, and failure.  Here’s the interview (the link to yesterday’s Huffington Post article is here).

1. There’s a lot of talk about sharing our innovations with the 3rd world — let’s flip that around. What are some of the lessons the “developed world” can learn from the innovators you support (who have to operate on pennies a day)?

Extreme frugality, a relentless focus on customers, the ability to navigate complexity and take nothing for granted. In 2003, Acumen Fund connected with the visionary entrepreneur Amitabha Sadangi who realized that he could reverse-engineer drip irrigation systems originally developed in Israel and make them infinitely scalable and radically affordable to poor customers in India. Amitabha knew that poor farmers would need to see an extreme value proposition – the ability to test the system on 1/8th acre plots and to see payback in less than a year – and that even so the road would be long and hard to change farming practices. Eight years later, Global Easy Water Products has served more than 300,000 farmers, and Amitabha has a lot to teach entrepreneurs globally about creating the minimal viable product to meet the needs of customers for whom value per dollar is paramount and the willingness to take risk is limited. He’s also about the most persistent man you’ll ever meet.

2. The Acumen Fund has a prestigious Fellowship Program where you develop young talent and you also work with some amazing visionaries — what do you see as the key traits of a successful leader?

We expect the Acumen Fund Fellows to possess a unique combination of traits – operational excellence, financial acumen, and what we call moral imagination, the ability to see yourself in another, to walk a mile in her shoes. Each year we select 10 Fellows from a global pool of 700 applicants from 60 countries, and the Fellows are an amazing group from all walks of life. We’ve had people like Jocelyn Wyatt, who has created IDEO.org to bring design thinking and user-centered design to address problems of poverty; Jawad Aslam, who is now pioneering low-income housing for the poor in Pakistan through his company, AMC; or Suraj Sudhakar who, in addition to his day job, has thrown 40 TEDx’s across the slums of Nairobi. In addition to the incredible combination of skills these Fellows bring to the table, what differentiates them is a deep and abiding commitment to seeing the poor not as passive recipients of charity but individuals with hopes, aspiration, and dignity.


3. On your blog you frequently muse on various faiths’ approaches to giving. How does faith inform your leadership and charity work?

When I started blogging I thought I was going to write about philanthropy and social enterprise, but as I continued my exploration I kept on getting to more fundamental questions of service and giving. While I’m a huge believer in the need for innovation to solve some of the world’s toughest problems, there’s also a deep wisdom that all of the faiths have to offer – we just need to be willing to open up our ears and hearts to what they have to teach. Sometimes I worry that we might get too smart in how we approach solving problems and lose our rooting in this centuries-old wisdom. The notion that giving is part of the circle of life is central to all religions and cultures – it connects us to one another, strengthens community, and is an acknowledgment that if we are in a position to give, then we have ourselves been given a great gift.


4. You mentioned you blogged publicly about your Generosity Experiment to encourage yourself to follow-through. How else do you keep yourself motivated?

It’s incredibly easy to stay motivated when you feel like you’re making a difference – it’s when you’re trying to make a difference and failing that your energy drains away. I think we all crave a better world and the moment you get a taste of helping create that, you can never let it go. I sometimes joke that I never knew what I was getting in to when I started blogging, and it’s just as well – it helps to be a little naïve because if you’re not you’ll never jump in. Whether through the crazy, unexpected success of Generosity Day 2011 or when I watch one of the Acumen Fund investees reach its millionth customer served with a product that really improves people’s lives, I know I’m doing the right thing and that I need to keep working harder and smarter.

5. And the question we ask everyone: What’s your most spectacular failure?

Some of the big failures come from fear – like times when I didn’t have the courage to look someone in the eye and ask them to make a big funding commitment for fear they would say no. Really, though, I’m not sure how I feel about putting “spectacular” and “failure” together. The big, real big failures often aren’t the go-down-in-a-blaze-of-glory variety, they are when you wrong someone, disrespect someone, make someone feel small rather than raise them up – and just as often these are sins of omission rather than commission. Those are the ones that sting.

I promise if you blog daily you are going to fail often.  You have to decide in advance that you’re ready to fail – if anything it’s the commitment to being open to failure that frees you to ship, to push your ideas to the edge, to dream big. And that all sounds great but that doesn’t mean you won’t write posts that don’t hit the mark, because you will.

This idea that failure is rare is what really holds us back. We are perfect so rarely, and if we stick to our guns the rest of the time, we will learn so much less and share so much less than we have to offer.

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.

Small talk

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Americans are famous for wanting to just “get down to business” in meetings.  Maybe a few minutes of chit-chat about the Yankees game or the weather, but otherwise, let’s get to the important stuff.

The misconception is that the meeting is just that – a meeting.  What if the person you’re meeting might be an incredible individual who maybe, just maybe, is going to become an important part of your life (starting today!).

Reflecting on yesterday’s post about generosity, we know that generous action increases when we expect to have repeated interactions.  The expectation of repeated contact makes it more likely that our kindness will be reciprocated, and makes it more likely that it will be witnessed by others, so the rational / optimal thing to do is to help others.*

So the question becomes: if the person you’re meeting just might be amazing, how do you act?  You’d want to make it more likely that you’ll see that person again in the future, of course.  And, going in, you don’t know who is and isn’t amazing, but I’d bet that there’s a lot more amazingness out there than you think.

To get us yankees to make a shift, instead of shouting (ineffectually) about how we should all “spend a little more time getting to know people,” let me instead propose that we reframe each meeting as one moment, the first moment, in a much longer-term relationship.  And that relationship is just latent potential until you activate it with real human connection at the outset.

Oh, and how IS the weather?

 

 

*(let’s park the question of the motivation behind generosity for a minute…that’s a post for another day)

 

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.

+ Audience

~ Sasha ~ 10 Comments

I started blogging three years ago.  This past Saturday, I was humbled (and thrilled!) to discover that my speech at NextGen:Charity was posted on the TED.com homepage – part of their “best of the web” series.  (93,000 views and counting…!)

This got me thinking about the series of events that led to this outcome.  There are certainly a lot of pieces, but since so much of the thinking and action behind that talk grew out of this blog, I boiled it down to the simple elements that keep me (or anyone) blogging for an extended period of time, namely:  Inspiration + Ideas + Motivation + Audience = A blog

More specifically:

Inspiration = the model of other people, whose actions and impact you’d like to emulate, doing great things with their blogs

Ideas = a flow of topics to write about that are interesting both to you and to your readers

Motivation = the drive to keep at it, day in and day out, even when the going gets tough

Audience = the knowledge that people are out there reading, and that you are being of service to them

I’m sure that there are more things at play, but in my experience these are the minimum necessary elements.  Which is to say, in a roundabout way, that this never would have happened without you.

Thank you for reading, for commenting, for cross-posting, for emailing me with great feedback and ideas and suggestions.  Thank you for pushing me every day, especially on the days when it’s hard.  Thank you for making this blog part of your day.