43. Not Your Parent's Giving

Welcome back to Spend Donate Invest. We vote, we protest, but what about our money? Is there a way we can line up our money with the kind of world we’d like to build? This is what I’m exploring on this show.  Thank you so much for all of your emails and DMs with all of the questions you’re wondering about. 

Here’s this week’s letter:
Growing up my experience with giving was giving to my church. My parents would tithe to the church and every week they would give us kids each one dollar to put in the collection plate. To be honest, by the time I was a teenager, I would pocket the money sometimes. I felt like my parents were chumps, and blindly giving instead of really analyzing what was being done with the money. And it wasn’t just the blind faith, I think what bothered me too was that they were giving because they were told to give. Like an obligation or something. Like they were programmed to give. So, now I’m entering my middle age and I’m starting to feel like maybe I need to be more generous. I have broken ties with the church, but there are other things I care about. But whenever I think about donating, I remember my parents and their robotic relationship to giving. I don’t want donating to feel like a chore. Or a reaction to guilt. Any tips?

Thank you for sending in this letter. I really appreciated the amount of self reflection that it took to be able to take that step back and see how your relationship with giving has evolved. You know, I would love to hear your parents’ perspective on their church giving. Did they feel like it was something they did because it is expected of them or because they wanted to do it? And does it matter that it was so programmed that it was automatic?

When we talk about automatic habits the first thing a lot of us probably think about is brushing our teeth. It’s one of the best things we do for ourselves every day, but I don’t think the automatic aspect of it diminishes just how great of a thing it is to do.

And I’m wondering if that’s the case for your parents too. If giving for them was something that they decided was a great decision for them and then they sort of set it and forget it. 

But like you said, you’re your own person now, forging your own path and creating your own relationship with your money.

I know folks that give, including to their religious institutions for so many reasons. I’ve heard the theory that giving sort of loosens our grip on money which can help us to not be as beholden to money and I’ve heard some people say that looser grip on money actually brings more generosity into their own lives. I’ve heard some people say that they felt like more money opportunities came to them when they were generous with their own money. I’m sure I’m not even explaining that correctly, ask one of your hippy dippy friends. LOL. Something about energetic centers or something. Chakras. I don’t know. Ask around.

I also know people that give because they are genuinely excited about what their money can achieve. Whether your focus is on building cultural institutions or filling in the gaps for people who need the help, or joining the fight against climate change.

I’m not here to defend your parent’s church, but what I wanted to say is that some people find it motivating to give as a group. They feel like their resources can go farther when pooled together. And honestly, sometimes you don’t have time to do the work, you just have the time to hand over the money to fund the work. I was just talking to a friend about the plan she has set up with her sibling to take care of their elderly parent. One sister is going to pay for everything and the other sister is going to work through the logistics of hiring their at-home nurses and outfitting their home with everything that is needed so they can age in place. I have sometimes been so busy that I desperately wished I could find someone with the time and resources and know-how to get something done, something that’s really important to me like organizing an after school activity for the kids in my neighborhood, and I desperately wished I could just hand someone a check and know that it would get done.

So there are a lot of reasons that some people get excited about giving! It doesn’t have to be driven by guilt!

So as you embark on figuring out your own relationship to giving, I wanted to suggest some steps that might be helpful.

1. Try to think through what your values might be. There’s probably one or two areas that tend to bubble to the top when you think about all the good your money can do. It might be broad like climate change or it might be really specific like cleaning up the Anacostia River outside your window. Don’t overthink this step, especially in the beginning, your giving is dynamic, your priorities will change and that’s fine. You can ask yourself questions like- what’s the biggest problem we are facing as a society? Or neighborhood? Or community? Who is being overlooked? What is chronically underfunded? Just starting with those questions is a really solid start to identifying a priority area for your giving.

2. Look for opportunities to make giving a part of your routine (holidays, birthdays, each pay period, tax season). I’ve seen people do this on their birthday every year. They give some amount of money and sometimes bring friends into it as well. That could be an easy place to start, annual giving on your birthday. While we’re talking about routines, if keeping track of donations is important to you for your own sake or for tax purposes, one easy thing that I do is I have a folder on my computer called “Giving” and every time I get a receipt for a donation in my email, I immediately make a pdf and save it in that Giving folder. The name of the pdf is always the dollar amount and the organization. So it might say “Eritrean Diaspora Network, $250.” Then what I like is to be able to, once a year, briefly scan through those receipts to see where my spontaneous giving went.

3. Start donating even while you research a great place to give to (don't get analysis paralysis). We don’t expect perfection for any other dollar that we spend. When we spend $10 on toilet paper, we don’t sit and think through ok well $1 was spent on the actual toilet paper, $4 was spent on transportation $3 was spent on those ads with the bears and $3 was spent paying all the people who work for the toilet paper company. We don’t stand there at the shelf and say “only $1 is going to making the actual toilet paper, I’m not buying this.” No! We look at the options on the shelf and we say, this one best fits my needs for now. You would never leave the store without toilet paper. And so I want to encourage you to adopt a little bit of that when you are thinking about where to donate. Every single dollar is not going to go towards programmatic expenses. That’s OK. You might not even find a group that does every single activity that you want them to do. That’s OK too. I would encourage you to get started, start giving there, and then continue your research. Keep your eyes open. And the great thing about giving, is that it gives you some skin in the game. You pay more attention. Which will lead you to other opportunities to give.

So those are some thoughts on creating your own relationship to giving. I hope you’ll keep in touch and let me know how it goes for you. And if you do have the opportunity to ask more about your parents’ relationship to their own giving, I’d love to hear about that too.

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