Any piece of green string will do

The new year approaches. As it does, many people consider their hopes and things they want to change in their lives. Traditionally this is also a time to make resolutions for the year ahead. Oftentimes, people make these vows to change something in themselves: to lose weight, quit smoking, or get out of debt. This year, I hope you will take a more outward vow: to be more generous to others in 2009. Tie a green string around your wrist to remind you to act on that resolution every day.

Right now, we are all challenged with an economic downturn; some people have been financially devastated and some people have not been affected at all, but we are all subject to fear about our future well-being. No matter our own situations, let us not forget the many people who were suffering even when the economy was booming. Now these most vulnerable people will be the first to suffer even greater losses.

Yet there is also an incredible sense of optimism now. This is not only tied to the election of Barak Obama and a new United States administration. It also has to do with people being mobilized to make social change and seeing that change make a difference in the world. This optimism can be a balm to soothe our fears and balance them, so that they do not run into unhealthy anxiety.

Regardless of your current economic state and how fearful you are, it is possible to be generous to others every day. This can take many forms, according to your resources, skills, and abilities. Being generous with the money you have may be the hardest but most rewarding action you can take. Mostly this vow has to do with your heart and how willing you are to be loving to other people.

Here is What to Do:
As part of your own resolutions this year, make a vow to be more generous in 2009 and start on January 1st. Be generous with your time, your skills, your heart and your financial resources. Give as much as you can whenever you can.

Challenge Yourself  –  Do Three Things:

• Tie a piece of green string on your wrist (right wrist of you are right-handed, left wrist if you are left-handed) to remind you to be generous every day and in every situation.
• Ask yourself, What is the most generous response I can make? whenever you are faced with a choice, a confrontation, or a need. The green string should serve as a reminder to always ask this question.
• Invite all of your loved ones and friends to join you and wear the green string. Let’s see how much generosity we can generate!

As you may know, a string tied around the wrist is used in many religions. This often signifies protection from evil forces, is a good luck charm, and is a blessing that is carried by the receiver. Wearing a red string is a custom of Judaism’s Kabbalah, in order to ward off misfortune brought about by an “evil eye.” A white string is tied on the wrist in a Thai Buddhist ceremony to call a spirit back into a soul. The string ensures that the spirit will remain in that body. Thais also use string bracelets as part of wedding and funeral ceremonies. Tying string on the wrist is part of both the Theravada and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. They consider it protection because it reminds the wearer of the Buddha and his teachings. In this case, it is not religious. It is just to remind you to be generous.
I have created a group on Facebook for people who are taking a vow and tying a green string. You can see the group here.

Also if you put on a green string, please let me know by writing a comment to this posting (which can be publically viewed) or send me a private e-mail (which will not be shared with anyone or other lists, I promise!) to:

info(at symbol)generositypath.com

This is my vow as well and I have donned a green string. Please join us!

You may remember an earlier post called Prayer and a Vow of Generosity, where I credited Lois Mitchell with giving me the idea to have a vow of generosity. I thank her again for this beautiful idea; I send a prayer now to her and to you — to know the blessing of generosity in 2009.

Ode Magazine has a wonderful article by Hilary Hart this month about receiving. It is worth reading the whole article, but I am most interested in the statements cited in the article by Sobonfu Somé. Somé is a teacher of African spirituality from Burkina Faso, which ranks as one of the world’s poorest countries yet one of the richest in spiritual life and custom.

Sobonfu Somé

Somé says that,

To bring our intimacy into a healthy level, it is important to surrender our armor and our feeling that ‘I can do it all’ and acknowledge our needs. Then we can open to receiving.

She acknowledges the spiritual possibilities in giving and receiving:

There is a spiritual dimension to every relationship, whether to a husband, a community or the land. When we acknowledge this, it makes giving and receiving easier. We don’t think ‘I have to receive from him.’ Instead, we are receiving from spirit.

If the reference to spirit does not fit for you, please fill in your own signifier. So according to Somé’s belief, we allow ourselves to be vulnerable so we can receive gracefully and allow for a spiritual experience.

Then she states that receiving is a healing medicine that then allows us to give more,

Receiving heals us individually, and the gifts of that relationship can then be offered back to the community. We have to understand that receiving is a medicine designed to heal and strengthen us. Being seen, loved and appreciated are just a few of the gifts that one can receive in relationships.

First receiving and then giving, one opens the door for the other. In this way one can see that burn-out (or giving beyond our capacity to take care of ourselves) can be healed through receiving, and that finding a balance between giving and receiving is a key to sustaining our health, our spirituality, and our relationships.

May you receive gracefully and with healing this holiday season…

Artwork by Jaimie Cahlil

Sasha Dichter is the Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund, a global non-profit venture capital fund that invests in enterprises that fight poverty in the developing world. He writes in his blog about how optimism and pessimism play a part in today’s financial markets. He tells an old joke to illustrate the subjectivity of a down-turn:

Two guys hear a bear outside their tent in the woods.  The first guy starts lacing up his Nikes, and the second guy says, ‘What are you doing?  There’s no way you can outrun a bear.’  The first guy says, ‘I don’t have to run faster than the bear; I just have to run faster than you.’

This is an illustration of the mercenary and opportunistic attitude that played a part in creating the current mess in the world economy. Dichter’s concern is about how donors and foundations will react to this downturn, whether they will react like the camper in sneakers and consider charity a disposable luxury or become more philanthropic because of the greater need of the most vulnerable among us.

Sasha Dichter

Dichter has a Manifesto on the same website, In Defense of Raising Money. It is worth reading for any fund raiser, any non-profit leader, and certainly for donors. In it he says that we may need a new word for fund raiser and says he,

… would rather be an evangelist, a storyteller, an educator, a translator, a table‐pounder, a guy on his soap box, a woman with a megaphone, a candidate for change.

And Dichter is, like many professional fund raisers, inspirational and optimistic. Back on his posting about the current economic downturn, he says,

From what I’ve seen so far, donors and foundations are taking their philanthropic commitments very seriously and doing what they can to step up and support the nonprofits they believe in. And that’s a good thing. It’s tantamount to running TOWARDS the bear and scaring him away.

Perhaps if we all pump up our cooperation and optimism to run towards the bear, it will benefit the people in the most need - and the bear may magically turn into back into a bull.

Giving connects two people, the giver and the receiver, and this connection gives birth to a new sense of belonging.
- Deepak Chopra

NGOs, nonprofits, universities, and church organizations rely on charitable contributions to fuel their missions. They solicit gifts using a battery of processes, programs (or vehicles), and techniques. Yet I believe many of them miss significant opportunities in dealing with contributors who are passionate about their missions. That opportunity is to provide people with a sense of right purpose and belonging.

Feelings of belonging have been associated with self-reports good physical and mental health, reduced incidence of depression, and other benefits. Belonging is also one of the more basic needs as laid out by Maslow in his Hierarchy of Needs; it falls in the 3rd level after physiological and safety needs. Clearly, it is not the role of nonprofits to fulfill the psychological needs of its contributors. However, these organizations must engage the passion of their contributors and receive contributions in a way that honors the gift and the giver. If these are done in an authentic way, the by-product of these interactions may be that the contributors feel received, have a sense of belonging, and gain deep satisfaction.

Lucinda Vardey & John Dalla Costa, in their wonderful book Being Generous: The Art of Right Living, discuss giving and receiving as linked with a third element in the dynamic, which they call circulating. Circulating is expansive, self-perpetuating, and affects things outside of the duet of the giver and the receiver. Please see their book if you are more interested in this concept. For the purposes of this discussion, what is most important is their concept that,

Receiving is itself a creative act.
- Vardey & Dalla Costa

The language of nonprofits often includes terms associated with belonging. These include partnerships, membership, constituent, council, fellow, giving circle, etc. This language indicates that there is an instinct in fundraising professionals to appeal to people’s need to belong, yet this may exist on an operative level only and not mine the deeper potentials of contributors bringing more of themselves to the relationship.

To receive someone, and what they have to give, is to give them belonging.

As stated in my last entry, I believe that many nonprofits shy away from allowing their contributors to engage deeply with their organization, because they fear that their missions will be set off course or their contributors will become too demanding. Some fundraisers talk about managing the donor relationship. Yet nonprofits are also hoping that their contributors will join with them in their purposes and become committed to their missions.

Joe Myers writes about belonging in his books about community and on his blog The Language of Belonging. A recent blog series of his was called Common Myths about Belonging. One of these myths is More Commitment=More Belonging and as an example he remarks that some people are committed to a marriage in which they feel they do not belong. Another myth is that More Purpose=More Belonging. He illustrates this by talking about Tom Peters and his influence on the business community to think about building common purpose communities in the workplace through visioning exercises, the emphasis on work teams, etc.  As many who work in a corporate setting can attest, this does not always create a sense of belonging.  So if nonprofits cannot create belonging for their contributors by just asking for a commitment and sharing a purpose, how can they?

By recognizing that:

• Receiving is a creative act dynamically linked to giving; your receiving behavior affects people’s desire to give to your organization.

• Contributors do not necessarily want an exchange or quid pro quo for their gifts; that heartfelt reception and thanks for their contributions can be profound.

• People contribute because they have something to give and also because they need something.

A nonprofit culture that allows for the possibilities in receptivity and belonging can satisfy its contributors at deep levels while also gathering fuel to realize its mission ends. This is a win, win, win situation for the organization, its contributors, and its beneficiaries.

What you need, needs you.
Anonymous

As you can imagine, I do a lot of searching in the media for discussions about generosity. More often than not, the topic comes up in the British and Canadian press (they seem to name this human attribute more than we do here in the US) or in discussion about the functioning of the internet. I have written about this before in the postings Is the Gift Economy Generous and The Business of Generosity (Part 2). Today I found an interesting, brief lecture by Clay Shirky about designing web interfaces to engage people’s generosity, called Designing for Generosity. The video from Pop!Tech is posted below. Shirky is a web consultant, teaches at New York University, and wrote the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Shirky tells the story of how the Grobanites for Charity came about. As he tells it, Josh Groban’s (a pop recording artist who sings neo-operatic music) large fan-base, through their online chat rooms, decided to give Josh a 21st birthday present. They started collecting money to be used as a donation in his name, and ended up with $75,000. Mr. Groban’s lawyers then back-pedaled and set up a Josh Groban Foundation to accept donations in his name. However, a group of his fans decided to start their own charitable organization (IRS 501(c)3) to raise money and fuel the Josh Grobin Foundation. In this way, money was raised before there was a charitable purpose and resources were created before there was an organization ready to handle them, exactly the opposite of how things normally go in philanthropy. Grobanites for Charity exists solely for the purpose of raising money for the Josh Groban Foundation, and as you can see from their website, do so with abandon and personal drive that is seldom seen on professionally created online fundraising web pages. If you are interested, this short video is packed with more information on the topic of designing to engage people.

Mr. Shirky’s 3 tips for designing web interface for generosity are most interesting to me. Here they are:

1. Design to appeal to intrinsic motivations: so that the user feels good at what she/he doing, feels she/he is doing the right thing for his/her fellow man, and is appreciated. Note: the latter means appreciated by a small group of people who know her/him well (not appreciated by a large group, i.e. fame).
2. Design to allow for autonomy. That is allowing the user to have choices, chart their own course, and be creative (in this case, contribute more than just money toward a charitable mission or commercial product).
3. Balance complete autonomy (openness) with constraints. By constraints he means focus, so that the topic and mission of the page are not lost and the participants function with community norms. I believe these constraints, if balanced by autonomy, encourage generosity because they appeals to a sense of belonging, an intrinsic motivation.

Shirky suggests that we think of groups (in this case web user groups) not as just an aggregate of individuals, but as members of a social system. This social system needs to have a consistent internal logic, which gets back to his idea about appropriate constraint.

Although this lecture content has to do with technological design, and he is lecturing to people who are looking to profit from engaging people for their enterprise (whatever it happens to be), I completely agree with his 3 tips as philosophical underpinnings for any philanthropic program or interface. I believe that most contributors to any charitable mission do so because they are seeking to satisfy some internal yearning, and would include Shirky’s list of motivations to other yearnings. However, if contributors are passionate about the cause, they want to give more than just money and will look for other ways to give their time, talent, and energy. And I believe they want to understand how they can add to efforts skillfully, so are looking for the internal logic of the social enterprise, i.e. guidance about where the effort is going, existing knowledge of the best way to get there, and how they can help.

Many times nonprofits are shy of opening themselves up to the real engagement and influence of their contributors. I believe that if they understood better Shirky’s 3rd tip, that they would find a way to design their charitable giving programs with allowance for autonomy while also drawing a map of the issues associated with their mission (challenges, past successes, opportunities, vision, etc.). In this way, the contributor’s non-financial involvement would naturally align with the organization’s strategies and would not drain the organization’s resources in extraneous activities geared toward contributor’s more external desires (looking good). A program based on Shirky’s tips would allow people to bring their full passion to the table which would fulfill more of their intrinsic yearnings (feeling good) while effectively contributing to the change they want to see in the world.