Giving with Purpose
Matching Your Gifts with the Needs You Recognize and the Change You Seek to Make
Takeaways:
Give with intention, not just instinct. Consider whether the moment calls for relief, opportunity, or systemic change.
Use what you have now. Money, time, influence, and encouragement can all be powerful gifts.
Give Small Now or Give Big Later?
Awhile back, I read Die with Zero, the premise being that you should spend or give away your money now in order to enjoy life and reap its benefits while you are living. For someone like me who finds joy in saving and security in steady finances, this book challenges my thinking about wealth and its purpose.
I was particularly interested in the author’s chastising of those who have left large sums of money after death through frugal living. These are the rare but prominent hourly workers who live simply and amass millions. The author claims the world would have been better off if these same folks gave during their lifetimes.
This assertion made me pause. I categorize giving as having one of two purposes: 1) dealing with immediate, pressing needs, often through small gifts and 2) stimulating broader, societal change, often with large gifts.
Meeting Urgent Needs or Impacting Broader Changes
Examples of fulfilling immediate needs include feeding the hungry, covering rent or utility bills, contributing to GoFundMe accounts, and stocking local pantries.
Examples of affecting change more broadly may include providing seed money to start a regional bank for the previously unserved, making large, unrestricted gifts to HBCUs, funding pharmaceutical research, donating generational land for parks and nature preserves, and building community centers.
So, theoretically, small amounts of money tucked away today and invested could bring about broader change later.
Still, the more I thought about the value of small amounts today, the more I realized that certain types of small, informal giving can have a big impact. These could be buying someone a meal or covering a bill for a friend who’s in a jam, preventing a downward spiral.
Interestingly, an article on Mackenzie Scott’s billion-dollar contribution to HBCUs indicated that she received relatively small gifts from others when she was a broke college student. Scott’s understanding of the power of money in the right situation at the right time became life and world changing.
Expanding What Counts as a Gift and Deciding What’s Important
These small acts of giving informally then led me to consider non monetary gifts of great value — a letter of recommendation, a referral to a summer or scholarship program, an explanation of systems that seem confusing to the novice, a word or note of encouragement, all could make a difference in trajectories.
Giving reflects priorities, relationships, goals, and resources. There’s not a specific formula that is best for all. Giving can be meaningful and impactful whether done now or later, in small or large amounts, through charitable organizations or informal networks, or involving money or something else: influence, time, and expertise.
This reflection brings me back to Die with Zero. The author is right to assert that we shouldn’t hoard our wealth, especially when there are opportunities to make a difference right now. Still, there are legitimate reasons to focus on the big gift or investment, now or later, to achieve broader change that can eliminate inequities and reduce the need for charitable giving altogether.
Are you sitting on a gift — of money, time, influence, or encouragement — that someone needs right now?