Philanthropy: More Than Money
I SPOTTED HIM A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO WALKING DOWN the aisle of a grocery store. He saw me from a distance, then quickly disappeared.It wasn’t difficult to know why. Only a year previous he had stopped me during a food drive and said that if he ever won the lottery, he’d give a full 25% to the food bank. We laughed at the time and I wished him well. Six months later he won a huge sum and I never saw him again until that day in the store.For whatever reason, we primarily think of philanthropy as a money matter. That’s unfortunate because the urge to help other human beings locally or globally is inestimable and beyond price. Sure, money makes the world go ‘round, but it’s compassion that keeps it grounded. More than that, it’s sustainable, or, as Albert Pike once put it, “What we have done for ourselves dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”Some of the most compassionate and sacrificial acts I have ever witnessed were undertaken by those who didn’t have a penny. There was the former slave in south Sudan who, having been freed, cooperating with us and journeyed back into the danger zone to liberate others. There was the man I witnessed at the food bank who gave the food he had just collected to a family too embarrassed to enter the building in case someone recognized them. And there was the young boy with a terminal illness, who on his 11th birthday (his last), had everyone who came to his party bring gifts for people in the cancer clinic.I have never risen to such levels of humanity, even though, like you, I donate funds to charities each year. It is by witnessing such acts that I come to realize just how far I have yet to journey on the road to solidarity.Though these are the remarkable stories that capture our imagination, they don’t account for the full weight of philanthropy, perhaps not even the bulk of it. Every time we buy a friend or co-worker a cup of coffee; whenever we bring hot drinks out to firefighters struggling against a stubborn winter fire, or place some food in a bin at the grocery store; when we stay late, allowing for a colleague to go home to be with her kids; when we offer a seat on the bus to the elderly man struggling with his cane; when we sense someone trying to deal with depression and move in to just be there; when we help new neighbours move in; when we stay with a person until the ambulance arrives following a car accident – these are the downpayments of kindness we grant to humanity each and every day and the sum total of all the parts is what makes civilization liveable and capable of moving forward.It’s true that money does a lot of talking. But it’s actually in the giving of ourselves that talk begins taking its first steps. It is in those exact moments when humanity displays its best hope of recovery. It’s not about giving when we become rich, but being willing in any moment to give because we are rich in spirit, because we believe in our ability at any moment to improve the human condition.All of these accumulated actions operationalize our world far more than the billions donated by the well-known and generous givers, for it is in such moments when hope and recovery are passed directly from one individual to another. These are the moments that make life endurable and quietly transformative.If there were some great hall somewhere dedicated to the philanthropists of the world, there would never be enough wall space because it would be taken up with pictures of those who just undertook a good thing that was in front of them and in so doing changed the course of our world by combining their efforts with all the others.Every day I witness such people in action and I thank them for restoring our belief in the good of every individual. More than humans, they are humanitarians, and in that distinction lays the hope of our world.