 I'm Eden Stiffman, I'm a senior editor at the Chronicle of Philanthropy where I write about how nonprofits raise money and what motivates people to give. I'm really excited to kick off this conversation. It's part of a partnership we at the Chronicle have with the Associated Press and the Conversation to help the public better understand how philanthropy works and what it achieves. Thanks to the Lilly Endowment for providing support for this effort and for enabling us to do more discussions just like this. Today we're here to talk about making a difference without millions. It's the ultra-wealthy philanthropists who often make headlines and tend to get all the attention, but people who give smaller amounts and give their time can and do make a big difference. So I'd like to start by introducing our four panelists. Lucy Bernholz directs Stanford University's Digital Civil Society Lab and is the author of a new book called How We Give Now, a Philanthropic Guide for the rest of us. Welcome Lucy. Could you start us off by sharing a quick synopsis of your book and why you decided to write it now? Sure, sure. And thanks for having me and all these incredible colleagues. So you know, if you're back at work, if you're commuting anywhere or even going downtown to run errands these days, chances are you're going to get asked for money by some red-bested-wearing person on the sidewalk or you'll check your social media and there'll be a request to give or maybe you're helping out your neighbors on a regular basis. Maybe you're part of a mutual aid network. If you go to the drugstore, chances are they'll ask you if you want to contribute something to something. And if you live in a city with a large unhoused population, there's a really good chance someone on the street is going to ask you for money. It would say nothing about the requests we get to help get out the vote or think about our consumer choices, particularly with an eye to the climate. I'm just the nerd who pays attention to this stuff, but I think many of us get asked like this all the time. And I was really curious about how other people who operate and navigate through what I call the giving scape, which are all these opportunities to give time, money, and data, are actually trying to make sense of this. If you can get asked to round up after your grilled cheese, end at the cash register, end in your email, end on social media, it's just sort of like, how do I make sense of this? So that's what I was really interested in and almost all the books written about philanthropy, right about rich people. And I wanted to know what was going on with everyone else. So that was really the motivating impulse. Thanks, Lucy. And so one of the people you talked to for your book was Tiffany Ashley Bell, who's also with us today. And Tiffany is founder and executive director of the Human Utility. Tiffany, tell us, what is the human utility? So I'm excited to be here first and foremost, but the human utility essentially is an organization that connects people who need assistance with their water bills to people all around the world who want to help. And they do that by giving $5, $10, $25, $5,000, whatever somebody is able to do. And essentially, again, help someone maintain access to water. Thank you. And we'll talk more about that in a little bit. So also here with us is Sarah Loma-Lean, executive director of Philanthropy Together. Sarah, can you tell us a little bit about the organization and explain for those who don't know what is a giving circle? Thank you, even. And as Tiffany, you know, I'm super excited to be here with all of you. What is a giving circle? I mean, a giving circle is a group that shares values and collaborates for change, right? It's a group of individuals that pull not only their money, but their time, their testimony, and they decide as a group where to give these resources. Giving circles for me literally lift up the best of how giving can be done, like nimble, joyful in community, in collaboration, in partnership with community. Giving circles and collective giving, as you may know, it's not new. It's not American. These began bubbling all over the world for generations. And now in the US, there are more than 2,000 giving circles and about more than 2,500 giving circles in the world that we know of. Philanthropy Together was born out of this, of this bubbling of giving circles in the US. Our mission is to grow and strengthen the collective giving and the giving circle movement to democratize and diversify philanthropy through the power of giving circles. And we are an organization that was co-designed. So this is the power of the collective, right? We wanted to create an organization that represented diverse voices, all of us, because the giving circle model is very flexible. There are giving circles that are tiny, you know, five people around a dinner table or, you know, giving circles with hundreds of people. So we wanted to have an organization where every single giving circle can find something of value. Thank you. And last but not least, Maria Smith-Dove-Troost, director of the West Chester Center for Racial Equity at the YWCA White Plains and Central West Chester. Thanks for being with us, Maria. Thank you so much, Eden. It's a pleasure to be here. And so you've described yourself as a lifelong giver and someone who learned about the values of giving from a young age. Can you tell us how and why you give now? Sure. You know, I think I described to you and I'm happy to share that I feel like I give because that's just who I was raised to be, to be someone who contributes positively to your family, to your community and, you know, dreams so big as the whole world, right? My family comes from Jamaica. And in Jamaica, there is a saying, I mean, look up Jamaican Proverbs, they're the best. But there's this saying, every mickle make a muckle, right? So it's this idea, kind of like a ripple effect. Like, I give my little, you give your little, you give your little. And all of a sudden we've given a lot because of this power of community that Sarah spoke to earlier. So I really come out of a culture of giving because I come out of a culture of community and we have to take care of each other. And when I think about my giving today, I was thinking about this question so much. I was like, well, I'm a strategic giver because there was a time when if you asked me for something, Lucy was describing walking down the street. I live in New York. I live close to New York City. You know, you're getting off the train. There are a million opportunities to just leave your house with $20 and come home with none, right? If you had that opportunity. And now I think about the things that matter most to me today and also the things that I want to be possible for my child in the future and for the world in the future. And so that's really what directs my giving now. And I also look for ways to directly impact people's lives. And I look for ways to, you know, see my money go to something that matters a lot to me and the people close to me. And because of the community I'm from and live in and continue to resource, sometimes we're overlooked by both large philanthropic institutions and we're also overlooked and maybe in some ways underserved by our government structures as well. So we really are to use the colloquialism. We're all we've got. And so we give to one another and keep that love and that community is really what is a lifeline to many of us. Thank you. And we'll get into how you make some of the decisions about where you give a little later on. But Lucy, I want to turn back to you and talk about, you know, there's so many ways that people give their money and time right now that don't necessarily pass through a formal nonprofit group. And you write in your book that while tax benefits may not matter for the majority of people who give, we still have this idea that the category of nonprofit is where change happens. Can you tell us why that is? And if you see that changing? Yeah, sure, thanks. And you just heard a little bit of it. I mean, Tiffany, Sarah and Maria, nobody mentioned tax benefits. Right. So there's, you know, there's a lot of things going on and in how we give now, I think actually the vast majority of the behaviors that people are doing, they're not actually necessarily new. We're giving our money. We're giving our time. We're making connections. We're taking care of other people. But these things all really they can they can be all consuming with their parts of who we are and what we do every day, whereas not for profit organizations are one part of this giving scape. They're they're an important part. I'm not here to bash them, but they're one part of the giving scape and they fit into, you know, they have certain benefits and there's certain drawbacks. And there's lots of, you know, lots and lots written about that. What I think is really important to recognize, though, is that there is an industry of around not for profit organizations and around capital P big wealth philanthropy that has spent spends a lot of time and money and energy counting certain things. And it counts what they do. It counts a financial contribution to a tax exempt organization. That's like a single letter in an alphabet of choices. We can do all these other things. And when times are tough, when times are good, we do all these other choices. What's ironic in a way is that our digital visibility into these different kinds of behaviors, there's a way in which being able to see, for example, someone put out a tweet and hang up a spreadsheet and say, look, now we're a mutual aid network makes those things visible in a way that they might not have been visible before. Mutual aid hundreds of years old and deliberately under the radar in many cases for lots of really exciting, important reasons. Same thing with peer to peer giving. I can give money to someone sitting on the sidewalk. I can give money to a needy friend. I can give money or time or connections or a couch, you know, place to sleep to people in my extended family and kinship care. And in certain ways, digital tools that facilitate that, things like couchsurfing or crowdfunding platforms, some make the behavior more visible if not the actual data on this. So a lot of these are old behaviors, newly visible. And I think a lot of things that are happening that are, you know, why people are perhaps leaning on those other letters of the alphabet more now than they might have been in the past, but which we don't even actually know is true. The truth is what we know about philanthropy, what gets reported about philanthropy in this country is about that one act, that one letter in the alphabet, financial transaction to a nonprofit organization and the rest of the alphabet gets ignored. So we don't even know how those two things compare or those 26 things compare. Right. But we have a we've focused a lot on this one activity. And what I think is really vital to our sense of ourselves as Maria was talking about who we think we are, who we identify as and what we want to be in our community and all the things we're doing is to, you know, understand the rest of that alphabet more clearly. Thank you. Maria, I want to turn back to you and I wonder if you can tell us when there's an issue that you really care about, whether that's food security or anything else, how do you go about assessing where you should put your money or time to address it? How do you make those choices? That's a great question. And I'm going to rely on something actually heard an institutional grant makers say once. She's also just a righteous human. So feel good about using calling her in here. And she said, people make most decisions, including giving. So it's true for me. Based on an emotional connection and they use whatever data is available to them to back it up later, right? To substantiate it. Should someone ask why later? So most of my decisions about how I'm going to give again, align with my values and have some emotional connection. So in the pandemic, there have been a lot of efforts, mostly by Black, Indigenous and other folks who identify as a non-white person of color to reclaim land. Like there was this opportunity, this window of opportunity where they could find lots of land that were available. And it was in this pandemic moment where like, if you can get in and get it, you were great. And I gave, I just said, yes, reclaim all the land. I did not look up who these people were. I was not getting any land. I couldn't logistically figure out how do I move my family to land? What do I do with the land next? I just trusted that people who had been in community with one another, figuring out liberatory strategies, would figure it out, right? And one of those groups is Black Women's Blueprint that I've trusted for years because they've been so innovative and they're led by women who look like me and who share common values. So a lot of it, for me, comes from that. There are some things I do to pull from another person. I've had the opportunity to hear say this in real time. I come from a faith tradition. I grew up in a Christian church. So tithing and offering is very common to me, this idea that a certain percentage of what I receive will go into the church to keep the church sustained, right? And so I budget for my philanthropy. I might not know what emergent issue will come up, but I know for a lot of the organizations I choose to give to, which again, are not getting these huge grants, are not waiting for large bequests to come in who don't have major donors who give them $10,000, $20,000. But my $20 a month is money they can bank on, right? It's like it is coming. It has been coming for years. We can bank on my Maria's $20 a month. And then I don't just budget for what I know I'll give every month to certain organizations, including those that I serve on the board of, like Sidney El Mosley dances, but I just have extra money. Like I just, not I have extra money. I wish I said that so effortlessly, like it was true. But I budget money for emergent and emerging issues. So when food insecurity showed up as a huge issue during COVID, I didn't have to wonder, will I have to make a choice about what we eat in this house if I give $100 to Feeding Westchester, right? I don't have to wonder if I get an email from a friend that their housing situation is unstable and unstable and they need a quick $500 to just figure out what to do for the next week. I'm not sweating it, because I budgeted for it. And it was actually Linda Sarsour who once said, you want to see the change happen, you need to be disciplined and just figure out not whenever it happens, catch me on the fly, but be prepared. Set aside a certain amount of money that you know is just gonna be money you give away. It's not hurting you. It doesn't feel like a sacrifice. It doesn't, it's just something you budget for like your cell phone, like your utility bill if you can, right? And I found myself in a position where I could and it's made my giving so much easier. Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you think about impact when you do give? What do you expect from some organizations do you have those expectations for other individuals when you give? How do you think about that? It's fascinating, cause I actually spend my time as a nonprofit fundraiser for many, many years. And I've had to shift from expecting a thank you, right? On a lovely letter with letterhead and like, you know, this over the top superfluous we could not go on without your generous. Look, just do the work. I see you doing the work. I see the pallets of food being handed out. I see the volunteer showing up. I see you purchased the land. I'm not, you know, the impact sometimes for me is very, very close to the output. And this is a thing that large philanthropy kind of forces nonprofits to think about is like, I'm giving you money in a grant period for 12 months and you're telling me you work on ending homelessness, prove you've ended it in 12 months. Well, that's ridiculous. But you know what? I was able to keep my staff employed with their benefits. Unlike Walmart, which has most of its employees receiving benefits from the government, I was able to provide that for my staff of 20 and we were able to serve this many people. So sometimes the impact comes from my own direct connection with the folks I'm giving to. And other times, again, I've budgeted for money that I can give away and I'm not hurt by it. So if I'm not hurt by it and I trust the people I'm giving to, sometimes the impact of it is just knowing they can stay open another day to do the good work I trust them to do. And it's not always about receiving a report or receiving some update, even though that's great to get. And sometimes I get that. Sometimes I get a lovely handwritten card. Sometimes I get a nice chatty but I'm not looking for any of that. I give because I have it to give and I believe this is what I'm supposed to do to create and contribute to the world I wanna live. Thank you. And so Tiffany, can you tell us a little bit more about how human utility came about? Definitely. So I used to be a consultant for the city of Atlanta back in 2014 and during that consultancy I basically got to see how a major American city works. Like one of the things we got to do was just shadow the mayor of Atlanta at the time, for example, and also talk to just the cabinet members or things of that sort. So it was fascinating to see that. But at the same time, like I also read about what was happening in Detroit with water shutoffs. And in just thinking about these are two major American cities, also majority black, both of them. It was interesting just to kind of think about how Atlanta did things versus Detroit where they were literally shutting off people who were poor. Like I've been to some of these people's houses. They're not faking, not having anything. And for me it was kind of just like I just was wondering why would Detroit make the decision to shut off demonstratively poor people's water when there were things that could have been done about that. And so one of the things that's also true about me is I'm a programmer by training. And so like when I read about what was happening I decided to just throw up a website and try to find people who needed help with their water bills. But I'm also a fairly obsessive Twitter. And so was my co-founder at the time. And so I shared the website that I skipped work that day actually to build that website initially. And I shared it on social media and we were initially trying again to find the people that needed help. But what was true is that they weren't really on social media, but people who wanted to give were. So it turned into thousands of people signing up who wanted to just give their $5. Again, they're $10 or $20 or some people wealthier folks that saw it want to give $5,000 and whatever the amount was to pile in to help people with this very real problem that at the end of the day there's something you can actually do about by just donating to a cause like ours. So that's how I got started. Okay. And tell us a little bit about what you found some of the ripple effects are on a missed water payment and what a donation can do to try and prevent that. Yeah, definitely. So one of the things that I learned in the course of this work is just how deep a water bill goes. Like the average person, all of us take for granted the idea of having water at your house. But when you don't have it, what is true in some cases is that a lot of people of course have kids, but when you don't have water in a house where there's children, that house is actually legally considered to unfit for habitation. And under the guidelines of the US Health and Human Services Department, that is a house where the children are legally considered to be neglected if they're living there. And so what happens is that when someone finds out about this, they will report it to Child Protective Services. And we've seen cases where people have lost custody of their kids or their grandkids because the water was shut off in their houses. But one of the flip sides from the flip sides of this is that we've been able also to help in those situations and either keep people from experiencing the shut off in the first place or allow them to be able to pay the water bill just through everybody's $5, $10 contributions, aggregate it together, pay those water bills and allow those parents, those grandparents to go to court to advocate to get custody of those kids back. And we've been able to do that just again through everyday people helping everyday people like Maria said, we're all we've got. I mean, these are public government run taxpayer funded water utilities are shutting people off. And then this is one of the effects of that. So another thing as well is that in a lot of places, if you don't pay your water bill, it's tied to your lease in the sense that you may have a lease that says you're responsible for that water bill. And we in Florida during the pandemic when some cities were still shutting people off because they just simply needed the money, we were able to help one family, for example, avoid being evicted. They were two days from being evicted, but we were able to pay the water bill and keep them and their two little girls from having to live on the street because they hadn't paid the water bill. So it's interesting and sad on some levels how deep a water bill goes. But it also again speaks to the power of people's just $5, $10 being aggregated to be able to help people in these very real ways. And I think you've said that most of the supporters of human utility are not even based in Michigan or in the Detroit area. How did you kind of spread the word and how did you build trust among the people receiving support when you started up? Yeah, I mean, so no, most people are not in Michigan. They're not in the three states that we help. So we're in Michigan, Florida and Maryland at this point. A lot of people are international donors, which I also feel a little bit about if you think about like people from Australia having to help with American problems. But it's an honor to have those people help. But as far as the people who get assistance, when we've told them where the funding comes from, I've often found that people have a much deeper sense of appreciation for it even. Because I mean, and there's tears that are shed both on my part and their parts, where they will have a sense of appreciation for the fact that someone who is not even in the state they live in, thought enough of them as a fellow human being to put their $10 into a website, run by some people that they don't know to help people that they don't know. And they feel a very deep sense of essentially being looked after. So you get a heightened sense of appreciation for that. And they really feel more hopeful even, because again, they feel someone out there is looking out for me. And I wanna bring Sarah into the conversation now. And can you tell us a little bit more about some of the impacts that giving circles are having and how much has been given collectively in recent years? Sure, even, and I think I'm going to touch a lot in what Maria has mentioned and what Tiffany has mentioned in two on Lucy. This is a lot about trust. Giving circles, one part is the giving, one part is the money. And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of money that gets moved through giving circles. Like in the last 20 years, $1.3 billion have been moved from giving circles to local grassroots, small nonprofits and initiatives. But giving circles are much more than that. They're about engagement, about community. They're about mobilizing people, organizing people. They're civic engagement equators. Like you have this civically engaged philanthropist doing something about it. Going to, coming together as Tiffany and her co-founders, right? As Maria and her community. A lot about changing the narrative of who is a philanthropist. And for me, it's going back to the root of the world, of the world, right? Like love of humanity. As Tiffany is saying, when people hear about someone in another community, that it's caring for you, for your needs, that is looking to people in the eyes like family. Like if we just start looking more into each other's eyes and seeing family and not strangers, everything changes. I mean, giving circles create real relationships. And in a lot of cases, they also break these power dynamics that exists between the giver and the receiver. Because you have people from the community being part of the decision-making. And 84% of giving circles give locally. So that opens also a lot of opportunities for people to donate time for joining nonprofit boards. I mean, you have folks, and I'm talking about, I'm Latina, so a lot of our members of the Latino Giving Circle Network here in California, the very first time that they have been asked to give was when they joined the Giving Circle. Because the reality is that a lot of communities of color, we have been seen as recipients of philanthropy and not as philanthropists. And the moment we're asked, we participate, we want to change our communities. And we trust our community leaders. And to see some very young folks joining a Giving Circle, and suddenly, in a year or two, joining a nonprofit board, running for office, it's what is all this about. So... Can you share any specific examples with us of a Giving Circle and what their contributions have meant for the recipient cause or organization or individuals? Yes, for sure. There are many, many, many stories of Giving Circles and there's a bunch of articles on our website. But one that comes to mind is Latino Giving Circle in Los Angeles. That is part of the Latino Giving Circle Network of the Latino Community Foundation in San Francisco. That Giving Circle got started in 2016 with a group of eight members in LA that wanted to do something for the Latino community in LA County. And so far, they have had four round of grants. They have about 40 members and have given out $200,000 in four years. And all the funding have gone to very small grassroots nonprofits, led by Latinos. And that are not only have their leadership Latino, but also their board members, right? Because it's so important to build a pipeline of nonprofit leaders and that the nonprofits really reflect the community that they are serving. Their focus areas of the LA Latino Giving Circle are civic engagement and economic justice. And last year in doing COVID, they got together and they gave grants to support some of the street vendors that were extremely affected during COVID. Thank you. I'm wondering if you can share for someone who maybe they're not involved in a Giving Circle, but want to make gifts that they feel like really have a collective impact. How would you guide somebody in thinking about how to do that? Yeah, well, you know, I think we all know that giving can be a little bit overwhelming, right? That there are so many needs, so many choices, so many nonprofits. But by getting together, you know, and I think Maria touched on this, by getting together with values aligned individuals, you learn from each other, you push each other by having discussions, you know, with people from different backgrounds with people from the community that maybe have different points of view than yours, right? You really become more open, more tolerant, open your perspective. And you just need to do it, right? For me, it's just find your thing. This is not rocket science people. Like all of you on the webinar, you just need to find something that moves you. What moves you? What is your passion? What do you care about? Then find your people. And your people may look like you and may not look like you because that's the beauty of this, right? It's just about what unites us more than what, you know, separate us. And from there, just go and do it. It's, as Maria said, just take action as Tiffany did. Just take action. This is something that shouldn't be, I want to take the overwhelming part of it out of the question. Just do it. And by really focusing on those small grassroots organizations and initiatives that are extremely, you know, invisible for big philanthropy, you are really supporting your community. You are going to see the change right there. Thank you. Lucy, I want to turn back to you. You touched earlier on how technology is affecting the ways in which we give. Can you dig into that a little bit more and talk about how technology has changed what we know about how we give? Is it making some forms of giving more visible? What don't we know about how it's changing things? So there's a lot packed into that question because what Sarah and Tiffany and Maria and the hundreds of people we interviewed for the book and the 40 or so that I included in stories, there it is, I think, largely around the sense of connection, community and identity. That's what's motivating folks. Now, I wrote a book called How We Give Now. So it's not about why and it's not about to whom and it's not about the number one most important thing it's not about is how much. So I was looking at the how and, you know, if you were participating in modern life in 2021, digital is everywhere and undergirds everything. It allows and it has a lot of positive contributions but we've reached a point. I think I was thinking about this yesterday where a lot of what was sort of glamorous about digital technologies for a while were, you can get bigger, you can go faster, you can do it more quickly. That's not assumed, you know, that's sort of assumed. It doesn't impress anybody under the age of 30. It, you know, just that's the way it's gonna work. And so I think a lot of that sort of expectation that digitizing something is itself fundamentally transformative is actually off base in when it comes to philanthropy because it's not getting to what we care about. I mean, we interviewed people who said, I contribute to the same effort to repair my neighbor's house from the flood. But if they hit me with a go fund me ask, I'm actually gonna walk over there and hand them the cash. You know, it's not the technology, it's the connection but that being said, one of the things we both can see better and can't see better is person to person giving and all of the kinds of giving that goes beyond the nonprofits. And that's because on crowdfunding platforms and with things like Venmo and PayPal and Cash App, we are moving, and again, I hear them just talking about money and money is not the whole thing. We're moving all this money. We rely on the companies to tell us how much they moved because we can't see the data. They don't have to tell us. So we can see the phenomenon but we don't actually have the details. That's both good and bad. What it has helped us to do is say, wow, there's all this giving that happens person to person. You know, come on folks, we knew that was happening. Everybody on this webinar has been doing it all, right? That's kinship care, that's being a good neighbor. That's actually organizing your community to make political change. You don't necessarily need this intermediary that's gonna help you with that but now you've got these digital companies, digital platforms that can make that happen really quickly. But we as a public, as researchers and as public care about oversight, we have to believe Facebook when it tells us that it's moved $100 million in charitable giving. Well, speaking only for myself here, I haven't believed the thing Facebook told me since Facebook became Facebook, right? We have to stop believing these companies. We've privatized information about where giving is going. That's sort of, there's flags waving saying, look, there's all this activity over here but we're not gonna show you what's actually going on. That's the digital economy that we currently live in. So that's one part of it. The other thing that's really, that does matter and I think Tiffany's story and actually the growth of giving circles is all part of that is in fact, people can find out about great things and join in from far away and be part of something that they're not necessarily close to. So that's a really interesting thing to understand how that's changing, if it's changing and how this question of proximity, but we don't know a great deal about that. The other big change and the book is funny, it's called How We Give Now. And I think back to my alphabet metaphor, about 23 of the letters in that alphabet are old behaviors, but one thing that's actually new that's become and wasn't invented yesterday, it's actually got moves like everything is our ability to give our data. And why does this matter? Well, for one thing, we've got lots of it. And here I'm not talking about just, I'm certainly not talking about having our data taken from us and I can talk about that if you want, but I'm talking about people who make deliberate decisions, for example, to take their digital photographs or digitize their family albums and contribute them as a conscious deliberate choice to an archive of say the Japanese internment camps here in the US. Who has that history? Well, the descendants of the Japanese families that were interned, they've got them in photographs, they can contribute those photographs, we can build enormous archives and actually uncover or reveal incredibly important parts of the complicated history of this country. This is having an enormous effect actually, still with photographs in efforts to protect biodiversity because so many people now have phones with cameras, you're out on a walk, you're out on a hike, you're somewhere you've never been before, you see a bug or a bird or something, you don't know what it is, you can take a photo of it, you can upload it to a particular app and you'll get an answer as to what that thing is. But what you're really doing is contributing to the world's largest database on biodiversity across the globe, which scientists are using to understand that, oh my gosh, look, nobody's seen a bluebird, I'm making this up, a bluebird in San Pedro lately, maybe there are no more bluebirds, right? We can actually track the existence or the destruction of our planet this way and it's being used in real time and it's been going on for a decade. So what's exciting about this from my perspective and it's an excitement that comes with a huge caution, I wanna be very clear here because data have been very, very harmful in our last 30 years. Digitized data concentrated and used the way they've been have caused a whole lot of harm. So the question before us is, who's going to think about if we should be able to do this kind of behavior, if we really want to encourage the giving of digital data? And if so, how can we diverse people from different backgrounds, different experiences with data, different experiences of structural harm, set the parameters for whether and how we should do that because I'll tell you who absolutely should not be in charge of deciding how this works are the big companies who have the data now. And again, I can go into that, but this is back to the sort of opening framing of this conversation. Philanthropy gets written about as if it's only something the wealthy do when it's a big corporate industrial set of practices. That is part of the picture, but by only focusing there and continuing to sort of reify the narrative that it's all about big money, we are first of all getting it just factually wrong. It is an inaccurate story of how this actually works. It's frankly offensive to me. I know I won't speak for anybody else, but I like Maria was raised to give as part of who I am and how I see myself in the world. And if you tell me what I do doesn't count, well, I'll tell you something back, right? And then third and most important, it's dangerous. It's dangerous to our democracy. And I can talk at length about that, but one of the ways we know it's dangerous is that we just keep concentrating attention on the wealthy and the wealthy keeps setting the rules. And that is a self reinforcing process that if we allow it to go in, if we allow that process to drive this question about whether or not we should give data, harm will result because this is a decision that needs to be centered on equity, rooted in a commitment to racial justice and rooted in a commitment to public safety. Before we go any further, that's where we should start. And the companies are not gonna do any of that. So that it's an opportunity actually to really imagine not just that system, but the whole alphabet of giving. Who is it serving? Who gets to participate? Who gets attention? Who's making real change happen? Where is change really coming from and how long does it actually take? Because as Maria pointed out, it's amazing that you can't solve hunger and homelessness in the 12 months on a grant cycle, right? But we're still out here doing all this work, much of which then connects to our ability as a population to say to our governing officials, no, you can't be a modern day American city and not provide clean, affordable water. You've just failed the test completely. Like you're not a city, you're not functioning, you've failed unless your people have access to clean water. And that's how these pieces, I think, fit together. I think we've talked about a lot of ways to give that some people might have never thought of as giving in this last hour. And so I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit about the idea of planning to give. And if you want to do good on a specific issue, how you think about this array of options and figure out your roadmap. Lucy, you have a section in your book about thinking about how someone might respond to a fire in their city and looking at all the different ways you could possibly address that. Can you briefly talk us through that kind of planning framework? Sure, and it's really, again, because the book is stories of real people. Maria's not one of them. I didn't have the pleasure of knowing her then, but what she said is what we heard. And here then I took what I know from this product landscape that I started to describe at the beginning where you're just asked in all these different ways. So I also, I should preface this by saying the research for this book was finished in 2019. The writing flopped into 2020 a little bit, but we were out there talking to these hundreds of people around the country, mostly in 2018 and 2019. And what we heard actually was only reinforced by the behaviors we've seen during the pandemic. But if you imagine a situation, as I do in chapter nine, where an apartment building in a town, that apartment building that provides affordable housing and an over-expensive housing market, gee, where could I be thinking about? Burns down, what happens? Just set that picture in your mind for a second, assuming you're fortunate enough not to be one of the families that's immediately displaced. Here's what's likely to happen. Within several hours, at most several days, there will be crowdfunding appeals. You will get asked to give on GoFundMe. I remember being in a hotel room when the Las Vegas shootings happened and the sheriff of that county in Nevada got on the television and said, okay, we're setting up a GoFundMe. And I thought, oh boy, that's, now we've tipped. So there'll be a crowdfunding ask. You will hear from the local nonprofits. The tip jar at the cafe near the building will all be turned into fundraising tip jars for the people who live there. There will be immediate drives to find housing for the individuals who were affected and to bride them with clothing. And if there are kids involved, school supplies and food, right? All of that's gonna happen immediately. You're gonna hear from politicians in the city. They're gonna get on the airwaves instantly and start telling you how they're gonna fix this problem. And if it is, in fact, something that involves a building or something like that, you're probably gonna hear from developers about how we gonna build more housing or something else. So I'm really instantly, you'll also get a chance, no doubt, if this goes on for a while, that same cafe may host some live music, they'll sell a t-shirt. It's gonna be instant and some people can and will have the time and resources and proximal commitment to do everything, to do absolutely all of that and recognize that all of those things are being set up by caring individuals. Some people are gonna have to say, wait a minute, how do I work my way through these choices? And what the book has led up to, this is chapter nine in the 10 chapter book, is what should you be thinking about with the crowdfunding asks? What should you be thinking about when there's an opportunity to contribute your time or maybe house somebody who's become unhoused versus get rid of your old shoes that don't fit you anymore? Like which of those really make sense? How should you think about where the politicians fit in here and what they're asking you for? Because they're asking you for something. What about those impact investing developers who are saying, hey, we need to invest in, so it actually sort of walks through the external factors, pros and cons of each of those different house. The ultimate mix of them is gonna come down to you as a person, but there are trade-offs that I think you can array along kind of two key axes if you're that kind of, I need a two by two graph to think about this, although most of us again are thinking about this with our heart, not our consulting firm two by two, but there's an axis of time. You wanna make the difference now, tonight, for the family that's otherwise gonna be on the street or are you in a position to help think about the housing stock of your city over time? Those are two different ways to enter into this. And then there's the proximity issue. If it is actually the building next door to you and you know the folks and they need food and shoes and notebooks and wifi hotspots and all that kind of stuff, and you're part of that community, this is part of your community, then it often in the most immediate minute will make real sense as a human to human connection to provide the people with those things that they need, right? But if this is happening somewhere else, if it's a world away from you, and whatever you do is going to have to be intermediated by a whole bunch of some things, whether that's shipping freight, freight ships, whatever those things are that's all backed up in the boards, those big ships or even some other way of getting it there. Chances are the best thing you're gonna be able to contribute is money. That actually shipping your old t-shirts around the globe, not the most helpful thing in the world because the expertise about what's needed is rooted in the community that was affected. Always true, no matter the issue, always true. So that's where the book tries to help people just look at this set of products. And I do, I call them very deliberately products. These are product choices we're making about how to allocate our resources. And some of them are better solutions to something or better contributors, I should say, to some problems than others. Thanks, Lucy, that was really helpful. I wanna take some audience questions. We have about 10 minutes left. And Tiffany, this one is for you. We're hoping you can share a little bit about how you share what you've learned through human utility with policymakers. And if you do any kind of advocacy to try and affect systemic change in addition to helping individual people pay their bills. Definitely, I mean, so over time, we have heard from a ton of families and just sort of seen just all these different cases of what's happening. But what we've also been able to kind of say is that going back to Lucy's conversation about data, we have data about what's happening to people. So we have all these stories. We have all this information about where people are affected. So we're able to go to policymakers. For example, the Congresswoman, one of the Congresswoman from Michigan, and say, we have a few thousand of your constituents in our database. Here's how we think we could help you and do you wanna work together. Or I think about just, and that's more of a longer-term situation. But even in the short term, I think about the fact that we help in Miami, for example, and we continually hear what people are experiencing through talking to them every day. And one of the things that we found was that Miami was claiming in one venue to not be sending shut-off notices during the pandemic, but they actually were. And it was a miscommunication on their part, I believe. I don't think it was ill will, but they were going through some leadership changes as well and we were able to kind of say and advocate through tweeting at the mayor of Miami and a few other of the suburbs that were in the area that, hey, you're sending shut-off notices to people and they didn't seem to know they were, so we got them to stop sending shut-off notices, for example. Or I think about our work in Detroit. The city of Detroit wanted to start a program where they were doing wraparound services for people affected by water bills and other issues, but they were having some issues around targeting which areas of the city used to do work in. So we were able to kind of come to them and say, the zip code that you picked actually is not the one that's most affected, you should go here. And so that's kind of, and those were services that were beyond even water affordability. So we've been able to kind of do that sort of thing. And again, it's been using our data, talking to people and even in areas that we don't actually help in. So I'm from North Carolina. And during the pandemic, I was able to hear from some state legislators in North Carolina who were interested in hearing about whether water affordability was affecting their constituents. So I was able to counsel them and say, as an elected official, you can go to your water company and request data and teach them about specifically what to ask for and for your requests and also help them understand, like when your team gets this data and you might have to be persistent in getting it even as an elected official, when your team gets this data, here's the stuff to look for. So our work has been again, like using what we have now to sort of affect things in the shorter term, but also to educate policymakers on exactly what they can be doing. Great. Sarah, a question for you. Can you speak to how giving circles are typically approached by nonprofits? Does it tend to be through personal connections or fundraising staff at nonprofits? How does that work? Great question. And the answer is not totally clear. There are some giving circles that are open for nonprofits reaching out to them. Actually, we have a great resource. We put together a global directory of giving circles that was started with a research project from 2016. And now this is the most updated research on giving circles. It's on our website. So people can find a giving circle. You can search it by issue area or by zip code. And you will be able to find a giving circle there. So some giving circles are open for nonprofits to reach out to them. Some of them do it by invitation only. So it is through connections and the local community. And why is it's also important to mention this? Because as you may imagine, the grants from giving circles are not huge. So a giving circle, some of them still do. We're trying to ask giving circles not to have an open RFP. Because if you have limited resources to give, say you have $10,000 that you are going to give out in grants, you don't want to do an open RFP and have 100 nonprofits applying for those $10,000. So it is better to have something by invitation only or just to really do your homework as a giving circle before asking anything from a nonprofit. Thank you. We have a few questions about GoFundMe and some of the downsides of GoFundMe campaigns. There's been some press coverage of fraudulent GoFundMe pages after a disaster. Lucy, can you speak to what we know about what proportion of GoFundMe is potentially created for ill intent and how givers can have some confidence that their contributions go where they intend? Sure. Kind of, I should say. The crowdfunding industry has a lot of different permutations. GoFundMe is one of many. It's a big one. But most of the big players that offer these platforms put in place some kind of fraud protection in the last couple of years. So there's fraud everywhere. If you build it, there's a saying, if you build it, they'll come. What it ought to be is if you build a technology, somebody will misuse it. That cedrics me as the better warning. So I've never seen data from GoFundMe. Not that I'm sure I would trust it if it came from the company. That sort of puts it in percentage wise. State attorneys general might have that information if they're actually prosecuting these cases and paying attention. And I know several of them are. So there's fraud protection on most of the big crowdfunding platforms. One of the interesting things about crowdfunding, and here Tiffany runs a crowdfunding platform. She can speak to this better than I can, is that this sense that there'd be this shopping mall of, oh, I'll go choose between this opportunity or that opportunity. That's not really how this works. It comes back to connections. Somebody who is doing something will decide to use these turnkey platforms to handle the money side of what they're doing. And in that way, I think they've actually been really exciting. Because if you've ever tried to mobilize your neighbors to respond to that housing issue or maintain something that's not being maintained by the local city or whatever, there's a whole lot of work that goes into organizing the people. And then just running the money part, it's nice if there's some easier way to deal with that. And crowdfunding fits in to a lot of those. So most people participate. They give to an ask from somebody they know or somebody who knows somebody they know. It comes back to that connection, which is why in the larger sense, the bigger challenge, I think, about this idea of crowdfunding. And Tiffany and I have talked at length, so she knows I think she agrees with me on this, actually, is that they tend to send a message that these big collective problems we share, like the fact that Detroit can't provide its residents with water, are problems that we as individuals ought to be solving. And that's not how we're going to fix these things. It's a public policy problem. It's a marketplace failure and a public policy problem. And the biggest one that GoFundMe does rightly get a lot of attention about is at the very same time that this country has been actively refusing to provide access to health care and insurance to our people. We have built a crowdfunding industry of privatized platforms where people can try to buy a wheelchair for their neighbor. It's unconscionable. And that's what I mean. I deliberately used the word dangerous before. A lot of the aggregate effects of some of these products is to reify this individualistic approach to collective problems. And everyone who's spoken here about giving has talked about the power of the collective, how it shapes their own identity, their connection to community, who they want to be in the world. And yet this giving escape is sort of, no, no, you and your $10 can contribute to, yes, you can contribute to getting your neighbor a wheelchair. But your neighbor ought to be able to get a wheelchair along with her health insurance and her access to health care. And how these things all interact is why it sort of has to be framed in this larger context. So I don't know that there's any more or less fraud on crowdfunding platforms than there is anywhere else. I do know that they put in place fraud protection, however. We just have time for one more question. Someone is asking, should people minimize their personal debt and have an emergency fund before they think about donating? Maria, could you share your perspective on that? Yeah, I totally will. It's a great question because I, a whole human person that worked several jobs, was in debt, did not have an emergency fund. And I was still throwing down that tithe and offering every Sunday, hoping, praying it would be different. And you know what made a big difference? My personal finance skills being upskilled and having better discipline. And I became the recipient of some gifts. And I earned more money. I just, I left my job and got more money. So a number of things happened at once. I don't want to make it sound like, oh, just negotiate a higher salary. And then that's not how this works. Several things happened at once in a line for me to be able to afford to budget to give the way I do, including getting out of debt. I think it's important. Your budget reflects your values. That's kind of just a thing. And I think it is possible to not be your best self and help someone else get better at the same time. You should not be reckless. You should be honest with yourself. And before we get into all these talks, or in addition to all the talks about big data, and you know, you have your own personal data. What are you mining about your own personal spending habits? What world, what data do you have about how you spend your money? And when you look at it, what are the things that matter the most to you that you want to be working toward? So I think again, for me, a very important tool is a budget. Whether I'm in debt or not, I'm grateful that right now I'm not because it's just a relief to me. But even when I was, I was committed to whatever amount of giving made sense for me at that time. Sometimes you can't always give money. So you know, Tiffany said she's an active Twitter at the time she founded her organization. I might retweet, I might retweet and tag five people that I know have money, right? Every little bit, again, every little, every nickel makes a muckle, right? Like do what you can. I do think it's, I'm not a financial educator, but I would say it's important to do the best you can for yourself. And if you are so inclined, find a way even out of that aggressive repayment program, even as you're going through, you know, loan rehab, I'm just shouting out things for my own life. If I can put aside 10 bucks that I have available, even if there's singles in my pocket, because I hate being on the train and everyone's screaming and I can't do anything. So even if it's just today, I have 10 singles in my pocket, I packed my lunch, I put all my debt repayments on auto. And if I feel like giving out these 10 singles today, I'm good, I can do it. So this idea that I got to get right to help somebody else get better, I encourage you to challenge that and start with what's the best place I can start with for myself right now. Thank you, Maria. And I'm afraid we're out of time. This was a great conversation. Thank you, Tiffany, Sarah and Lucy as well. And thanks for everyone who submitted these great questions. I also want to shout out the Chronicles partners, the Associated Press and the conversation. We'll be hosting other events like this in the coming year and we welcome your suggestions on topics we should cover. So if you have suggestions, you can send those ideas to editor at philanthropy.com. Thank you again for being with us and have a great afternoon. Thanks everybody.