My father once said to me, “I worry that one day you’ll be living on dog biscuits. You give too much away to others, too much generosity.” Coming from a line of family members who are “in business” and “making good money,” I’ve been the black sheep of my family. I always wished I had more of a business spark inside of me, but my only motivation is that I would then be able to put more money into causes or making things better.
Some of the people I admire most are ones who are able to combine their business sensibility and their efforts to make the world better. It’s a fantastic combination in my eyes.
I think it takes great effort to guide your charitable efforts in a direction that makes an impact.
My husband, I have slowly come to discover, has a strange system of charitable giving. He is the person who gives to people who call on the phone — he gives to every cause from every kid who is selling something for their school; he gives to charities who send him free mailing labels. His heart is even more generous than mine. I’ve been observing his charitable giving, and I tried to identify a theme, the particular charities that he cares about most.
I couldn’t guess. It’s a random sequence. Anyone who calls gets money. I asked one of the charity callers about their cause.
What does your organization actually do?
The person on the phone seemed too embarrassed to tell me, or she actually didn’t know.
Does my husband send your organization money?
Of course.
I had to sit down with my husband and discuss this situation. Our family is in the same economic situation as the rest of the country. We have three kids in college and our health insurance out-of-pocket cost is actually the same as our monthly mortgage.
There just isn’t enough money in our family budget to give money to every single cause that calls on the phone plus to the organizations locally that we want to support.
In tough economic times, we needed to get creative.
We decided to set a charitable budget. We have budgets for all kinds of other things in the household. Since we both felt that charitable giving was important to us and to our community, we wanted to ensure that we would have the money each month — like our mortgage and health insurance. Each month, I receive a payment for this column. Since the column is on living with meaning and purpose, my husband and I decided to give the community the funds I’m paid from this column. This allowed us to know where the money would come from and how much we could afford to give.
It was freeing for us to know rather than guess how much we could give. Sure we wished we had more to give, but it made us get realistic, and it requires us to work together to choose the causes. I now understand that my husband really likes a personal interaction when he gives a donation. He likes talking to the callers on the phone, the kids at the door selling things for their school. He will continue to make some donations that way, but we realized that he can also have more personal interaction by attending fundraising events.
I’m not so much an event person; I’ve been more cause- and issue-focused. I realize that my husband would enjoy giving with me to these issues if he could have more personal involvement.
The United Way Day of Caring is Wednesday. I’d like to encourage you to spend some time this Day of Caring thinking about how you give and deciding if there is some way you want to change that this year to satisfy your generous spirit.
Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island and director of Leadership Snohomish County. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother, and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.
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