Learning to Give, Curriculum Division of The LEAGUE

One of the organizations that I’m working with (I’m on the steering committee) is a group called YDOA which stands for Young Donor Organizing Alliance. It’s a really great group because it’s pulling together both young people who are donors themselves and also young people working in philanthropy who are working with young donors or have an interest to work with young donors to try to expand the field of philanthropy.  [Expanding the field of philanthropy] is happening, in particular social change philanthropy. [They are also exploring] the new ways that young people are doing philanthropy which tends to be with a lot of alliances to activism and partnership.  So that’s one of the things I’m doing.

I just recently came back from a Threshold meeting where I’m a participant. Threshold is a membership-based, donor-supported group of the Tide Foundation, and I’m on a grant committee called Community in Co-existence. We just finished our grant-making process.

I do a lot of work trying to build a constituency of new young donors working primarily with Resource Generation (www.resourcegeneration.org).  That’s the work that I do.  And in general I’m doing a lot of fundraising support work.  One of the projects I’m working with recently is a great group called the Lineage Project which offers meditation yoga to young people who are incarcerated. [The Lineage Project] has a center in South Bronx in New York.  So I’ve been doing support for a couple of projects also in the South Bronx and then also some international peace organization with the Peacemaker Community which is an organization that supports activities that bring in spiritually based methods of doing their peacemaking.

I feel the work that I’m part of is like a seed of growth. I feel like we’re people bringing in some elements to that, so I see it as a progression of work that’s happened.  I also feel like we’re bringing in a new element.  There’s definitely a legacy that’s almost like new colors that are being brought into this, like the flow of energy in ways of working.

I think one of the things that we bring in has a lot to do with thinking about ourselves in a larger context as people with less in this society. What does that mean and how do we position ourselves when we have more than what we need? How do we want to utilize that privilege wisely in partnership with people who are being impacted, who are not in the same position as we are in. I think that we’re bringing in certain types of questions that maybe were not asked previously.

I think so.  In terms of individuals, yes, but in terms of changing institutions [and the] ways that philanthropy happens, I think that’s a slower process.

I had an amazing influence when I was about 13, maybe it was 12.  I went to this international, intercultural camp in Virginia where I was living with people who were very different than me, from different places.  I took a class on environmental activism, so it was really through that experience that I started learning about what was going on in the world and the ways I could be a part of changing what was going on.  That was my first learning opportunity.

My family [members have been] philanthropists and they’ve given a lot of money, especially to the establishment of the state of Israel and institutional giving. I definitely was influenced by my family. My father was doing some things for people who were homeless and serving meals, I got involved there.  Then there was a period of time where it really wasn’t my own until I turned 13 and I started doing environmental work—wanting to be a part of the movement, to change the problems and the destruction that was happening.

Actually, it’s interesting because when I was reading [the questions], I was thinking of what’s something that you carry as a witness and it came to me, like stories  Then I was so happy to see that you actually included the question of what are the stories that you draw from.  I have two different pieces.  I’ll start with the more recent one. I practice contemplative spiritual Judaism and I have a friend in that community who is a lay leader in California.  He told me this story and it really has stayed with me because the theme represents important qualities to me.

This story happened on the Sabbath, and for Jews that’s on Friday night.  Typically, people who are religious won’t drive; but in his case and my case, we do drive.  He had this experience after going from this community gathering.  He was so overjoyed by this experience that he had in community and with prayer and eating.  The idea of Sabbath is that you are taking time away from your life and just eating and really acknowledging the source of the divine. [That is what everything] is really about instead of working—just being with the energy of perfection, the energy of peace and the energy that’s really pushing things forward in the world.

So he came from this amazing experience and he was driving back and he said, “Thank you, God, for this amazing experience.  It was so powerful and beautiful.  Thank you so much.”  And he said, “I think I want to just kind of give praise to you.”  So, he was going through a tollbooth and he said, “I’m going to pay for the person in the car behind me.  I’m just going to give extra money and pay for the car behind me.”  [Then] the person at the tollbooth said, “Oh, actually, the person in front of you already took care of you.”

It was really powerful to me because it connected this thing of giving and receiving—of being in the flow. For me, personally, it’s very much harder to receive than to give.  I thought about this a lot. Sometimes when I feel like I’m in the face of what I want to give thanks to—this larger universe, this larger, divine energy—if I’m driving and I see the tollbooth, I [think], “What if they were the car behind me?” and to me it’s symbolic about how to give back.

And connecting to that, I was also thinking about how, within the Jewish tradition, there is definitely a relationship between giving honor, (the word actually is kvod in Hebrew) and giving money—to give honor to either a person or to a life situation, whether it be in death or whether it be in birth or celebration.  When I was born, my family gave money to the state of Israel in my name . . . so I feel like its energy.  Like the generosity—in this case money, is how I specify it, but there’s a generosity in that.  That first step is the generosity and the next step is utilizing the money to share that generosity.  So I feel it’s a way of asking for blessings on my past and giving honor in this world.

There’s a high value in looking at people’s lives and seeing how much they give.  The word that can usually be loosely translated “charity” is tzadaka in Hebrew.  The idea is that it’s not really somebody who’s rich.  Everybody can give.  Everybody can be part of this exchange of energy and asking for support or asking for honor.  Everybody can be part of that way of giving.

I grew up in activism and progressive thought.  In more recent years, I’ve come to learn that the actual word tzadaka roots itself in the word fedek which means justice, and so there’s also a teaching that monetary giving is also a way of creating more justice in the world.  An exchange of money and energy for the purposes of creating greater equality.

I think that I definitely learned a lot of that from my family, especially from my paternal side of the family who were philanthropists.  They came to this country as immigrants and started a business with cousins. They were successful in the metal industry. There was always this real part of their story that was very much about the tzadaka, the giving that they gave.  In this case it was institutions and hospitals.

I’m a part of a couple different donor communities like the Jewish Funders Network. I think that the distinction for the primary community might be more “center” in their politics or in their ways of thinking about giving. Then I’m involved with what would be more radical group called Peace for Justice which is a donor circle through the Tide Foundation.  So there’s a spectrum. What’s true of most all of these groups that I’ve been giving in or in the culture that I’m a part of—is that it’s definitely much more about social change philanthropy, not institutional giving. [Such as,] what are ways that we can create more systemic change?  Even in the Jewish Funders Network, it’s not just about giving to Jews.  It’s not just about supporting our own community.

I think that actually [causes] a little bit of a concern to the older Jewish funders. There’s a trend where a lot of people who are the mega-donors, for example, are starting to give to more global issues versus things that focus on Jewish continuity.  That’s the sort of a change that I see.  Especially in my generation, we’re looking at what’s happening in other countries, what’s happening with the class divide.

When I meet other young people who are Jewish, it’s like oh yeah, your family gave this and that and it’s all the same charities.  Now, there are fewer attempts to build unity by coming together and trying to do collective giving. It feels like everything is very separate.

This community of young donors exists also for the purposes of bringing people together and sharing with them and giving resources and other types of resources. It is also the same thing with Jewish Funder’s Network.  I think that the shame or the discomfort about visibility has also separated us, so the giving that we’re doing is much more collaborative.  It also includes more people who are being impacted more.  It’s not just donors.  The people who are receiving the money might be involved in the process in some way.

Also, I’m a part of Threshold Foundation, a community which speaks to me.  It’s also a way of giving which I try to bring into the young donor community. I do this in my own personal life—trying to find the spiritual alignment. How much am I supposed to give, when am I supposed to give, and who am I supposed to give to? Finding an alignment that’s not based on anxiety or guilt or pressure, but really feeling like this is what I’m supposed to give to.

To give you an example, there were actually two women who are friends of mine who got married and instead of asking for gifts—they both have Jewish backgrounds—they decided to say these are our [charities] that we want you to give to and we don’t want to accept gifts.  They don’t come from a wealthy background, probably a middle-class background. I remember sitting there and really feeling like there are these four wonderful charities.

What feels like the right thing, and doing it by way of the same kind of trusting—my spirit will kind of direct it.  I see that among other young people, too, especially the people that came to Fetzer.  I was looking for that in the people that I recommended—people who have a contemplative approach to their giving. I’m on the grants committee within Threshold.  It’s called Community in Coexistence and we do a process called attainment where we’ll go around and we’ll close our eyes and give forth what we really feel is coming through us. I don’t know that the grant people would like this, but we do that by way of which grants stay and which grants leave and how much we give.  Typically we do that at the very end.  We start with our minds and our questioning, and then we try to let it all go and just touch into the spirit.

That’s what I think about my giving, too, acknowledging some kind of larger reality that’s defining what is really supposed to happen versus what is the grant that they need and not knowing what’s going to happen.  Maybe what they’re asking for is what they might need—maybe more or less than what they’re asking, so it’s interesting.

I think it’s true what you said.  My spirit has a really strong connection to the Jewish Hasidic tradition, and there are many stories where somebody gets saved before they give tzadaka.  It’s always about some character that has this round-about life story. There’s something that happens and [reveals] how there’s a divine plan and everything.  I carry that thinking when I’m doing my giving.

When I was younger, I used to give a lot to people on the street and it was like dollars here and there. You never know . . .  I see that as part of the Hasidic tradition—the divine unfolding of this mysterious thing.  You don’t know who’s an angel or who’s the mysterious Elijah who is bringing in the Messianic time.  We don’t know who’s who, which people are playing on the outside and on the inside.  The Hasidic stories are very much about the mysterious.

I’m thinking of two things—one I mentioned before.  I received so much from this experience of going to Legacy.  I went there when I was 13.  That’s typically in the Jewish culture when you make a transition in your life.  I didn’t have the same type of meaning.  The Jewish traditions and events really did not help me find meaning in my life.  I think that from Legacy it gave me such a sense of how I could be a contributor in this world. It was so powerful because I recall a real turning point of dissatisfaction with the values that I was being raised with in my socioeconomic background, and the pressure that I felt growing up in that culture and the materialism. My father is a very generous person and he’s involved with giving his time to serve homeless people and do meals.  My father was a positive model but I don’t feel like I have anything beyond that.

Legacy was my first experience of having a larger community that acknowledged me as somebody who was going to be potentially a part of changing the world.  I feel like they gave me the ability to build relationships and connections with people different than myself—people from other countries or people from New York that look different than myself, or have different economic backgrounds.  I feel like one of the main things that they gave to me was the ability to connect, to build a relationship and connection with people who were not the people I would have easily connected with—the people in my synagogue or from my private school.  To me, that was such a powerful thing, to have the ability to make a connection. 

The second part is also to make a connection to environmental issues and leadership, so I had the ability to learn about what’s going on in the environment which was a whole other thing I didn’t know about before. 

The third part was that I am a leader.  The whole part of the program was that you, the young person, are a leader and that was very meaningful to me.  I’ve gone back to Legacy for two other summers and been a counselor and wanted to complete that circle.  I’ve given them small amounts.  I often wanted to give larger amounts to the work that they’re doing.

I think the theme about connections is very important to me in terms of what I’ve received and what I give back .  I don’t know if you’ve heard in other interviews, but there’s a young donor conference called Making Money Make Change. That’s a “conference” in quotation marks, but it’s really a gathering of 70 people that come together who are under 35 who have financial wealth and who are passionate in a progressive, activist way or are thinking about wanting to change the world. It was so frightening because it was the first time—a lot of times we talk about this donor process as coming out—so it was my first time “coming out.”

I joked about this one woman in particular who I said was wooing me, but she really pursued me.  Somehow she saw something in me, that I was ripe for leadership in the community. She was somebody my age.  This is typical in this community where there’s a peer mentorship. She went out with me and had meals with me. I was [wondering] what’s she doing? Is she trying to fundraise for me? I think there was a part of that because she actually runs a foundation (that great foundation I mentioned where I’m on the advisory board). There was an element of that but really she was building a relationship with me. This is a very important relationship to me.  I feel like what I’ve done for other people in this constituency is that I’ve really learned about that and there is something that I continue to see build a relationship.  Now she is a leader in this community.  That’s a really powerful thing because in a certain way it’s really not about writing a check.  It’s about feeling good, it’s about feeling your center, and it’s about moving energy and showing fully up and fully who you are.  I think that was a powerful thing.

It took me about a year to feel a sense of comfort and freedom in myself that I could be involved. This woman—I wouldn’t probably say this to her in this type of way—but I’ve mentored her, [too].  I’m still looking for the right word because it’s definitely a nonhierarchical type of mentorship.  I guess both are true.  One is that I’m further along in my process. But [at the same time]… I’m just the same as her working through my emotional issues and questions as this woman that I’ve “mentored.” But this woman she did not take her a year.  She went to this Making Money Make Change conference and she became a leader immediately.  She went back to her family foundation.  She started getting involved. She said “I care about this type of art spirituality and I want to give to this and I’m going to give this donation.”

Another interesting piece of it, and I’ve heard this from people who are teachers, it’s like in these relationships— I can’t find the right word—clinical mentoring. It’s like [through] my giving I’m receiving. I received so much watching this woman connect with the community, connect with her own power. Now I don’t feel like she needs the mentoring, she’s just in the process. It’s now like a colleague relationship.  [Originally] this relationship was about [helping to] connect her, with me being the giver in a certain way, but still receiving so much from her.  I would hope that’s true of her relationships, too, that the giving and the receiving are constantly at play. It’s good for me to remember that because it’s definitely much harder to receive.

I thought exactly what you talked about. The greatest thing would be to get it in a lot of different places.  It seems from my brief experience with Fetzer, some of these amazing things that [are produced] can only be received through knowing [the] Fetzer [Institute].  [Make the] resource [available], and include community resources, too.