How We Give Now Quotes

“Use distance as a proxy for knowledge—the closer you are to an event or a cause, either physically or socially, the more likely you are to know (or be able to find out) what’s really needed by those directly affected. If you’re physically close, you can ask people what would be helpful. If you’re socially close, you’re likely to be in direct contact with people who can tell you what they need. If you’re neither physically nor socially close to the event, the most useful thing you can do is provide money and let those doing the work take the lead.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“In our mapping conversations, donating time was the second most common activity, mentioned 16 percent of the time across all the discussions. Notably, these mentions of volunteering were separate from people’s counts of the time they spend cooking or transporting neighbors, working on political campaigns, mentoring others, donating blood, or doing advocacy work. Time is a factor in all of our giving choices, and we routinely undercount it.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“When it comes specifically to disasters, making a gift to a local nonprofit that’s part of the affected community is key to ensuring that local knowledge is being brought to bear. If the group existed before the disaster, has been running effective programs or services, and is staffed and run by people from the community, you may have found useful proxies for trust, reliability, and local accountability.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“Why bother? After all, even if all the money does go through to the organization as promised, you’ve handed all the good parts of giving to the company that sold you the product. They get the credit and attention and “good feels” for your donation. You’d make a bigger difference, and feel better about it, if you gave money directly to the cause yourself.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“First, the total amount of money that goes to charity from these branded products (both from the percentage of the purchase and any company match) is less than if people just gave directly to the charity. Second, many people who buy products branded to help out a cause overestimate the good they’ve done, confusing the full cost of the product with the percentage that is actually donated. And third, people who buy cause-branded products may feel like they’ve done their good deed for the day and don’t need to do anything else.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“Giving while shopping seems to reduce overall giving. Most of the research on these relationships focus on the benefits to the companies that sell the product, not on how these partnerships affect either you—the consumer/giver—or the cause itself. There are a few academic studies of cause marketing that focus on the end result for the nonprofit partner or on how people’s behavior changes after they’ve purchased one of these branded products. The most generous read of the research on cause marketing is that it is good for the marketer, not so much for the cause.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“Making charitable contributions used to involve writing checks, charging a credit card, or dropping cash into a bucket or onto a plate. In the last twenty years, we’ve gotten used to clicking Donate Now buttons on websites. We can make donations by text message or Tweet, through Facebook, via PayPal, during videogame streams on Twitch, and by touching our phones to a card reader attached to the Salvation Army kettle bell.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“Finding ways to return control of a person’s digital data self is important. It is one of the most important civil rights issue of our time, a fundamental question of justice.32 Putting us—and not companies or governments—in charge will require new types of technology, new laws, and new behaviors on our part. Ironically, getting people to think about how they might share their data willingly to accomplish things they care about may be a way to get us to care more (and act differently toward) other organizations that just take data from us.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“science is political. Who gets to do it, what they study, how it’s used and by whom—these are questions of participation, expertise, agency, and activism.5 The tensions of citizen science pervade much of giving and volunteering; they are all political.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“The Native activism to protect land and watersheds galvanized not only physical sit-ins in front of earth-moving machines but also efforts that reached far beyond these machines. They looked past the pipeline and earthmovers to the companies that owned the machines. They then looked further again to find the financial institutions that provide those companies with working capital. In doing so, the water protectors of North Dakota sparked a national protest against banks that fund pipelines and other parts of the extractive fuels industry. They connected the immediate threat of one pipeline to the larger threat of climate change, bringing new allies to their fight and joining themselves to a global movement.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“Recent years have seen protests and outrage at museums, universities, and other endowed institutions that have taken gifts from people who made fortunes by manufacturing weapons or opioids. As one opinion writer put it, “museums have always been exceptionally good places to convert roughly obtained private wealth into social prestige.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“Giving is, and always has been, a social act. We give to be part of something, and we give because we’re asked to.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“If so many people in the United States need help paying basic medical bills, this raises the question of whether there’s a better solution to the problem than pitting people against each other in an online competition for strangers’ money.8 The same logic holds true when you consider the increasing number of college students looking for help with food and shelter or graduates seeking help with crushing student debt. Crowdfunding makes it easier than ever for individuals to raise money from strangers. It also may be absolving us from looking at problems, such as medical costs, more systemically.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“The petition site bundles your name, email, and the insight about your interests (you just signed a petition about something you care about, remember?) and sells this information to data brokers, advertising agencies, subscription houses, and political campaigns.19 When you sign an online petition, the chances that you’ve just handed over your data for someone else to make money from them are higher than the chance that the intended legislative recipient of your petition will ever see it.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“These reporting requirements are the legacy of old ways of thinking. In this view, charitable giving to nonprofits was not just a piece but almost the whole of doing good. Other types of action were cordoned off—either not counted at all (such as gifts to individuals) or seen as unrelated activities, like shopping, investing, or political engagement. While tax laws and reporting regulations still treat them as separate domains, people choose between them as comparable products for taking action. This is problematic.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“If our legal systems and national conversations about giving are to be more inclusive and just, we need to open them up to the values and practices that power mutual aid networks and other traditions. However, it is not sufficient for participants in existing White systems just to engage with these practices without examining and changing their assumptions and expectations. Megan Ming Francis and Erika Kohl-Arenas have documented the long history of how this kind of White “discovery” often leads to co-optation and capture.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“By focusing on products, I mean to highlight the commodification of giving and to refute claims that what is going on is somehow democratizing. The former is about selling things to more people; the latter is about sharing power. In the last decades, we’ve heard lots of talk about democratizing giving. But what’s really going on is a commodification process—making products out of relationships.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“In the United States, more and more of these services and systems have been underfunded publicly (by taxes), and so philanthropy has stepped in. These are two sides of the American historical coin: we underinvest in our shared public systems while we celebrate individual generosity. This places a burden on voluntary acts and giving that is both too big and inappropriate to their purpose in democracies.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“The rules about giving are currently written in ways that benefit only the wealthy, even as the vast majority of giving comes from everyday people.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“For more than a century, US law and the media have concentrated their attention on financial donations to charitable nonprofits as the crux of giving. Books, magazines, movies, and radio shows celebrate and criticize wealthy philanthropists, encourage people to become “social entrepreneurs,” and profile well-intentioned software coders using “civic technology” to improve government services. These are interesting stories, but they ignore the sort of everyday situation chronicled at the start of this introduction. They also ignore century-old traditions of mutual aid, cooperation, and reciprocity, especially those that thrive in African American, Indigenous, and diasporic communities. They center nonprofits and charitable donations, even though people give much more than money.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“since most of us just feel guilty or pressured when the cashier asks us to donate, we don’t even get a little hit of good feeling. We certainly don’t get a big hit of feeling good; the companies take all the credit for the giving they do with your nickels. The result is a form of pseudo generosity that is unfulfilling to both shoppers and society. It’s possible that the opportunity costs of these omnipresent products are a reduction in overall participation and contribution rates.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us

“Somewhat unexpectedly, talking about how we give allows us to broach a lot of challenging topics—from religious or political beliefs to issues of wealth, from life stages to our dependence on the internet. It’s critical to focus these conversations on the how and not the how much or to whom/what issues. The first question, how, actually works to open up the discussion, allowing people to share all kinds of choices and for others to reflect on their own behavior. This question allows people who disagree on politics or who are unfamiliar with others’ cultural or linguistic traditions to still talk about actions that mean a great deal to them. It lowers the judgmental heat between people: while causes and preferred outcomes may vary, the tactics or hows of getting there can overlap or inspire.”
― Lucy Bernholz, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us