On Giving (The 10% Challenge!)

(This article is dedicated to my IITM1987 batch mates (Ravi, Sathya, Srini, Sanjay’s, Mouli, et al ) who originated many of the ideas and spawned the discussion on this topic over the last several days.)

Giving Tuesday was earlier this week and maybe some of you already made your contributions. We are getting to that time of the year where many of us give to the community either by volunteering or through our donations. I am hoping that by challenging your thought process on Giving I can convince you to give more and give more impact-fully.

Why should we give? Why share our hard earned wealth ( some of us inherited it perhaps 😄)? Who should we donate to? How much should we give? Based on the stage of our life and our commitments we all ponder this in our families. Wouldn’t we feel better if we can improve one life. How about two or five? In order to motivate ourselves we need to understand some of the stark realities about the distribution of wealth and income.

Lets start by understanding how skewed wealth distribution is through out the world. Thanks to my friend Sathya who brought this to my attention. A simple Google search was enough to highlight how skewed the distribution of wealth is in the world. 73% of the adults (3.55 billion people) have only 2.4% of the wealth (less than $ 10,000 each )(Click here to see the global wealth distribution pyramid). Just imagine that? Did that startle you? Now $10,000 is not a whole lot, yes the buying power could vary based on where you live in the world. But it is still quite small. Now look at the other extreme, 0.7% of the adults (just 33 million) have 46% of the worlds wealth (> $1 million each). Isn’t that baffling?

Now what can be worse than that! It’s the trend, stupid! Economists use something called a Gini coefficient (Srini thanks for introducing me to this measure) to measure whether this inequality is growing or reducing. If you are curious you can read this interesting article in the Economist that explains it clearly and shows the state of the world. As you can see in the chart below from the World Inequality Lab, the inequalities are only worsening in many countries. Maybe this has opened your eyes to the dire state of affairs in the world we inhabit.

Ravi, who leads a non profit — “Enabling Leadership” (you must check this out, it is quite inspiring what they are doing), challenged us to to think about what we are doing to change the world we live in. His notion that if we don’t make an effort who else will, was quite thought provoking

Leading a contented life, just after a nice Thanksgiving and a weekend of shopping or at least browsing both stores and the Internet, for things I didn’t need, I realized how misplaced my priorities are. My way of giving has been off late getting on the Internet finding a few of my favorite charities, educational institutions and religious institutions and just transferring money. Pretty easy and straightforward process that needed very little effort other than having some money to spare in the bank. Yes my money is getting used for a good purpose but little do I know what my money was used for. I don’t even understand if the money was just used for future mailings or to pay someone’s salary. Did it really serve a good purpose?

A few others spoke about their charitable efforts. S and M says they donate to charities and Mo says his family donates 10% of his salary for the education of students and the care of the elderly(what a noble cause and notice how the money is directly being used for a specific purpose). SR quips his family donates to a religious foundation whilst Sr says his family pays for educating one household employee and provides coaching for another. All extremely noble causes and very different. So clearly there is a lot you can do and it’s entirely up to us to choose what we do. Just like Ravi, Sanjay (Our John Lennon and Kishore Kumar) has been doing something very interesting. His contribution to society is an app that tells you the potential side effects of medicines (Download MedicalSideFx from iTunes to check it out). He spent his sweat equity to develop something that many can use. Sure it probably was a lot more effort than a few clicks to donate money, but doing so I am sure brings a lot more satisfaction.

I was reminded of a talk I attended in 2012 by Gururaj Deshpande a serial entrepreneur and founder of Akshay Patra, a non profit that provides school lunches. He told us to think about donating our time and our expertise over our money. He explained how a non profit like Akshay Patra has to solve a challenging supply chain problem to ensure that hot meals could be delivered hot at every school. It’s not that donating money is bad for organizations that are doing good do need our monetary support. But if you are giving you may want to be assured that your money is not being used for admin support but for furthering your charitable cause. I stumbled across this book called “ Dead Aid” by Dambiso Mayo a young economist which really changed my perspective on donating money. In this book she argues how the world’s money was wasted on Africa and how the money meant for benefiting the countries and supporting their growth never really furthered their cause of becoming self-sufficient. Clearly large doles of money seem to have failed unlike the successes of Mohammed Yunus’s micro finance initiatives in Bangladesh, which now are trying to be replicated world over.

Now what is interesting about giving is that you don’t have to be an active wage owner to give. I am proud that my octogenarian dad is taking care of the temples in his native village, whilst my uncle is busy driving initiatives to dredge his village lake of silt and collect money to help the families impacted by the recent cyclone “Gaja” in south India. But my true inspiration is a charity started by Nandini (my niece) and her friend Sanjana both high school juniors called “Side by Side Smiles” that raises fund for children with cleft lips by making and selling bracelets.

The growth in the gap between the haves and the have-nots is not good for the health of our societies. We cannot wait for our governments to intervene. It is our obligation as citizens of this world to make a difference. The next time you see an opportunity to make a change in someone’s life try and get involved. Make a pledge this holiday season to adopt a cause and volunteer your time for the cause, in addition to the checks you cut. If you can, consider setting aside 10% of you salary. Just like the ice bucket challenge for multiple sclerosis this year let’s all dedicate 10% of our salaries for improving the quality of others lives. Finally, keep me honest and do check on me to make sure I am holding my end of the bargain too!