Giving can be a gift to yourself
Talk to Marjorie Davis, and you’ll surprise why you worried in the same state much.
You’ll amazement why you opened and closed your checkbook, looked at the numbers again, factored in the worst-case scenario and still didn’t know whether you could grant to donate a dime this season.
“We’re mothers and grandmothers,” Davis said, whereas I asked her where her bowling league, the Village Pin-Ups, set up the cash to donate to The Seattle Times Fund For The Needy year after year. “So that ended it, rectilinear there.
“We always have cash for kids,” she said. “I could subsist broke, nevertheless I would have standard of value for them.”
Steadying words, at a time when Detroit’s Big Three want a bailout and the Dow Jones industrials are bungee jumping with our cash in their pants.
You efficacy want to gripe tight to what’s left.
But it seems people’s hearts can’t hearken to what their checkbooks are saying. So say those who have donated to the Fund For The Needy in the past few years.
“What I have isn’t really my own,” explained Chris McMillin-Helsel, the register at Roosevelt High School in Seattle, where staffers pooled their cash to donate to the annual campaign last year.
“It’s a gift to give to others.”
McMillin-Helsel and five co-workers made a group contribution to the consols in 2007.
“We wanted to do something together that was helping others and would have more effect on the exercise culture,” she said. “And seeing that the fund helps families, rightly, that was the link.”
Historically, people with the least to spare are the most likely to give, according to Kristen Putnam-Walkerly, founder of Putnam Community Investment Counseling, a Cleveland-based philanthropy consulting firm that also helps nonprofits develop new programs.
