Last week, I shared The Savvy Do Gooder Way, a new framework for doing good that is manageable, effective, and rewarding.
It includes three main activity areas: The Do Gooder Lifestyle, The Do Gooder at Work, and Savvy Giving; in that order.
Why in that order, you might ask? Why is giving last?
It might seem especially weird in view of the conventional wisdom which teaches that giving is;
- always a good thing;
- necessary to being a good person;
- the first plan of attack on any cause or issue.
We’ve been trained to think this way for years, even centuries. By this logic, doing good through lifestyle choices and workplace activity is nice if you can manage it, but giving comes first and is best.
But consider for a moment what the roles of these activity areas actually are.
Charity and giving exist for when the system fails; when people’s needs can’t be met by business or government or informal networks and communities.
Meanwhile, those very areas are the system. Whether or not it’s broken depends on how we conduct ourselves as members of it: workers, consumers, community members, and so on. The more the system fails, the more we need charity. It will always fail at least a little, because we don’t live in a perfect world, so we’ll always need at least some charity.
But the more fail-proof we can make the system, the less we’ll need charity. Through our choices about lifestyle and work, we have that power. Why abdicate it only to turn around and shell out money and/or time to clean up the resulting mess?
This is not to say that no one can give to charity until they perfect their lifestyle and work situations. Again, there’s no such thing as perfect. But we must at least get moving in the right direction in those areas before we think about giving.
The fact that this flies in the face of everything that’s been drilled into us for decades makes this even more important. There has been far too much focus on formal giving for far too long, and we need to shift to a more balanced approach.
Leave A Comment