me + charity

I haven’t been able to hit this theme as hard as I wanted to due to the move, but here’s the promised post on why I care so much about this issue. There’ll be one more later this week about why Richard Armitage’s interest in directing fan attention to his charities is a significant factor in his appeal to me.

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Despite the turmoil of the last few years, I have always led a materially comfortable life, particularly in comparison to people who live outside the first world. I’ve never had to stay in a Salvation Army shelter or get food from a food bank. Even so, though it might not be immediately obvious to you, I am a major beneficiary of charity. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how different my life would have been without the contributions of people who gave without counting the cost, largely in ignorance of the lives of those they’d eventually benefit, simply in the belief that giving was a virtue in itself, or that certain kinds of charity assistance could change people’s lives. None of the people who helped me set out to ask about whether what I would eventually do with their charity was worthy. They thought that charity in the abstract was a worthy activity that could benefit people like me, and the activities in which we engage, in specific. And they did change my life.

My parents aren’t destitute and even when they were poor they didn’t realize it. They grew up on struggling dairy farms, but so did everyone else around them. As a consequence of skills my father learned after being drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, they were able to “get off the farm” (their main shared life goal) and joined the lower middle class as that was understood in the U.S. Midwest of the 1970s and 80s. We had a comfortable, if frugal, childhood in that context. The family of my best friend from school went hungry over winter if her father and brother did not shoot deer during hunting season, for instance. Even now hunger charities (like the ones Calexora mentions here) get a lot of attention from me; growing up in a farming community — U.S. farmers are rarely hungry even when they’re cash poor — makes hunger read to me as an especially extreme sort of poverty. We weren’t hungry. Ever.

My parents’ big dream for my brother and me was college, and to that end, every spare cent and every cash birthday gift and (once I started working) much of every bit of pay was diverted into savings. My school didn’t have too many extras, so enrichment came mostly from other groups, and cost money that wasn’t really in our budget. The clarinet I played as a fifth and sixth-grader: donated to the school by someone well-meaning. (After that I got my own.) The music camps I attended in the summer for four years: paid for entirely by scholarship from the local Music Boosters Club. The first three years of piano lessons at a private university conservatory: arranged for by a well-meaning teacher at no cost to me. The Girl Scout trips and camping that substantially expanded my world: paid for by people who bought cookies and participated in other fundraisers. Youth group events at church, church summer camps for seven years: paid for by the church and the people who donated to it. None of this necessary in the sense that food and shelter are. But these activities sharpened my conscience, they taught me practice, teamwork, and the habit of being meticulous, and they very much expanded my awareness of a world behind the tiny community in which I grew up. They prepared me to be an adult as much as school or my parents did.

Frugality notwithstanding, my parents had no idea what college really cost. Everything we had saved would have covered a year, perhaps. It was the end of the 1980s and Pell Grant money was going mostly to poor families, while the middle class was being diverted into government-subsidized loans. I’m sure my parents would somehow have gotten both of us through college. But they didn’t have to. Because my college tuition was paid for entirely by benefactors through the company my father worked for, a local paper mill that had donated to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, and most significantly, by alumni donors to the institution I attended. I worked only to pay my living expenses, and I got away with one tiny student loan (for study abroad — something I couldn’t have done had I had to foot the entire bill myself). And because of these grants, I received a demanding private education of a much higher quality and with a great deal more individual attention than I might have had I attended the local public institution of higher education.

The first job I had the summer after college was at a foundation dedicated to improving the U.S. political process. It was funded completely by an endowment created by an important American inventor. My parents had no idea what graduate school was or why it would be necessary for anyone to attend one. At that point they had my brother’s college tuition to worry about. And so my graduate education was also paid for by charities: by alumni donors to my graduate institution, and by a foundation created by heirs to the fortune of an important American industrialist and banker.

As generous as those grants were, they didn’t cover the time I’d have to spend in Germany researching my dissertation. Most of that cost — over two years of complete support during the dissertation years — was covered through a private association that is heavily funded by the German government. Before you object that this was not philanthropy, but government assistance, let me point out that the agency itself is a non-profit, and also that the German government didn’t have all that much reason to think that it would ever profit from subsidizing additional research on the topic of my dissertation. This agency is the largest grantor in the world of support for academic exchange programs; it assists more than 50,000 students per year. To me, it was charity.

And then there were the charities that supported my work after my dissertation was complete: the various private associations and foundations in Germany that paid for summers at the site of my research; the private non-profit in the U.S. that financed a year of sabbatical for my book manuscript; and then, finally, the other German foundation that gave me a two-year grant. That fellowship had the label of “Marshall Plan Thank You.” The Marshall Plan was a landmark act of U.S. government philanthropy: $13 billion was transferred to Europe with no expectation of payback.

And in all this, I’ve only talked about money. I haven’t discussed the gifts of time and energy made to me by teachers and other volunteers who believed in my potential: Girl Scout leaders, music teachers, Sunday School teachers, youth workers, writing center tutors, professors, and so on, and on, and on, and on. All the people who didn’t think about spending another hour of their day to further my education.

The result for me: I’ve become incredibly convinced of my own amazing luck — not just in being born in the U.S., or in having parents with goals and a strong work ethic and moral orientation — but also in being the recipient of so much largesse from people and foundations that chose to believe in my path and my goals. And every time I think about how fortunate I have been, I realize how easily it could have been different. Had I been born elsewhere, and not had access to solid pediatric care, or a handy, safe water supply, or good public schools, or a safe environment around me. Had I had parents more focused on their own welfare than on mine, or ones who needed my labor on their farm more than they desired my education. Had my father carried away more negative baggage from the war than he did. Had my mother been disabled. Had my parents divorced. Had I been afflicted with a serious physical or mental illness, or suffered an severe accident. Had I been the victim of violence. Had I been in the path of a hurricane or tornado at any time. Had I succumbed to drug addiction. Had I been unemployed for a long period of time (academics all know what a random stroke of luck it can be to find an academic position in a situation where there are up to 300 applications for every position). And if you’re tempted to say to me: well, you deserved these awards, you’re smart, you work hard, my response is: what if I hadn’t been lucky enough to be born with a strong helping of intelligence? I’ve worked hard, all my life, really. But even the capacity to do that is not something that I created. It was given to me, instilled in me, cultivated, and rewarded — by charities. And let’s face it: I’m a human. I don’t always deserve what I get, in the sense that no one who has a year-long grant is able to spend every second of that year on work. Scholarships paid for my studies, and I’ve used the time responsibly, but they also paid for me to have a life — to drink a few beers, to make friends, to go sightseeing, to read an extra book. And there’s no sense in which I deserve things like clothing, food, and shelter any more than any other human being.

Charity is thus a framework without which it is difficult for me to understand how I’d have developed. Everything could so easily have been different.

So the upshot of all of this is: I think a lot of my “luck” in life has been fostered and created by charities and various philanthropic ventures, and by philanthropists with money and philanthropists with time. That doesn’t mean that I necessarily give indiscriminately. I, too, have my favorite charities — most of them are educational, or have to do with women’s health in the third world. Sometimes I think it’s better to give time, and given how much time I’ve been given by teachers over the years, I try never to refuse a student’s request for time. But at the base of what I do manage to squeeze in lies my conviction that  charity is a practice of central importance to improving our world, because I know how charity has improved my own world. And when I think how it has improved my world — I, who have never really suffered in the sense that we typically think of human suffering — I know how it must impact the lives of those who do suffer in those ways. Charitable gifts of the kind that Mr. Armitage has recommended create luck for a lot of people, a little bit at the time. Not the kind of luck I’ve had, maybe. But things that are a lot closer to the ground, like the good fortune of not having to spend another night on the street, or finding an ear to listen to one’s adolescent troubles.

I worked one summer in grad school soliciting donations from alumni for one of the alumni foundations that sponsored my education. As part of my training I learned that the number one reason people do anything, including make donations, is that they’re asked. So if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this post, I ask you:

Will you — in whatever way you can — engage in philanthropy? Will you make someone else’s life a lucky one, today?

Thanks for reading.

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Happy Birthday month Richard Armitage! In honor of this event, consider donating your time, energy, and thoughts / prayers to an effort that’s meaningful to you. If you need a suggestion, here’s a link to Mr. Armitage’s recommended charities at JustGiving, as well as a link to means of generating a charity contribution on his behalf at RichardArmitageOnline.com, and a link to Act!onAid, a child sponsorship organization for which he recorded a voiceover in December 2010. Donate to Christchurch Earthquake Appeal here.

~ by Servetus on August 15, 2011.