Why I Donate
When Peter Singer asked me to write an essay on “Why I Donate,” my initial reaction was pride, which is embarrassing to admit. Why? Peter and I have become friends in the many years we have worked together, but my work and financial donations are relatively insignificant compared to the impact he has had. Furthermore, he was the catalyst that inspired my philanthropic work over the last 12 years…and my wife’s and my financial donations.
It is a bit odd for me to be reflecting on why I do anything. When I was a graduate student in social and clinical psychology, my work centered on attribution theory – people’s causal explanation for their behavior. I came to believe that while people are often quick to explain their behavior, there is ample empirical evidence that their access to the cognitive processes that led to that behavior is generally flawed. I won’t go into the evidence supporting this point of view except to refer you to Nisbett and Wilson’s 1977 essay “Telling More Than We Can Know", as well as the research of the Nobel Prize winning Israeli-American psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, whose most well-known work is his 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow. Interestingly, Kahneman provided many insights into his thinking on Peter Singer's podcast, “Lives Well Lived.” I urge you to listen to this fascinating man speaking with Peter and his co-host, Kasia de Lazari Radek.
When my wife Diana asks me why I did this or that, I routinely say, “You know I don’t answer why questions, because I don’t have a clue why I do the things I do.” But since Peter Singer is asking, I will make an attempt to answer his question as to “Why I Donate.” I’m actually looking forward to delving into this, even if my explanation is seriously flawed – forgive me Daniel Kahneman.
Short Answer:
I donate to save and improve lives through The Life You Can Save’s “best charities” because by doing so I act on my core values, as a result becoming more like the person I want to be.
Much Longer Answer:
The narrative that follows focuses on my desire to have impact, but the goals of that impact shift between the social to the highly personal. In retrospect, I am not proud of all the choices I have made. Had I been more intentional about those choices I might have made different decisions – more socially focused and less focused on myself and my family. I was very fortunate to be able to return to my core values in the past twelve years through The Life You Can Save, but in a different way than I envisioned during my early 20’s. I have said to Peter Singer that The Life You Can Save has actually saved my life. While that is not literally true, it has dramatically enhanced my connection with my ideal self.
I grew up in an upper middle class Jewish family in a suburb of New York City. My parents were both interested in world events and analyzed those events from a liberal perspective. My dad had written his honors thesis in university on a very interesting man, Hugo Black, who had gone from being associated with the Ku Klux Klan as a young man to being one of the most progressive Supreme Court justices (1937-1971) in U.S. history. I actually got to have dinner with him one night along with my family when I was about 8 years old. I think my family environment in which there were frequent discussions of domestic and foreign events had a significant influence on my world view. My parents often referenced the holocaust in which six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis. I even had a little bronze bust of Franklin Roosevelt on the shelf over my bed! My favorite subject in school was history and that academic interest has persisted throughout my life.
I entered university in 1967 during the height of the war in Vietnam and the ongoing civil rights movement. Interestingly, I knew that Hugo Black had been one of the justices on the Supreme Court when the Court ruled that school segregation – "separate but equal schools” was “inherently unequal.” (Brown vs The Board of Education of Topeka, 1954). The decision in the Brown case led to the civil rights movement when a year after the decision the court ruled that schools had to be desegregated with “all deliberate speed.” All hell broke loose in the South as a result of this decision, leading Eisenhower to send in Federal troops to enforce desegregation. I should add that much later forced busing to desegregate schools in Boston also led to significant disruption.
During my time at New York University, undergraduate and graduate students became embroiled in the anti-war movement and to a lesser extent the civil rights movement. My girlfriend Diana, who later became my wife, and I both became increasingly “radicalized” during this period of time. We both attended groups of various types of radicalized students – she at Harvard and me at NYU. I was influenced by Italian Marxist-Leninists, anarcho-syndicalists, socialist feminists, and radical feminists . I was heavily affected by Noam Chomsky’s American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and the various works of George Orwell. My best friend from secondary school Walter Cohen and Diana also impacted my political development. But my parents’ liberal and holocaust consciousness certainly played a role in my evolution, despite the fact that I had moved far to the left of their political views.
Consistent with this previous history, I chose to get a Masters degree in history and education. I taught secondary school from a left perspective, but after three years I became disillusioned about the impact my teaching was having. Having a clear impact has always been important to me, and when I think my work or behavior is having an impact, I work diligently. But when I don’t see clear results, I often become extremely complacent and lazy! My desire to see impact from my efforts becomes important in my story, but so does the complacency and indolence.
In 1975, the war in Vietnam ended with a Vietnamese victory, and so did any shred of my political activism. I became increasingly disillusioned about the chance of radical social change that would usher in an era of democratic socialism. I was aimless for several years, playing a lot of competitive tennis while managing a tennis club. Looking for a more interesting way to support myself, I eventually got a job as a psych tech in a day hospital for seriously mentally ill people.
When Diana left her primary school teaching in favor of medical school, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology, mostly to have a respectable career because I thought I did not have a strong enough ego to be surrounded by a bunch of doctors when I was a low-ranked regional tennis player and psych tech.
I loved my time in graduate school. My dissertation director and mentor helped me look at human behavior in an entirely new way. We played basketball together almost everyday at lunch and often went to his office to discuss his view of self-perception theory. Later I was able to apply my work with Jim on self perception theory and my graduate school introduction to Bandura’s self-efficacy theory to both anxiety treatment and the training program I started in the retail company I worked for.
After our first child Noah was born in 1984, I sonambulated through my post-doctoral internship and then took a job in a professional school of psychology training psychotherapists - despite the fact that I had a strong distrust of psychotherapy and psychotherapists. I could discuss this decision much more, but what is relevant for this narrative is that I pursued a career that I felt had very little impact in favor of a focus on my family, my personal hobbies (e.g. distance running), and my desire to move from New England to California.
I did do something that did have an impact, which was to start a behavioral treatment center to train graduate students to treat people with obsessive-compulsive disorder and with panic disorder and agoraphobia. But this deviation into impact work was sort of an accident. My wife had asked me to see a patient of hers, a Hmong woman named Song who could not care for her children, as she would not leave her home. I reminded Diana that I did not want to do any clinical work, but she beseeched me to see this woman, who had no money or insurance. I had no idea how to treat agoraphobia, but I did some research and devised a treatment protocol based on the relevant outcome research. It turns out that teaching people to cope with their panic attacks is not difficult, and after that you can gradually introduce them into exposure to situations they previously avoided. Song got better quickly. Diana then referred me another patient of hers with a similar problem, and she also got better.
Serendipitously, at this time the school I was teaching at asked me to write a grant for anything I was interested in doing. So I wrote a proposal to fund an anxiety and stress disorders teaching clinic that I would develop and supervise. Thus was born my impact work. However, I subsequently abandoned it after a very successful two years. Why did I do that?
Diana and I wanted to get out of Fresno, which meant leaving the clinic behind. Living in a beautiful place, the San Francisco Bay area, rather than the unattractive and very hot central valley of California, was very important to both of us, and we felt the Bay area would be a better place to raise our two children.
I had hardly worked on my research at all during the seven years I taught at the professional psychology school because I did not think I was going to make a valuable contribution to psychology. Thus, indolence with regard to both my teaching and research dominated my work. I had worked hard to form the clinic and make it successful, but I put it in my rear view mirror in favor of a more personally satisfying path. I should mention that during my seven years in Fresno, I trained hard to become a long distance runner, which is something I continued until disc problems turned me into a long distance walker (i.e. currently 12 miles/day). The impact of that is on my personal satisfaction and health.
Now comes a twist. We had moved to the Bay area where I started to build a psychology practice treating anxiety disorders. I was asked to start an anxiety clinic by a rehabilitation hospital in the area, but then, instead, I switched directions completely. I decided to work to make my family financially secure, which had never been a primary concern before. Peter says, I was “earning to give,” but that was not at all in my mind.
A childhood friend asked me to join the clothing company he had started in 1973, which had now gone public twenty years later. My job was to start a sales and management training program utilizing my knowledge of behavior change. The program was extremely successful, raising the average store transaction a startling 13%. During that period of time I worked extraordinarily hard, and eventually, after twelve years, I ended up being promoted to president of the company.
But in 2008 I resigned my position as president to try and do something more consistent with my values. Why the sudden change in direction? My relationship with the CEO, who was the person who recruited me, had deteriorated significantly. More importantly, I looked in the mirror and thought, “You're 59 years old - if you are ever going to do anything socially beneficial, you better do it now!.”
I then volunteered for two socially impactful organizations, providing personnel management support to the CEOs, both of whom were wonderful, smart people who became friends. But each gig had a natural ending, and I was searching for something else…. In 2012, while vacationing in Hawaii, I read Peter Singer’s The Life You Can Save. This altered the course of my life!
After reading The Life You Can Save, I was so energized that I looked for an email address for Peter and reached out to him, although I had never met or communicated with him before. After a couple of conversations, I asked him if he thought Diana and I could be more useful by making a sizable gift to a few of his recommended nonprofits that engage in highly successful poverty interventions, or by providing seed money for growing his nascent non-profit organization. If we did the latter, I offered to volunteer to be that organization’s executive director.
At the time, the choice was not an easy one for Peter, Diana, and me to make. If we did not succeed in building The Life You Can Save (TLYCS), we would, for example, be sacrificing the chance to save more than 100 children dying from malaria or to perform about 700 additional fistula surgeries. On the other hand, developing the organization could mean significant leverage both in spreading Peter’s message and in raising a large number of additional dollars—dollars that would not have been donated to those nonprofits if Diana and I had supported them with just one large check. Our decision to start TLYCS turned out to be correct by a large margin. Currently TLYCS moves approximately $20 Million USD per year. Some of that money would no doubt be given to the high impact, cost-effective organizations that TLYCS promotes even if we had not started TLYCS, but even 50% of that would be an amazing return on our initial investment of about $400,000 USD.
So in 2013 The Life You Can Save became an IRS recognized nonprofit, and I volunteered to be the Executive Director. Once I had envisioned being an activist and helping to address wealth and social inequality through systemic change. That dream quickly faded for me, and I sought refuge in personal pleasure and my family. But TLYCS has provided me the opportunity to have a quantifiable, achievable type of impact.
So to answer Peter’s original question to me, “Why do I donate?” - the short answer would be sufficient, but I have personally benefited from thinking through the longer answer. The movie version of John Le Carre’s novel, “The Constant Gardner,” provided me with an interesting perspective that still resonates with me. At one point, Ralph Fiennes turns to his wife, Rachel Weisz, and pleads with her not to go off on a dangerous mission. He says, “You can’t save all those people,” and she says, “I know, but I can save one.” At one point in my life I had hoped to be part of a movement to help all “those people.” That never happened, but The Life You Can Save has provided me with the opportunity to save many more than “just one.” If you feel hopeless and disempowered today, you can do something about it.
This video sums up how I feel about the amazing opportunity I have had and that is available to others through The Life You Can Save's best charities.
Feel Good. Do Good.
Charlie
