You’re Already a Philanthropist.

When you hear the word philanthropist, who do you picture?

I'll be honest about my own answer. After years of working in fundraising, sitting in the meetings where these words get used, writing the appeal letters and the grant reports and the thank-you notes, my mind still goes to someone whose name is on a building. Someone with a foundation. Someone making gifts with a lot more zeroes than most of us will ever see on a single check.

And here's the part I find genuinely strange: I know better. I've spent a decade telling rooms full of fundraisers that every gift matters. I've written it, I've given that speech, I believe it completely. And the picture in my head still hasn't changed.

Building give GroundUp has made me sit with that, and I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable thought: maybe we've made philanthropy much too small by making the word itself so big.

At its core, philanthropy just means the desire to promote the welfare of others, usually expressed through giving. That's the whole definition. There's no minimum gift amount in it. There's no line you cross at $10,000 a year, no moment where the paperwork for a family foundation transforms you from a donor into something more official-sounding.

The person who gives $15 to a classroom supply drive because they can't stand the thought of kids starting the school year without what they need is participating in philanthropy. So is the person giving $25 a month to the food pantry, quietly, on autopay, for years. So is the person who makes one $100 gift a year to the organization that helped their family through the hardest season of their lives.

The scale is different. But the impulse is the same, and ultimately the impact, is the same. 

Which raises the question at the center of this: if the definition is that open, why don't most of us think of ourselves that way?

I don't think it's an accident, and I don't think it's the fault of the people giving $25 a month. I think the nonprofit world, my world, the one I've worked in and consulted for and genuinely love, has spent decades unintentionally reinforcing the distinction. Listen to how we talk. Donor feels accessible. Supporter feels accessible. Philanthropist feels like a status, something conferred, a word that comes with a wealth advisor, exploratory conversations, and a few nice dinners attached. Philanthropy gets discussed almost entirely through the lens of major gifts, foundations, donor-advised funds, naming opportunities, planned giving. And those things matter. Major philanthropy accomplishes extraordinary things, and I've been in the rooms where it happens and watched what a transformational gift can do for an organization that's been ready to grow for years.

I understand why the sector's time and energy is concentrated there. But somewhere along the way, I think we confused where the money is with what generosity means.

And the word carries more than just recognition. When philanthropy belongs only to people with wealth, so does the influence that comes with it: the seat at the table, the assumption that your read on what the community needs is the one worth acting on. The people closest to the actual need rarely get either.

And the sector's biggest mistake about the $20 gift is treating it as a snapshot, because generosity isn't measured in totals, and a donor isn't fixed at the size of her first check. Anyone who's ever built an annual fund has seen the file: people whose first gift was small and whose fifteenth gift wasn't. The person who starts giving $20 at twenty-eight, and gets thanked well and kept close and shown what her giving actually does, is so often the person writing the $20,000 check at fifty-five, to an organization she's known for half her life. A one-time transformational gift is a windfall, and windfalls are wonderful. A donor who grows with an organization across thirty years is infrastructure. Ask a development director which one they’d rather build on.

Small-dollar donors do things that don't show up in a single gift record. Collectively, they provide revenue an organization can actually count on. They introduce organizations to networks nobody was cultivating. They advocate for causes long after the transaction clears. They build a habit of generosity that lasts a lifetime.

And, maybe most importantly, small giving gives people a stake in their own communities, not a symbolic one. A real one, the kind where you drive past a building and think, I'm part of what happens in there. 

One of the ideas underneath give GroundUp is almost embarrassingly simple: I want more people to feel like giving belongs to them. Not someday, when they make more money. Not after they've read enough to understand every issue facing their community. Not once they can make a gift large enough to feel impressive or important.

Now.

This isn't something the platform taught me. It's something I built the platform around. But watching it happen has been its own kind of confirmation. I've watched people describe what they care about in their own words and discover organizations, five miles from their house, that they never knew existed. I've watched people save an organization's profile the way you'd save a recipe you actually intend to make. I've watched small gifts get made, and logged, and I've noticed that nobody making them seemed to think their gift needed to be bigger to count.

The first step toward a more generous community isn't necessarily asking everyone to give more. It may be helping more people see themselves as people who give.

So here's the reframe I keep coming back to. What if philanthropist weren't a title you earned but rather a practice you participated in? A ritual, a commitment, a pledge to show up for your neighbors.

You don't need a foundation or a giving strategy. You don't need to already know the "right" organizations, whatever that means. You don't even need very much money. You need some amount you're genuinely comfortable giving, and something you care enough about to support. That's the whole entry requirement, and it matters to me that giving fits inside your actual life and your actual resources, because a version of generosity that requires you to strain isn't generosity, it's just a different kind of pressure, and there's enough of that going around.

Maybe what we need, honestly, is to lower the bar for what it means to be generous. Not because generosity doesn't matter, but because we've set the bar somewhere most people can't reach, and then wondered why they stopped trying to. A community where more people give something is better than one where a few people give everything and everyone else watches.

Maybe you give $10. Maybe you give $100. Maybe this isn't a season when giving financially makes sense for you at all, and that's not a failure, it's just a season.

But if you've ever looked at something happening in your community and thought, I want to help, then the instinct behind philanthropy is already there. And if you choose to act on it, even in a small way, I think you're allowed to call yourself a philanthropist.

I'm starting to think more of us should.