Now and always is the time to help

Charitable giving in 2020 increased by 5.1% from 2019, according to Giving USA’s annual report on philanthropy. Individual and institutions gave a total $471.44 billion last year to charitable institutions. Giving USA doesn’t release its annual report about the previous year until spring, but some commentators on its website seem optimistic that giving in 2021 and 2022 will be similarly strong.

Perhaps not surprising, researchers such as Tim Sarrantonio of Neon One, a technology company that advises charitable organizations on raising funds, note that while there are opportunities to attract donors throughout the year, December remains a big month for donations flowing in. And even though Giving Tuesday falls during the first week of December, “the final days of December tend to attract the largest flow of gifts no matter what.”

Here we are at the end of December. If you have the urge to give or help before the month is up, there are plenty of opportunities.

Some readers already have local, national, or international charities to which they contribute. Shortly after the tornadoes devastated parts of Kentucky, organizations like CARE (https://my.care.org) and Feeding America (http://feedingamericaky.org) put out the call for cash donations that would help get food to those affected.

For those of you trying to sort out how much of you cash donation actually goes to the cause rather than running the charity, Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) remains a valuable source of information. Another organization, Give Well (www.givewell.org) goes a bit further and tries to measure how well specific charities succeed at their missions and provides a list of top giving opportunities on its website. It also has developed its Maximum Impact Fund where rather than choose a recipient, you designate how much you want to give and Give Well donates the funds where they determine they can do the most and then reports back to donors on where their money was donated.

Cash contributions are not the only way of giving to others in need. The American Red Cross (www.redcrossblood.org) indicates on its website that its blood supply is dangerously low. For those who are able to donate blood, the website makes it simple to find local blood drives by typing in your ZIP code. And for those who donate blood between December 17 and Jan. 2, the American Red Cross is even offering donors a long-sleeve T-shirt while supplies last.

There are also ways to donate time or expertise to local organizations in person or to those more far afield remotely. If you want to do some good for those who might be in need, there are plenty of opportunities and there is still time to do so before the year comes to a close. If you know of a particular good organization or effort to help others, tell your friends who might be in search of some as well.

But if you really want to make a difference, the right thing is not to wait until the end of the year, but instead spread out all the acts of kindness over the course of year. The need for help from others doesn’t appear only during specific holidays or seasons.

Thank you for whatever you are able to do. May your holidays and coming year be full of patience and kindness.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Small acts of kindness when no one is looking abound

A few weeks ago, I asked readers to tell me the small or not so small things they have done for others or others have done for them when no one is looking over the past year-and-a-half of coexisting with a pandemic. Many responded.

M.A., a reader from Santa Rosa, California, wrote that she has tried to do “the right thing” almost every day of her adult life, except for the time she stole a roll of Scotch tape from the office where she worked. She still feels badly about that episode but, now in her 80s, writes that she continues to act as “rightly” as she is able and that doing so “feels good.”

Another reader posted on Twitter that he picked up garbage pails for his elderly neighbors after a bad windstorm on trash pickup day.

K.C. from Hilo, Hawaii, writes that she does “the right thing without anyone looking almost daily.” When she sees trash on the ground, she picks it up to dispose of it, even if she has to temporarily put it in her car on the way to disposal. K.C. regularly picks up items from the grocery store floor when she sees them to return them to their correct place on the shelves.

A small neighborhood shopping center frequented by J.V. of Petaluma, California, recently had cars broken into. Broken glass was scattered in two of the parking spots. J.V. was concerned that because the glass was starting to spread, “tires would be compromised,” so he asked a coffee shop barista about it and was told the landlord had known about the broken glass for two days and had yet to take care of getting it cleaned up. J.V. went home, grabbed a broom, dustpan, and gloves and returned to the parking lot. “In 10 minutes, I restored three parking spots that cars had been avoiding.” Clearly a small thing, J.V. writes, but the right thing to do.

J.W. is in a memoir-writing class that meets every eight weeks via Zoom. When a classmate told the instructor that she couldn’t afford to continue the class, the teacher told her that there was a fund available to help students “supplement the payment” if they needed assistance. No one but her teacher knows J.W. is the source of the funds. “It gives me great pleasure to see this classmate every week … and note how her writing has evolved.” She’s looking forward to meeting the classmate in person someday.

“Just before Covid raised its ugly head,” writes L.H., her husband became ill with congestive heart failure. While his heart has recovered, his kidneys were affected in the process and he now has to receive dialysis three times a week. Besides being her husband’s primary caregiver, she has tenants to whom she rents property. “My tenants have really stepped up during this crisis,” she writes. They make sure any and all repairs are taken care of. “They are the nicest people in the world. I love them.”

These and other stories reassure me that there are plenty of examples of people doing the right thing even when no one is looking. “If everyone did small things every day what a great place the world would be,” writes K.C. from Hilo, Hawaii. I agree.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Learning to listen as vigorously as we speak

In 1990, an attorney named Mike Godwin came up with a premise that the longer Internet discussion threads progressed it was inevitable that someone would make a comparison to Hitler or Nazis. The premise became what is now referred to as Godwin’s Law. Some online forums went further than Godwin himself did and established the rule that whenever Hitler or Nazis were invoked in a discussion the discussion was over and who did the invoking officially was deemed the loser. But Godwin has since made clear that he believed that comparing someone to Hitler shouldn’t automatically end a discussion as long as the person making the comparison showed some knowledge of history and was thoughtful.

I bring up Godwin’s Law now since we seem immersed in a moment when many online or in-person discussions lead to an invocation of the former or current or 44td or 43nd president of the United States not as it relates to a particular policy issue but more as a way of shutting down the possibility of any reasonable discussion. The name is hurled more as a pronouncement than that the person it’s being hurled at is irrational, unreasonable, or untethered. The results make it near impossible to have a reasonable discussion on everything from healthcare and taxes to education and poverty, as well as most things in between including which professional athletes are acceptable to root for.

When we can’t talk about pressing social issues with those who have differing views, the likelihood that we can address these pressing social issues becomes diminished. If invoking a politician’s name as an epithet shuts down the conversation, it’s reasonable to argue that perhaps it’s time for each of us to focus more on the issues about which we are passionate.

My best friend and I met in the fifth grade. We were each the best man at the other’s wedding. We live on opposite coasts but we still talk every week. Politically, we are about as far apart from one another on issues as you could imagine. Yet we still talk about social issues, politics, and policy. So far, in more than 50 years of friendship neither of us has judged the other to be evil or corrupt or an idiot because we think differently from one another. We just disagree strongly about some stuff and we each do what we can to support the issues we care about. Each of us might hope that some day we might be able to convince one another to come around to thinking differently on some things, but we don’t invoke past politicians’ names as a bludgeon to shut talk down.

It seems important to call for more focus in the way we talk to one another, even or most especially with those with whom we disagrees. Focus on the issues, not the person. Focus on the desired outcomes, not the political affiliations. Focus on being as informed as we can become on an issue rather than mouth off something we read posted on a social media site by someone we have never heard of and for which we have no context or support.

With so much noise coming from all directions, the right thing seems to be to become as informed as possible and to learn to listen as vigorously as we speak.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Tell me your stories of doing right when no one was looking

 I’ve often quoted psychiatrist and author Robert Coles who wrote in his book “The Call of Stories: Teaching and Moral Imagination” (Houghton Mifflin, 1990) that character “is how you behave when no one is looking.” As we reach the end of another particularly challenging year, I’m curious how you’ve behaved on occasions when no one is looking.

Since at least March 2020, many of us have wrestled in one way or another with the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve been sequestered at home. We’ve been careful in the way we shop or socialize with others outside of our home. Parents of young and school-age children have worked to find a way to keep their kids safe and educated while balancing their own work lives thrown off kilter. We’ve been tested, received vaccinations and now boosters, and some of us have made our way back to work while adjusting to a new reality of wearing masks and continuing to be cautious.

And all the while we’ve continued to be faced with ethical challenges. Some are big, but most are the small day-to-day variety that call on us to be honest or kind when no one is watching. Those small day-to-day actions partly define our character. They may not involve saving a life or single-handedly ending hunger in our community, but they define us nonetheless, even when it feels like it’s no big deal.

I was reminded of this last weekend when I engaged in the first of the big leaf rake-ups for the season. The woman I’d eat bees for and I spent about seven hours over two days bagging up leaves and bringing them to our town’s public composting site. It takes a few trips to get all the leaves loaded on the back of an old pickup truck to the site. On one of the trips, I noticed that instead of the 16 bags of leaves I can carry on each trip, I was one bag short. On the way home, I noticed a bag of leaves on the side of the road. There was no easy pull over so I continued driving home.

It would not be truthful for me to tell you that the thought didn’t cross my mind to just leave the bag there. There was after all no way to trace it back to me unless someone had seen it fall off the truck.

That thought passed and I left an empty spot for the bag for the return trip to the composting site, put my hazard lights on as I pulled as far off to the side of the road as possible, and heaved the escaped bag into its spot on the back of the truck.

A small thing, but one less bit of trash for the town employees to clean up and less risk that the bag might blow into traffic and cause a motorist some woe. It was clearly a small thing, but it was the right thing to do.

Now, tell me the small or not so small things you’ve done or others have done for you when no one was looking over the past year-and-a-half or so. Tell me who and where you are and send your stories to me at jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. If it’s OK with you, I may share some of your stories in the weeks ahead.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2021 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.