What I Heard In the Room - The 2026 Greater Giving Summit

As a rule, I’m not a fan of invite-only events.

I wrestled with that when I was invited to the Greater Giving Summit in Atlanta because any gathering that is going to talk about generosity, philanthropy, giving and participation ought to be pretty careful about deciding whose voices get to be in the room in the first place. There is something inherently uncomfortable about saying, “We’re going to gather a group of people to talk about the future of generosity,” and then putting a velvet rope around the conversation.

And yet, I knew some of the people organizing it. I knew some of the people who would be there and, more importantly, I trusted the intention behind the gathering enough to believe that being invited into the room was not supposed to mean, “Congratulations, you are now among the Important People Who Know Things.” It meant we had some responsibility for what we did with the privilege of being there, so I went, and I am very, very glad I did.

I was also asked to serve as one of the summit listeners, which may have been one of the best possible roles for me because it required me to do something I am not always naturally inclined to do: shut up and listen. Mostly.

My job was to listen across the conversations happening over the two days and offer a short synthesis at the end, not necessarily what I thought about everything I heard, but what seemed to be recurring across presentations, table conversations, disagreements, side conversations and all those little moments when somebody says something and you suddenly realize three other people have been circling the same idea all day using completely different language.

There was a lot to listen to. We talked about giving and generosity, mutual aid, trust, identity, community, measurement, technology, participation, safety, belonging, institutions, platforms, agency and the environments that either allow generosity to flourish or make participation harder than it needs to be. At different moments those could have sounded like completely separate conversations, but they weren’t.

Asha Curran, CEO of Giving Tuesday, set the stage and the tone for the entire summit:

What's missing in encouraging generosity is the Invitation . . . If generosity is abundant but the pathways are neglected our role is not to convince people to care it’s to encourage people who do care that there’s somewhere to go. The social sector is the network of connection. Think of it as a coral reef

What began to emerge for me, from there, were a series of connected tensions:

“Some generosity is actually designed to escape recognition.”

Pam Paxton

We kept returning to the idea that generosity is much broader than charitable giving. It shows up in mutual aid, collective giving, care, volunteering, community action, spiritual practice and informal networks. Tyesha Maddox talked about traditions of mutual aid in Caribbean communities and about the Black Panther movement’s models of collective action, mutual support and self-reliance in response to communities’ needs.

Those examples matter historically because they remind us that organized generosity did not begin with the American nonprofit corporation, the tax-deductible charitable gift or somebody sitting down with a CASE or Giving USA report. Human beings have always figured out ways to take care of one another. Sometimes money is involved, sometimes an institution is involved and sometimes neither is.

People bring food. Somebody watches somebody else’s children. A community pays a neighbor’s medical expenses. Somebody gives a ride. Families send money across borders. People organize after fires and hurricanes. Churches pass a plate. Friends build a ramp. Somebody starts a GoFundMe. Someone quietly pays somebody else’s rent. And, as Pam Paxton put it, some generosity is actually designed to escape recognition.

That creates a pretty significant problem if the only generosity we know how to discuss seriously is the generosity that appears in the datasets we have created.

But there is another tension sitting right alongside that one: charities still have budgets. They have payroll, buildings, programs, vendors, commitments and people depending on them to show up tomorrow and next month and next year.

This is where I think these conversations can go off the rails if we force them into binaries. Money matters. It matters enormously. Nonprofits need money to employ people, provide services, build things, advocate, create, teach, feed, house, heal, protect and do all the other work we have asked nonprofits to do.

I have spent more than thirty years helping organizations raise more of it, and I am not suddenly going to declare dollars an oppressive social construct and wander barefoot into the woods. (Although I'll gladly go off on the Industrial Charitable Complex during Late Stage Capitalism, but I digress.)

But dollars are a measurement of something; they are not the thing itself.

If generosity is a human impulse toward participation, care, reciprocity, responsibility or connection, then the charitable transaction is one possible expression of that generosity. It is an incredibly important one, but it is still one expression, which means the unresolved question cannot simply be, “How do we redirect all of this generosity back toward charities?” That is too small a question.

Generosity may be abundant. Pathways are not.

Again and again, we heard about friction, barriers, access and enabling environments. People may care deeply and still not know where to go, what to do, whether they belong or whether their action will matter. That suggests the problem may not always be a lack of generosity. Sometimes it is a lack of pathways through which generosity can move.

That idea has followed me home because it changes the starting point. Instead of beginning with, “How do we get people to care?” we can begin with, “Where is caring already present, and what makes action possible?” That is a very different posture.

It is also why I kept thinking about a woman I met years ago when I was a Chief Development Officer. Her daughter had benefited from the organization I worked for and the family attended one of our events. When it came time for the fundraising ask, I saw her reach for a pledge card, and I leaned over and said something like, “No, no, you’re our guest. Please don’t feel obligated.”

She looked at me and said, “Who am I to accept this help without also offering it to others?”

I have told that story many times over the years, but I heard it differently at the Summit because look at what I did: She cared. She had already decided what participation meant to her. And the fundraiser (me) nearly got in the way.

I had decided what role she occupied in the story. She was a beneficiary’s mother. She was our guest. Therefore she was someone to whom generosity flowed, not someone from whom generosity should be invited. I thought I was being gracious. She understood something much bigger: her participation mattered to her, and she wanted a pathway for expressing it. Who are we to decide who can and cannot be "generous"?

Invitation kept surfacing, but we often collapse invitation into solicitation.

Several conversations came back to the importance of being invited to participate, but invitation is bigger than an ask for money. It can be an invitation into community, action, belonging, contribution, learning or shared responsibility. It can be an invitation to see yourself differently, to discover a connection you had not recognized before or to participate in something larger than yourself.

That is very different from persuasion, and it is also very different from assuming our job is to manufacture concern where none exists. Fundraising, at its best, recognizes caring and gives it somewhere to go.

There is another layer to this that I think matters enormously right now: as social connection weakens, who is left to do the inviting? If participation depends partly on being invited into community, responsibility and shared action, then declining social connection is not just a social problem. It may be a generosity problem too.

We seemed to recognize invitation as essential without fully resolving how we build more of it, and that brings us to friction.

There is an enormous amount of language in fundraising right now about eliminating friction, particularly in digital fundraising: one click, fewer fields, no obstacles, instant transaction. And sure, yes, please do not make somebody enter their mailing address four times, solve a CAPTCHA written in hieroglyphics and do an interpretive dance on the evening of a waning moon simply to give you $25.

There is obstructive friction, and we should get rid of it. But somewhere along the way, “friction” has started to become synonymous with anything that slows down a transaction, and those are not the same thing.

Some forms of participation ask something of us, and that is not necessarily a design flaw. Sometimes we have to stop and think. Sometimes we have to confront something we would rather not see. Sometimes a story unsettles us. Sometimes we have to decide whether this matters enough to act. Sometimes we carry an idea around for a few days before we know what to do with it.

That is not the same thing as making a giving form unnecessarily difficult. It is the difference between friction that obstructs participation and friction that creates attention, deliberation, connection and meaning.

And that is where the idea of resonance clicked for me. All sound is vibration. Something has to move in order for something else to resonate. Think about a bow moving slowly across a cello string: the sound comes from contact, resistance and movement.

Mission can work like that too. A person encounters a story, a need, an injustice, a possibility, a community or an idea, and something moves. Sometimes immediately, sometimes slowly, sometimes uncomfortably. That encounter may happen in person, in print, online, through another person, through a community or through a story carried for years. The point is not the channel; the point is the encounter: generosity requires encounter.

Trust is not only cognitive. It is felt.

We heard versions of this idea throughout the Summit: how I feel about something shapes what I come to believe about it. Safety matters. Connection matters. Identity matters.

People do not participate simply because the mechanics are correct or because information is available. They participate within relationships and contexts that make action feel possible, congruent and meaningful.

That does not mean facts do not matter. Of course they do. It means human beings are not spreadsheets with shoes. We do not receive information neutrally, run it through a perfectly calibrated processor and output a rational decision. We interpret information through relationship, identity, experience, belonging, fear, hope, memory and trust.

That is why “people like me do things like this” can be so powerful. Community giving, giving circles and collective action are not merely alternative mechanisms for moving money. They can build knowledge, trust, identity, belonging and the sense that we can do something together.

That is participation doing more than generating a transaction.

What we measure shapes what we see.

This was one of the tensions I kept returning to. We talked about the limits of dollars as the dominant proxy for generosity, but we also talked about the hierarchy of measurement and the authority we give the things that are easiest to count.

Measurement is not neutral either. What we measure becomes visible. What becomes visible becomes easier to study, defend, fund, optimize and prioritize. And what we do not measure can begin to look as though it does not exist.

That is especially dangerous when the things that are hardest to measure are trust, belonging, relationship, agency, informal care and the long, messy processes through which people come to see themselves as participants in a community.

Again, none of this means we should stop measuring money. Please do not leave this article and tell your CFO that Clay said budgets are merely a social construct - or do, but I wouldn't expect much from their reaction. What it does mean is that we should be a little more humble about what our measurements can tell us.

How do we expand what counts without losing the financial measures institutions genuinely need, and how do we avoid mistaking what is visible to institutions for the whole of human generosity?

Agency may be the connective thread.

Across mutual aid, giving circles, community giving and movement-building, there was a recurring question underneath the conversations: do people believe they can make a difference?

That may be one of the most important questions in all of this because community giving seemed to be about more than moving resources. It builds knowledge, trust, identity, belonging and a sense that we can do something together.

Anthropologically speaking, generosity is how the tribe (and I use that term in its anthropological sense, not the modern borrowed colloquialism of 'friend group') — humanity — survives. We share, exchange, cooperate, care for one another and respond when somebody needs something.

We build systems of reciprocity, obligation, belonging and mutual responsibility because human beings do not survive alone.

Which means agency is not merely individual. “I can do something” matters, but so does “we can do something.”

That is part of what institutions can enable at their best. They can create structures through which individual acts accumulate into collective impact. They can connect people who care with people and causes they may never otherwise encounter. They can make sustained action possible.

But the structure is supposed to serve the participation, not the other way around.

And finally: structures matter, but they are not neutral.

We talked about disintermediation, platforms, new giving structures and formalization. Even so-called “direct” giving happens through systems and institutions.

A GoFundMe is a structure. A giving circle is a structure. A mutual aid network develops structures. A nonprofit is a structure. A foundation is a structure. A digital platform is absolutely a structure.

Every structure makes choices. It determines what is visible, what is easy, what is difficult, who has authority, how resources move and what information gets captured along the way. That is not inherently bad; we need structures.

The unresolved question for me from the listening is how we build structures that help generosity move without making those structures more important than the human relationships they are supposed to support.

That question feels increasingly urgent as new platforms and technologies begin to position themselves between caring and action. I came home from the Summit and almost immediately found myself looking at crowdsourcing, agentic giving and some very large claims about the future of how people will participate. I want to come back to that separately because there is a lot to unpack there, but I don’t want to leap to the technology before sitting with the more foundational questions the Summit raised.

Before we decide how people should give, we ought to understand more about how generosity actually works. Before we design the transaction, we ought to understand the participation. Before we optimize away every moment of effort, we ought to know whether that effort is actually standing in the way or whether something meaningful is happening there. Before we decide who the intermediary should be, we ought to ask what role the intermediary is supposed to serve. And before we lament declining trust in institutions, we might want to understand the many ways people are already trusting one another outside them.

By the end of the summit, that was really where I landed.

Rather than ending with answers, I want to leave us with the same five questions I heard sitting underneath those two days:

How do we broaden our understanding of generosity without losing sight of the fact that nonprofit organizations still require dependable financial resources?

How do we recognize informal and community-based generosity without trying to redirect all of it into formal charitable giving?

How do we value measurement without giving measures more authority than they deserve?

How do we design structures that support generosity without making those structures so formal that they lose some of the human connection they were meant to support?

And how do we keep the people and communities at the center of this ecosystem present in the conversation itself, rather than primarily discussing the institutions, platforms and intermediaries around them? That room represented a phenomenal representation of differing roles, backgrounds, experiences, ethnicities, experiences . . . but somehwat missing was the voice of the beneficiary, the people and communities we serve. And, as the story of the mother I met so clearly indicates, who participate fully in the generosity ecosystem themselves.

I went into an invite-only Summit uncomfortable with the idea of who gets to be in the room. I left thinking much more seriously about who gets to build the room, who gets invited into it, what structures shape what happens there and what responsibility the people inside it have to the people who aren’t.

That feels like a pretty good place to begin.