episode 01: It's a Movement if It Moves Without You

It's a Movement if it Moves Without You with Giving Tuesday

Featuring Asha Curran, CEO, Giving Tuesday and Henry Timms, President and CEO, Lincoln Center.

Asha: [00:00:02] The key thing is to create as many ambassadors for your idea as you possibly can and try to give it away and then try to let it go. If people do their own thing with it, then they will consider themselves a co-owner of whatever it is that you want to happen, and they'll be pushing your mission forward. [00:00:20][18.3]

Jeff: [00:00:28] Before we officially kick off the season, we thought you should get to know your hosts first. I'm Jeff Walker, investor, philanthropist, jazz lover and long term meditator. For the past few years, I've become fascinated with leaders who rally people towards scalable, sustainable and systemic change. People with managed egos who know they don't have all the answers. [00:00:48][20.1]

English: [00:00:49] As a fellow catalyst, Jeff and I started working on projects in the community health space. I'm English Saul, by the way. I also happen to be a data nerd who runs around tech company and a part time alpaca farmer. When I met Jeff years ago, I quickly learned that he has a get stuff done kind of guy and is a great connector of extraordinary people like Julian Montgomery. [00:01:12][1.6]

Tulaine: [00:01:13] That's me. Tulane. I'm the CEO of the venture Philanthropy New Profit. I'm also a musician, an organizer, and above all, a true believer that a better world is possible. But I also know that we can't fix this world alone. And so I joined Jeff and English on a mission, which is to bring you our podcast system Catalysts. [00:01:35][22.4]

Jeff: [00:01:37] The three of us interviewed dozens of activists, philanthropists and changemakers about how they collaborated with others to solve the world's toughest problems. [00:01:43][6.7]

Tulaine: [00:01:44] And we have been given the tremendous honor of telling you these stories. So let's get started. For our first episode, we're starting with an approach to movement building that sounds unorthodox, letting go. If you've ever put your heart and soul into anything, the thought of losing control over what you've created can be scary. It's a hard pill to swallow. But as you're about to hear, allowing your idea to take shape and grow in the hands of others can be immensely powerful. Ashcombe, CEO of Giving Tuesday knows this firsthand. [00:02:32][48.0]

Asha: [00:02:34] Giving Tuesday was really an idea that was meant to be given away and adapted by individuals, by organizations, by places. And that is how it has grown so fast over the past ten years. [00:02:45][10.7]

Tulaine: [00:02:49] Whether you've seen it as a hashtag or you have the habit of donating right around the holidays, chances are you've heard of giving. Tuesday It's a day in the year when people pay it forward. In 2022 alone, Giving Tuesday raised a record breaking $3.1 billion in 24 hours. Yes, that's billion with a B. Such impact is the result of a year long effort by a network of leaders around the world spanning across 85 countries. But like every movement, an idea had to take root. And for giving Tuesday, it all started in 2012. [00:03:27][38.2]

Asha: [00:03:31] We were trying to get as many organizations to hear about it and commit to doing something on the day as possible. Our goal was actually 100 nonprofits. We wanted to get 100 nonprofits to commit to doing something. On the day when we launched Giving Tuesday, we launched it with only 60 days notice. At the time, it was a little hectic. In retrospect, it was a really great idea because it entered the world, I think, with such purity of concept and it didn't have time to be grounded into much by committees of approvals and bureaucracy and so forth. And so immediately after it launched, people really reacted very positively to it and and organizations immediately began to take it and change it. So the first change that somebody did was an organization called Dress for Success who did a Give Tuesday campaign. They called it Giving Shoes Day. And many nonprofits at that point would have said, you know, whoa, cease and desist. You need to use this idea as we came up with it in your teams, our logo that we designed and it is the name and here is the brand guideline and the style guideline. But instead we sort of faced this critical moment where we could have gone that direction. But what we did instead was to celebrate and amplify that change. [00:04:41][70.1]

Tulaine: [00:04:45] The person who came up with the Giving Tuesday idea was Henry Timms, then executive director of 92nd Street Y, a cultural and community center in New York City. Henry thought that after Black Friday and Cyber Monday two days focused on consumption, people might be interested in giving back. [00:05:04][18.3]

Henry: [00:05:06] The great advantage of giving. Tuesday at the beginning was nobody thought it was going to work. So there's something hugely liberating about ideas that no one thinks is going to work. Because if you try them and you fail, all that happens is a couple of clever people say, Well, I was right again about it all working, but you don't lose anything because you just tried something and it didn't work. [00:05:24][17.8]

Tulaine: [00:05:25] Today, Henry is the president and CEO of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York. [00:05:30][5.3]

Henry: [00:05:31] And the problem, I think, for lots of organizations and I say that, you know, running a large one now is it reaches a point where all your ideas are expected to work and it's much harder to try new things. And at that point, the 90 seconds, by now, no one expected a, you know, Upper East Side Jewish Cultural Center to start the philanthropy revolution. That was not what was on the table, which gave us a lot of cover because no one was interested. [00:05:52][21.2]

Tulaine: [00:05:54] Henry and Usher, who also worked at 92nd Street Y at the time, decided to use the hashtag giving Tuesday to spread the word. [00:06:01][7.1]

Henry: [00:06:03] Believe it or not, and many people weren't. This is absolutely true. There was a big debate about whether people would know what a hashtag was when we launched Giving Tuesday. We I remember people saying, people are going to think it's something to do with telephones because back then the only time you would see a hashtag was on a payphone. And of course, in the early years we were quite insistent on the hashtag because the hashtag was saying something. It was saying, this is not business as usual, there's something new about this. And so I think there was something about the kind of it was a shareable idea in its DNA. [00:06:31][28.8]

Tulaine: [00:06:34] The hashtag worked as a way for organizations around the world to build their own narrative about the meaning of the day. That first year, nonprofits received a total of about $15 million in giving. This was a 50% increase from the same day the previous year. To continue growing, Asha and Henry allowed people to adapt the concept of giving Tuesday and to make it their own. [00:06:59][24.9]

Asha: [00:07:02] It was like, Oh, we got this call from somebody in Brazil, This kind of cool guy who runs the fundraising association in Brazil really likes the idea of giving Tuesday, wants to adapt it there. Got another call from the Charities Aid Foundation in the U.K. They want to take it there. For us, it was certainly like, yeah, do it like, we have this great idea. It's going to spread in Brazil. It's going to spread in the U.K. and oh, my gosh, here's all these other countries as well. Of course, the people who live in those places should lead those efforts. I don't mean to say that we were flighty or made decisions lightly, especially if they could impact people's lives. But it seemed just like an absolute basic truism that somebody in Ukraine, somebody in Tanzania, somebody in Colombia would know how to inspire generosity in those places. [00:07:52][50.2]

Tulaine: [00:07:53] But Asha and Henry didn't always recognize how important it was to keep the movement organic. [00:07:59][5.6]

Asha: [00:08:00] We were aggressive for a hot minute a few years ago, and I like to talk about this because I like to be really honest with myself and everyone else about when my strategies fail. And there was a kind of very specific moment. I want to say it was maybe three years in to giving Tuesday where it was really clear that the global spread was going to be significant. The money was also growing in just extraordinary ways, by which I mean the amount that was donated to nonprofits in the United States on the day itself. And the work was becoming more year round, right? So those people who raised their hands were working on giving Tuesday, not just in advance of the day itself, but using it as a platform for innovation and creativity around giving and generosity all the time. So I even bought a physical map of the world and I put it over my desk and I bought. Colored pins, and I had my global community manager. This was back when we were at the 92nd Street Y, and I sat with her and I said, okay, we need to map out where we already have representation and where we need it and we using these different colored pins. And because I wanted, you know, proper representation in the global South, in the Middle East, in all these places. And then her job was to sort of research the most appropriate giving Tuesday leaders in those regions. It was such a failure. It just didn't work at all. And we just totally and I realized I was betraying our own principles, which are really all around hand raising. And, you know, I think there's lots of things that make a movement. A movement, right? Henry says it's a movement if it moves without you. And there's lots of definitions of movements and any definition I've ever heard giving Tuesday is one. And I think one of the things that makes a movement a movement is that people enter it in whatever the movement is at, of a place of real deep belief and passion. Right. And that's what makes movements radical. That's what makes them about systems, is that they really come from a very deep, heartfelt but soul felt place in people because they care. They care really deeply about whatever that whatever that movement is about. And the hand raising strategy is really based on that knowledge that you can't just find someone on a piece of paper. They really have to step forward because they believe it. And you're never going to know that just by seeing someone on LinkedIn. [00:10:16][136.0]

Tulaine: [00:10:21] Giving Tuesday's success can be attributed to what Henry calls new power. Unlike old power, which is top down static and held by a few new power, is collaborative, dynamic and held by many. And Henry outlines this idea in the book New Power, a national bestseller he coauthored with Jeremy Hyman's. [00:10:43][22.0]

Jeff: [00:10:46] One of the theories of our podcast is that there are individuals and organizations that are these system catalysts that hold together lots of different other groups to go after key problems of the day. And we want to motivate people to become system catalysts or organizations to become more new power focused. Can you talk about new power and your own view of what that means and how giving Tuesday might relate to that? [00:11:08][22.0]

Henry: [00:11:09] I think one of the great challenges of the nonprofit sector in particular is thinking beyond the boundaries of your own organization. So if you're working at a homelessness charity, you're trying to make your homelessness charity very successful. And there are three other homelessness charities, and it's often the case, although not always, that those four organizations work out good ways of working together. And that's not a criticism. All of those organizations have people on the payroll. They all have executive directors. Everyone wants to make their board happy, but we tend to be quite segmented as a sector, taking on some bigger problems. So something like Giving Tuesday was designed to be bigger than the boundaries of a single organization, less of an old power approach, which is about what resources you can consolidate and own and keep a handle on, and more about how do you create more of a new power perspective where you create an idea that is able and in fact not just able, but depends upon getting stronger when other organizations join. So as a design principle, giving charity was very much a new power design that the idea was it wasn't power as a as a currency. It's something I've gotten to happen. It was power as a current. It was something that grew and build and surged. And for ten years now, that current has been surging around the world, made stronger time and time and time again because of the leaders and individuals who have added that voice and their talents. [00:12:25][75.8]

Tulaine: [00:12:26] For new power to spread. System catalysts must prioritize impact over ego. [00:12:32][5.8]

Henry: [00:12:33] There's a certain style of leadership which is actually true of new power in general, which is people who really aren't going to make it all about them. And the dirty secret, particularly of social, social, entrepreneurial ism, is it's become a bit of a cult, right? So it's, you know, dynamic individual X, who is a brilliant speaker, tells his story of his challenging crucible moment, which he finally saw the way in which we were going to transform problem B, you know, through the efforts of the blockchain, whatever the story is, it's that kind of narrative, which is the hero's story. The hero's often a young white man with a big idea, and a lot of people have reasonably become quite famous in that mold. The problem is those ideas don't tend to scale beyond the limits of that personality. Why, given Tuesday, I think his work is because no one became friends with Bono through giving Tuesday. A lot of these campaigns, these new social entrepreneurs, they end up on stage with Bono. And I always think the big danger for anyone in this field is when you start spending most of your time with celebrities, not everyday givers, you've taken a bad turn and people do it. And I get it. Like it's fun to hang out with Bono. I've always wanted to hang out with Bono. It's never happened, and that was a design choice. We did not start giving Tuesday to become friends with Bono, and I think that's why it worked, because it really was about the people doing the work in the field. And if no one was taking about, we're giving Tuesday and the critique we certainly have is at the 92nd Street Y was always, you should have got more credit for this. I hear this all the time. Nobody knows this was you. Nobody knows you did this. And of course that. In Silicon Valley terms, that's a feature, not a bug. That was intentional. That was supposed to happen because if it was all about a single individual, whether me or Ash or anybody else, then you've branded it with your own brand and you haven't left space for someone else to brand it. And I think that's a really important idea with this kind of movement, which is how do you create something that has the space for other people's agency? [00:14:26][112.9]

Tulaine: [00:14:29] And 2019 given Tuesday branched off 92nd Street Y to become its own organization. Henry stepped down from leading giving Tuesday to make space for Asia. [00:14:39][9.7]

Henry: [00:14:40] And I think what Oxford did particularly well was actually take a very global mindset and transform what was a very American idea into something that a was brought in, the sense that it reached, you know, 100 countries around the world, but more importantly was deep. What's so interesting about giving Tuesday is actually the effort that goes into building culture. It was always a good idea. It was a good concept, but good concepts are easy. What's hard is good culture. And what Giving Tuesday benefited from, I think was the right idea at the right time. And then what followed up, which I think also deserves the lion's share of the credit for, was was the culture building. And that was what was the transformative moment, I think, for Kevin Schuster. [00:15:17][36.9]

Tulaine: [00:15:19] Since Usher became CEO of Giving Tuesday in 20 1925, new countries have joined the movement totaling 85 as of early 2023. [00:15:27][8.1]

Asha: [00:15:29] We were virtual even before the pandemic because we are so global. We did a survey recently. I think we are team speaks like 30 languages total among 50 people. We are a 24 hour operation. We're literally in dozens of different countries. And that does make culture very, very, very important. Culture is always very important and people should be paying attention to it all the time. And I think you need to do that even more when you're looking at each other on a Zoom screen the vast, vast majority of the time and acknowledging that some people work really well that way and that other people don't work really well that way and that other people are really longing for, you know, to be sharing physical space with their colleagues where some are completely fine, only seeing them on a zoom screen. So we pay a lot of attention to that. And so I think we we really prioritized setting a professional but warm tone in our digital environments. And by connecting voice to voice as often as possible when something could be misread or where honest feedback needs to be, given that that's better to be given when you're actually hearing someone's voice. So never unprofessional, but also pretty informal. It sort of mirrors the tone of the broader community, really. Right? So there's on our Slack channels, there's talk of what we're binge watching, right. Talk of what we last cooked that we loved, like tons of conversation about things like that, learning about each other's cultures. I mean, we have a full time India hub now, a full time East Africa hub of full time Latin American and Caribbean hub. And it's just fascinating, like the number of things that we all share all the time and learn from each other. And of course, we visit each other in person as well when we can. [00:17:14][104.8]

Tulaine: [00:17:15] While Asha encourages a warm culture, she also holds high expectations from the people she collaborates with. [00:17:21][5.7]

Asha: [00:17:21] I see a lot these days of culture being about. Just giving employees whatever they want and creating a warm and safe environment and giving unlimited time off and all of that stuff. And we do all the things right and all the things that that you need to do for people to feel that they're supported and have a balance in their lives and to acknowledge that people have families and that takes precedence, etc.. But I think it's also about there being. Expectations of really high delivery and a really inspiring vision, right, That you can't just expect people to work really hard without thinking that it's really worth it. Our job is to really make our employees feel like they're working on something amazing and that that really inspires them to work hard. [00:18:14][52.1]

Jeff: [00:18:15] Well, then, so you've created this scaling strategy from an idea to billions of dollars of impact larger than that with hundreds of millions of people involved with a light touch. Right. And I can't imagine you had that in mind ten years ago. But how did you let it evolve as a culture, as a structure, as an organization? [00:18:35][20.2]

Asha: [00:18:36] Yeah, that's it's such an interesting question and so, so meaningful to reflect back on now, because the organization, the number of staff, the number of countries, the whole thing is just so much bigger that it can't be exactly like it was ten years ago. Right. And so there has to be a sort of constant vigilance that we're not really changing those key guiding principles and power dynamics that were established right in the beginning. We have the broader community, which at one point was a dozen people, right? It was like a few countries and a few communities, and now it's hundreds and hundreds of people. But it's what has happened that's really interesting is that there is one big community right where we all gather every year, pandemic notwithstanding, to learn from each other and celebrate our full community. And then there's all these sub communities and affinity groups that have broken out among the larger group because it's so big now. So there's a you know, there's a Spanish speaking group. There is one for all of the different regions of the world. There's one for people who are mostly interested in non-monetary activations, right? So there's all of these different affinity groups that are much smaller and more intimate and then part of this sort of big community. And that is really who I consider our most important stakeholders are those networks of networks, because they're the hand raisers, right? Without them, we're nothing. You know, you ask about keeping a light touch and it's really interesting because in some ways I find it harder because we've gone from being a sort of rogue band of guerillas in the beginning, like five or six of us, you know, and then maybe 25 of us sort of just doing what we needed to do to build this thing to being now a formal, spun out nonprofit with a staff of 50. And, you know, certainly a light touch is not possible as a CEO of an organization. Right. But at the same time, the larger community, 85 countries and so forth, I'm not their boss. Right. They are under no obligation to do what I say. Not that I try to boss them around. I don't I think of myself much more as how can we provide opportunities for facilitation, connection, convening, right? How do we really keep that connective tissue between each one of these individuals as strong as it can be? That's really our role. And if I took too heavy a touch, we'd lose our ability to do that. [00:20:58][142.1]

Jeff: [00:20:59] I love the words connective tissue. What do you use to do that? You know, you have convenings, you have newsletters, you have shared lists, you have people gathering with each other. You create new ideas with Sterling Collective and others. You know, how do you think of that glue that kind of helps unify it? All the things that you can do to make that happen? [00:21:17][18.3]

Asha: [00:21:19] So the things that you mention are all tactical and we use all of them, all the existing technology to keep people connected on a daily basis. We have calls all the time, multiple times a week with different sections of our communities, etc., all the things. But that's not what does it. There is something else and it's something that's really hard to define. One of the greatest moments of revelation I had was reading a scientific theory that really cuts across academic disciplines, which is that there are so many things, so many phenomena that scientists can't fully explain, Right. Why fungi work the way they do, why tree roots work the way they do, why starlings in murmuration work the way they do. This is why our fellowship program is called the Starling Collective. And the theory is that it's something that is happening between the component parts. It's like the manifestation of Aristotle's, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, right? The physical manifestation of that saying is all of these natural phenomena, but can absolutely be transferred to principles around human self-organization as well. That if you took apart every single component of giving Tuesday and labeled it and measured it and codified it and then put it all back together again, you still wouldn't be able to explain what makes that connective tissue strong. And it's because it's about the relationships between the people. It's about the warmth and the shared imagination and the shared vision. To share a vision with somebody is really powerful. You know, the people in our movement feel deeply connected to each other because they share that vision of a radically more generous world. And they're. Moved by it when they see it in others, because it is it's something that they feel so strongly themselves. So that's probably a much more meta answer that you wanted. But I think it is all those tactical things. And then it is also an acknowledgment that systems are made up of humans. And if you pay attention to humans first and the relationships between them first, then you have the basis for all those tactics to work well. [00:23:26][127.4]

Tulaine: [00:23:31] Ultimately, Usha knows that our beliefs and mindsets must be changed. If our goal is to change systems. She is doing this by spreading a culture of radical generosity. [00:23:43][11.7]

Asha: [00:23:44] You know, financial donations are incredibly important. You know, they keep civil society running, and civil societies is absolutely crucial. People would die without it. But a better world will never be built upon more donations alone. We could triple all financial donations to nonprofits in this country right this minute. A lot more people would be fed and a lot more people would be sheltered. And there would be a lot more symphonies. But at the end of the day, we wouldn't actually be building a better world where people just treat each other better and are more concerned for each other. That's the really transformational part, and you never know when somebody takes that one step there. You know, somebody was inspired to get all of their neighbors to put potted plants on each other's doorsteps on Tuesday. Like, did that save any lives? Nope. Would people have been fine without doing that? Yep. Was it a lovely idea just to bring a little bit of brightness and to rally the neighborhood and to get everybody together and, you know, Yes, it was lovely. And you never know when you see that kind of tiny step. Right? And I celebrate ineffective giving if it means that the person is going to blossom in their own generosity, because that is itself an impact. Right. So if somebody gives to a cause that somebody else would deem to be not the most important cause or not the way that that person could have made the most difference. But in giving that $20 or that 10 hours of volunteerism or that voice and advocacy, that person sets themselves on a path to become a transformed human being, a person who is utterly driven by their own deep value of generosity, and they end up affecting so many other lives. Right. And then they raise children who then see that a raised with that core value and become people in the world who do a lot of good and their neighbors become inspired by them, their friends become inspired by them, their mayor starts to notice them and etc., etc.. Like these are all things that actually happen when people start engaging in generosity to only look at the number of bed nets that are purchased just entirely leaves out this part of the narrative and it's part of the equation that for me is the most transformational. [00:26:00][136.0]

Tulaine: [00:26:03] Before we end each episode of System Catalysts, we ask our guests questions Rapid fire style. Here's the one Jeff had with Aisha. [00:26:11][7.8]

Jeff: [00:26:13] What's one word to describe your journey as a system catalyst? [00:26:16][2.6]

Asha: [00:26:17] Emergence. [00:26:17][0.0]

Jeff: [00:26:19] What's been one of the most gratifying moments along this journey? [00:26:21][2.3]

Asha: [00:26:22] Oh, that is so, so hard to nail down every single time someone says I was moved to do something because these two words exist. I was moved to cook a lasagna for a neighbor or a local community center or place a potted plant or make a donation. Those are the moments it just fills my heart. Likewise, when an organization says we blew past our giving Tuesday goal and X number of people will be affected in this positive way. I could go on and on, but I will stop. [00:26:54][31.7]

Jeff: [00:26:55] What about your organization? Keeps you up at night? [00:26:57][1.8]

Asha: [00:26:59] Being responsible for the livelihood of other people should keep every CEO up at night. I want us to stay on a path of growth, and I think most of all, I want us to always stay true to our values. What keeps me up at night is the idea of somehow betraying one of the core guiding principles that makes giving Tuesday as special as it is. [00:27:18][19.2]

Jeff: [00:27:19] For listeners who aspire to be a system catalyst. Where and how do you think they should start? [00:27:24][4.4]

Asha: [00:27:26] Well, reading new powers is a good place to start. But I think that really the key thing is to create as many ambassadors for your idea as you possibly can and try to give it away and then try to let it go. If people do their own thing with it, then they will consider themselves a co-owner of whatever it is that you want to happen, and they'll be pushing your mission forward. So there's a there's a real strategic wisdom to the idea of creating an idea that is meant to be given away to lots and lots of people. But letting go can be hard. If I were to say what I think I view as the most common roadblock to people actually doing it, even when they say they want to, it's that that sort of balking at letting go of control, but it's a really necessary thing to get past. [00:28:15][49.3]

If you want to learn more about giving Tuesday, head on over to givingtuesday.com