One Women's Quest to Give $100 Away, Every Day

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2010-03-11 12:13:00 UTC
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Giving $100 a day, every single day for a year. Each day, a new cause. Each time, a new blog post to share the experience. For the next full year, this is Betty Londergan's life, and it's all happening live and online.

The way she tells it, Betty's giving was inspired by a few things. To begin with, over the last few years, she'd seen the collapse of her finances and savings, and figured that if she was going to lose her money, she might as well be giving it away. Second, she got excited about the idea of focusing on the upbeat and inspiring rather than the downbeat and dreary for a year. Third, as she puts it, "I’ll be doing penance for all the years I spent in advertising, working tirelessly to convince people to buy a whole bunch of crap they didn’t need."

It's a really fascinating experiment. I first heard of it because for the last two weeks, Betty has been supporting the aspiring entrepreneurs trying to raise money to get a slot at the inaugural Unreasonable Institute program. So far she's given to nine of the 34 projects trying to raise money.

The Unreasonable projects she's chosen to fund are a window into her larger approach to giving. From the sound and look of it, her philosophy is to find project that make her gut come alive, regardless of the particular emotion they elicit. As she puts it, she wants to find projects that "make [her] want to cry...make [her] feel ferociously protective..things that want to make [her] say Amen..[and] things that just make [her] feel good."

It's a pretty remarkable project. $37,000 is not an insignificant chunk of change for anyone not independently wealthy. But the thing that is most compelling to me is the public nature of it. This is basically a full-year live-action case study exploring the motivations for giving. As Betty articulates so well, she's a complicated person driven by a lot of different types of interests. Telling the story of all of those decisions does a huge service for a field constantly exploring motivations.

I'll also be really interested to see how her biases to support projects changes. Over the course of the year, will she end up getting really interested in one type of group or another, learn more about an industry and think differently about past gifts? Will she begin to rely on certain pipelines of information for giving ideas? Will she get bored or frustrated with the experience?

No matter what happens, we'll all learn something from it. Tune in at What Gives 365.

Photo Credit: MarcinMoga / Lolek

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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