When it comes to charitable giving, perhaps what drives us isn’t so different after all. 

I’ve worked in Australia’s charity sector for some seven years. Starting out in service delivery it wasn’t long before my work evolved to the into the inevitable world of funding.

Slowly but surely, I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with thoughts on who’s responsible for the funds behind charitable work? What models harness the best outcomes? And what on earth makes it all possible? In essence, what drives us to give.

Is it status or guilt? Perhaps family traditions. Or hey, it might just be possible – sheer passion for a better world.

I’ve been plowing through the research, following the data. But sitting around the table with friends over the weekend, it was clearly time to take my head out of the books.

Updates weren’t of the boyfriend’s cooking and his furniture choices (which let me assure you have spurred their own rein of sagas). Instead it was the four-day week he’d managed with work. Cutting down his hours was reaping the benefits – volunteering just one of them.

Looking to fill his cup, he’d started to help people with their hoarding issues. He’d found it online and was now involved with the charity service each week.

My other friends chimed in. One had just spent the last two weeks with an elderly woman she provides company to through Red Cross. Apparently something she’d done for years? Since seeing her last, my old housemate had also picked up a voluntary tutoring role for a boy with learning difficulties.

Despite the initial challenges, six months in she was making headway. Out came the cocktail of feelings. Self-doubt and uselessness turning up each week. But somewhere in there a distinctive drive to improve the reading experience of someone who struggles finishing a book.

I had never thought to ask my friends what they thought of charitable giving. Whether in fact they supported it at all. But I did. The list got long. Overwhelming even.

One friend aimed to give a set percentage of her income. The other was happy giving $30 or $35 to a charity each week, and another gave to local services she didn’t have the time to support. Lastly, a friend with a stretched bank account, and strapped schedule, couldn’t do much at all.

These people are not high income earners. They’re in their late 20’s and early 30’s, mostly single, paying their rent, their car repayments and university loans. And whether it’s now or yesterday – they’d all integrated charitable giving into their lives in some form at some point.

How much, how to and what to give were big points of discussion. Why wasn’t one of them.

“Because we have it just so good.”

“It’s not so much a matter of deserve. It’s that I don’t need it. And others do.”

And that’s just it. Those who typically give the highest portion of their income and time are indeed not the most financially secure in Australia, they’re often the low to middle income earners. They’re those with lived experience and awareness of the unequal stepping stones we have laid out in front of us.

Even when looking globally, it’s Burma that gets the ribbon for most generous country – in volunteering, financial donations and acts of kindness. And I don’t have to spell out that Burma hardly has the thriving economy of Wall Street.

I scribbled down our conversation thinking that it all sounded a little heavy, but then again, that wasn’t the impression I had at the time. At the time, giving was thrown about in the same tone and conversation as the pottery class one of my friends had started.  The yoga session we were all trying to squeeze in.

Volunteering and donating was something they wanting to make space for. Not so much having to make space for. Just possibly, giving fills their cup. It isn’t always easy and won’t always be possible – like going for a run and other things that we know are good for us.

Without getting too excited, I did manage to pull back on sharing fun facts around the health benefits they were likely to gain from doing so. Cause firstly, they weren’t that fun. And secondly, it’s one of the few healthy activities that knowing the benefits far from a placebo affect actually undercuts them altogether.

No one needed that bubble to be burst. Certainly, not after all the fried food we’d just devoured.

Emma Lang is Good2Give’s Marketing Communications Coordinator, consummate blogger, social media guru and connoisseur of fried food.