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Hali Lee and a group of friends gather regularly. They have meals together, travel together, do cultural things together. Over the 20 years they’ve known each other, they’ve married and divorced, had babies and sent them to college, mourned and celebrated career changes, and helped care for elderly parents.
“We’ve just lived a lot of life together,” Lee said.
This group started, however, simply as a giving circle — a group of Asian American women who wanted to pool their donations and collectively decide how to have impact. The group, she believes, is an example of the “Big We.”
That’s the name of a new book by Lee that argues giving circles and mutual aid foster community and a sense of belonging — antidotes to what experts describe as our “loneliness crisis.” Lee recently joined Chronicle deputy opinion editor Nandita Raghuram in a Commons in Conversation interview to discuss the book. They talked about what Lee describes as the atomizing effect of large foundations and billionaire donors (“Big Philanthropy”), the breakdown of connectedness in America, and the unifying power of collective giving.
Watch the discussion on the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s YouTube channel. Below are some highlights. Also, see all of our previous Commons in Conversation interviews.
Interview Excerpts
“We in this country have often had sort of a worship of the individual — you know, ‘Go out West, young man, and found a country or a religion.’ ... We love to idolize heroes. One person doing an amazing thing — and one person can do amazing things. One person can have an amazing idea, but, in fact, it’s usually a group of people who are coming together around that good idea to make change together.”
“If we think about the things that we’ve done in our lives, sure, there’s individual effort and good ideas as part of it. And hard work. But if we really think about how we got to where we got, there’s almost always the story of a parent or grandparent or an auntie or ... a coach or a mentor who helped us get there. And that’s a more truthful way of making social change. It’s usually not going to be one person who has this idea and does everything. They’re usually organizing friends, neighbors, colleagues, compadres in the work to get the thing done.”
“Relying on Big Phil inspires a sort of passivity in the rest of us, and our system doesn’t work if we are passive. Our system works when we, the citizens of the United States, care enough to get educated and take action to address the things that we are concerned about.”
“I called my book The Big We because I think that this relentless focus on individuals is literally killing us and our planet. And if we can — at least some of the time and hopefully more of the time — try to shift from a me thinking ‘me, me, me, my, my, mine, I.’ If we can shift from that kind of thinking to a ‘we’ and an ‘our’ and an ‘us’ kind of thinking, then that will help us feel more connected to a group and feel belonging.”
“It is in these [giving circles] that we can talk about rats and trees on my block, which might lead to one or two of us going to a city council meeting, which is part of being civically engaged. Which might mean to some of us, not all of us, going to a hearing or a march or a protest or two. And it might lead to some of us voting more and running for office more.”
