An annual day of charity now in its 13th year, Giving Tuesday is a global phenomenon drawing thousands of individuals and organizations worldwide to give back to their communities through donations, volunteer work, acts of kindness and other forms of giving on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.
Giving Tuesday is a “global generosity movement that is present in 110 countries around the world, and is simply a day for giving back,” said Asha Curran, CEO of GivingTuesday — the nonprofit organization now running the annual movement for charity.
According to Curran, the annual movement did not begin globally. Rather, it originated back in 2012 as more of a “social media experiment” based in the United States, an experiment that would seek to test if people would respond to the idea that a “day for giving back could follow the days of consumption: Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
“We were hoping that the answer would be yes,” Curran said, “but I don’t think that we were expecting that it would be such a resounding, and loud, and global ‘yes.’”
That “yes” has continued to be as resounding ever since then, she explained, adding it is comforting to know “people really will choose generosity when you put that option in front of them.”
Since the movement was originally co-founded in 2012 by 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation, Giving Tuesday has raised more than $20 billion in the United States alone, and is now run by its own independent nonprofit.
This nonprofit is composed of about 70 staff members, and is joined by a distributed system of leaders, participants and youth ambassadors worldwide. “So we’re actually quite a small nonprofit that is sitting at the center of this global movement,” Curran said.
She then added that while the movement didn’t originate as a global one, people and organizations spanning anywhere from “Brazil to Tanzania, to Colombia, to Romania” have looked for ways to join in and give back.
“It just didn’t really occur to us that it would be a global thing,” Curran said. But “at this point, it is truly a global phenomenon.
“We have official leadership in 110 countries, but there is Giving Tuesday activity in every country on earth, and we’ve even had activity on the International Space Station and in Antarctica. So we can truly say every single continent, all over the globe.”
This global growth and activity continues all year round and not just on the day itself, Curran said. She highlighted three ways this growth is manifest and said Giving Tuesday is a celebration of each human’s ability to “make change in their own communities.”
First of all, there’s the “growth of money,” she said. Then there’s the “global growth” that is seen both by the number of countries participating and the depth of work that is reaching those countries. And lastly, there’s growth in terms of data.
“About half of our work is really uncovering learnings about the effects of generosity behaviors,” she said. “Generosity can take so many forms, and our data work is really devoted to understanding the full landscape of generosity behaviors and how they affect the world, how they make communities better (and) how they address different causes.”
This morning, Curran woke up to the news of one community doing a “charity run in the shape of a heart,” she said. And through the years, she said she has seen diverse countries and communities host Giving Tuesday launch events, gatherings where local nonprofits and community members can interact, blood drives, toy drives, and food and clothing drives, among other charity events.
“Giving Tuesday is best used as a day to try something new,” she said. So she encouraged individuals, communities and organizations to get involved.
“I hope that on this year in particular,” she said, “we will find a way to connect with someone in our community who might be a stranger to us. … We’re really in a state of crisis right now, and so much of what is wrong, so much of what ails us, has a simpler explanation than we think, and that is simply extending care to our friends, to our neighbors, … to strangers and to our communities.
“So I hope that people are able to do even one small act and feel the profound reward of that.”
This reward includes feeling greater happiness, health and connection, Curran explained.
“We know we have huge problems with disconnection, with social isolation, with loneliness. We know that online we see just this tremendous amount of cynicism (and) outrage, and well, generosity is the antidote to every single one of those things.”
To get involved, Curran recommended interested individuals to search hashtag #GivingTuesday on social media and see what their area’s organizations and nonprofits are doing. She also recommended individuals visit the “Generosity Toolbox” on GivingTuesday’s website for more ideas on how to give in a variety of ways.
In Utah, some options for monetary donations include the Light the World Giving Machines located in Logan, Ogden, Orem, Salt Lake City and St. George. Utah Food Bank is also taking donations, with an anonymous donor giving $3 for every $1 donated, up to $85,000.