The Season of Giving: Time to Rewrite the Rules?
By: Rachel Hodgdon
Tags: Volunteering, Leadership, Purpose, Wellness, Giving

Photo credit: IWBI

For many of us, gift-giving is a favorite holiday ritual — a symbolic act of sharing abundance that’s deeply rooted in a variety of seasonal traditions.

This year, though, take the time to pause and think about giving in a different way; to consider the closing days of 2020 as an opportunity to not only expand our gift repertoire beyond the latest must-have consumables, but also to bask in the joy that accompanies the pure act of giving back.

We know that the pandemic has disproportionately affected some of the most vulnerable people on the planet, exacerbating existing inequities and creating the conditions for even greater hardships. Even among our own friends-and-family networks, there will be some who are anticipating the customary gift exchange with anxiety rather than anticipation.

We have the power to change the narrative. By decoupling the act of giving from its material tendencies, we can recalibrate our own holiday expectations and establish new customs that are simpler and more emotionally rewarding. We don’t have to give “things” — we can give our time, share experiences and make memories.

Giving makes us happy. Studies repeatedly show that givers not only enjoy a spontaneous glow of satisfaction from selfless engagement with others but also experience longer-term physical and mental health benefits, including lower blood pressure and stress levels, as well as higher measures of self-esteem and happiness. Even, perhaps, giving themselves the gift of a longer life.

It doesn’t appear to matter much what form your giving takes — donating funds, volunteering or supporting friends through difficult times — it all contributes to a greater personal sense of well-being.

It’s easy to confuse the joy of giving with the adrenaline rush we get from treating ourselves to online shopping — heightened, perhaps, by our desire to bag ourselves a Black Friday bargain or get in on the Cyber Monday madness. But it doesn’t compare to the lasting sense of fulfilment we derive from the purely altruistic act of giving.

It’s an approach that can be embraced at an organizational level, too.

Civic Engagement is a feature in WELL’s Community concept that promotes project involvement with local community initiatives. At IWBI, each staff member receives one day of paid volunteer time off (VTO). This year some of our team members in the US volunteered at local polling sites in November’s elections, while others volunteered at neighborhood schools and organizations. More than two-thirds of our staff take advantage of this volunteer time off, some going above and beyond. Our director of Workplace Wellness, Susan Illman, gives her time to more than nine organizations and also connects other team members to volunteer opportunities.

Throughout 2020, we’ve been acutely conscious of the need for a global movement to redress the social, legal and economic imbalances that have only increased in 2020 and have stepped up our efforts to support underserved communities and oppose injustices.

Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve given 20 percent of WELL registration fees to Doctors Without Borders. Our donations have already exceeded $60K, placing IWBI in its top 10 percent of supporters. We also offer our support to organizations advancing racial and social justice. We’ve tripled our donation-matching initiative and are delighted that well over half our team took advantage of these funds, enabling us to donate a total of $10,000 to two dozen organizations. I donated to Equity Now and Legends Charter School run by my good friend Atasha James who headlined in our Power of Place webcast last June. In the last six months, IWBI has also contributed $5K per month to the Equal Justice Initiative.

This year we offered those who were out of work a chance to register for the WELL AP exam for $99; IWBI picked up the remainder of the tab. Members of our customer service team who fulfilled these requests reported feeling happy and proud to be able to service our community in this small way. All in all we supported 754 individuals in their professional advancement, opening up fresh opportunities in a growing market.

Focusing our engagement across these different ways of giving has offered us all a sense of purpose that’s helped us to stay grounded amid a period of universal turbulence. We know we can make a valuable contribution to global recovery efforts — a collective vision that’s been a powerful motivating force helping us to maintain our momentum even when our energy levels have flagged.

It has infused our work with a fresh urgency and given us an even greater desire to pursue an agenda that more closely aligns purpose with profit, a mandate that we have as a public benefit corporation. Let’s hope that a renewed sense of joy in the act of giving becomes a global phenomenon as well as a positive legacy of 2020.

Rachel Hodgdon is President and CEO of the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI), a public benefit corporation and the world’s leading organization focused on deploying people first places to advance a global culture of health.