Guide to Giving Circles: Pooling resources to support change and build community 🤲 Joelle Berman and LiJia Gong

Get Together

“This is about everyday people coming together with their friends, with their families, with their community, with their colleagues and saying that they have a voice and that they want to use it in a constructive and powerful way in their communities. It just happens to be that we're dealing in philanthropy.” - Joelle Berman

In this episode, we sit down with two bad**s women for a conversation on the joy and challenges of giving circles–how to get one started, how to reach a consensus as a group, and how to celebrate along the way.

In 2015, LiJia Gong attended marches and supported the #BlackLivesMatter movement. She felt inspired to do more. So she and three friends started gathering, exploring how they might use the bonds of their friendship and shared values to reduce inequality. Their giving circle "Radfund" was born from these conversations. The friends pledged to pool 1% of their annual income and 0.1% of their wealth annually to support organizers in NYC doing the work to challenge structural inequality and fight for racial and economic justice. In this episode, LiJia will share stories and insights she’s learned from building a "political home" for herself and her friends.

Joelle Berman was recently the founding Executive Director of Amplifier, a global network of 125+ giving circles inspired by Jewish values. From that position supporting so many different giving circles, she had a rare view of the ecosystem as a whole, and was able to pinpoint trends and best practices. (Shout out to Amplifier's founder, Felicia Herman, and Amplifier's current CEO, Liz Fisher, for their work continuing to spread the power of collective giving!)

From their respective experiences as giving circle practitioners and experts, Joelle and LiJia will share how to build a political home and community around the shared activity of giving. Hear more from other community leaders about stage 1 in getting your people together, 🔥sparking the flame by doing something together: https://gettogetherbook.com/resources#spark-the-flame

📙Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building 🔥: bit.ly/gettogetherbook

👋Say hi and learn more about work we do with passionate, community-centered organizations, visit: http://people-and.com/