Building and saving community through giving circles

Twenty years after she began the Asian Women Giving Circle, Hali Lee is ready to tell her story about being a philanthropist. In her newly released book, “The Big We,” Lee talks about the importance of community during tough times and how it is time for society to no longer rely on billionaires to change society.

The knowledge she shares stems from her childhood. Born in South Korea and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Lee and her brother were one of the very few Asians at school. Later, as a student at Princeton University, Lee again struggled to find girlfriends among the Asian-American student body, who tended to be international students or had different social and political views. 

It was during graduate school at NYU to study social work that Lee started the Asian Women Giving Circle, a nonprofit that funds art projects for Asian-American women and gender-expansive artists and art communities. The idea to focus on the arts came from the nonprofit’s members, all ten of them, having careers in the arts or in social impact jobs. Many of the art projects funded over the past two decades have been focused on social issues. These include a documentary film called “The Muslims Are Coming,” which followed Muslim women comedians addressing Islamophobia in their shows; the theatrical production of “Claiming Our Voice,” about South Asian immigrant women low-wage workers; and the public art project “Here to Stay,” about gentrification in Chinatown. Lee says more than 100 projects have been funded in the last two decades, with six to twelve selected each year. 

Lee admits that she originally started the Giving Circle to at last make friends with Asian women. But by doing so, she has created a sisterhood that she relies on 20 years later. It has also taught her how important it is to have community with others and for those communities to help one another rather than wait for someone from the outside with resources to help out instead. City & State spoke with Lee about what she’s learned as a philanthropist and how that could solve the nationwide loneliness epidemic. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What made you choose to fund the arts? 

There were 10 women in the first iteration of the Asian Women Giving Circle, and I realized that the 10 of us, we were artists, or wannabe artists, and we were also social impact, social change people. So I had this idea in the shower that what could kind of unite all of us and keep us really interested in this project we were embarking on, which is to pull our money and time to do good, which is what a giving circle is. It’s getting together with friends, neighbors, colleagues, college roommates, book group mates, getting groups together to do good together. And it was a thing that spoke to all of our interests. So arts and social change, arts and activism. And it was sticky enough and fun enough that here we are 20, almost 20 years later, funding, raising money and funding in the same area, and it's been really gratifying. 

There were 10 of you at first. How many are you now?  

There's about 25 of us in the steering committee, but about 200 women (who) give us money every year. 

Are you involved in any other giving circles?  

There's a few of these State’s Project Giving Circles in New York City, and one of them is a Downtown Nasty Women Social Group, and I'm a member of that giving circle. And the whole point of these giving circles – and it's mostly women, and they're around the country, but New York City has several of them – is to raise money towards flipping state legislatures around the country from red to blue, and it doesn't have to be in your state. So the one I'm part of sent money to Texas and Michigan, for example. And I'm a fan of that. It's often women. It's giving circles, pulling money to get involved in the political sphere. The Downtown Nasty Women's Social Group, probably the core group is 20 women. But when they have a party, 150 people will come.

The Asian Women Giving Circle has gone from a small group to a big nonprofit. What have you learned?  

I have learned that the future of philanthropy is collective. I have learned that often it's women – not only, but often, it's women – who come together and do good. The first third of my book is kind of a critique, nice but firm critique of “billionaire rich guy knows best” style of philanthropy, which has been kind of the pervasive form in the last 10 or 20 years. I nickname that kind of philanthropy “Big Phil.” And at the end of Part 1, I ask Big Phil, firmly but kindly, to step aside and retire in peace to make way for the rest of us. And the next two-thirds of my book, which is the meat of my book, is really the story of regular, non-billionaire Americans coming together to pull their time, volunteer time (and) expertise. They can lend their pro bono, low bono services, and their money to do good together. I tell the stories of lots of these giving circles around the country. They might be mutual aid groups. They might be book groups that get political. They might be like my Stitch ’n Bitch. The Downtown Nasties show up in my book. The Asian Women Giving Circle and some of our sister and brother circles around the country show up in my book. 

Why is it that you believe it's time for Big Phil? 

There's been lots of critiques about big philanthropy, Big Phil in my book, and they were written by Anand Giridharas and Rob Reich. They're super smart, good books that were out maybe three or five years ago, so I don't need to rehash it, but their main critique is that Big Philanthropy, like these billionaire, usually men philanthropists, don't have any incentive to change the systems that made them so rich to begin with. If we care about changing the system so that it's more fair for more of us, we cannot rely on them to do so. 

If you can put an image in your head that I think snapshots this story perfectly, think about Donald Trump’s inauguration. On the dais right behind him were sitting Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, those three men who are Big Phil's cousins, right? Two of them aren't actually that philanthropic. Those three men control as much wealth as 50% of Americans. Those three men control as much wealth as 170 million of the rest of us. And that's not fair. It's kind of gross, it's not fair, and it's not very democratic, in my view. So to that critique that Anand and Rob Reich make beautifully in their books, which is that the billionaires have a different incentive than the rest of us, I would add another critique, and I do that in my book, which is that relying on Big Phil to save us inspires a sort of passivity in the rest of us, and our democratic system doesn't work if we are passive. 

Our system works best and works only when we the citizens, we the people – that would be me and hopefully the readers of my book – care enough to get educated, get involved and join with their friends, neighbors, colleagues, book group mates to do something. That is called civic engagement. And if there was ever a time to exercise our civic engagement muscles, it is now. I think that giving circles, coming together in groups to do good, are a great way – not the only way, but a great way – to exercise our civic engagement muscles.

The title of your book is “The Big We.” Is it referring to “We the People,” as in the average person and democracy in that sense? 

That's exactly what I'm referring to, as opposed to the Big Me, which is Big Phil. I ask everyone who reads my book to shift their stance in a way from Big Me, like: “I alone can fix it, I as an autocrat or a dictator or as a leader.” That's one style of thinking about our country and our world and how we can make change, versus a “we” position (which) is: “What can I do together with my neighbors, friends, colleagues, college roommates, Stitch ’n Bitch mates, book roommates, in order to do good together?” In my opinion, if we can have that stance from a “me” to a “we,” it fundamentally changes the way we think about social change and doing good in our neighborhoods and doing good in our communities.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Most people are pretty hungry; my sense is that loneliness in America is literally killing us. People are dying deaths of loneliness and despair, and it’s been beautifully written (about) by Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times and Robert Putnam and others. So what are we going to do about it? What's the antidote to loneliness? I think it's belonging. What are the things that we can do as citizens, as neighbors, as sisters, as friends, as moms and daughters and aunties and uncles, to create more belonging and more community in the places where we're able? Really, I'm hoping that my book can engage with those ideas as well. 

I see it around me, you know. The kids around my kids’ ages are – some of them are kind of lost in their worlds of gaming and social media, and they don't have friends. We don't go to church. These kids don't go to college anymore, you know, they're out, or they've dropped out of college. What can we do as adults to help those kids, provide those kids some sort of social structure that can build in some belonging when we don't have church and we don't have dormitories and we don't have civic clubs?

One thing I think I've seen from doing the research for this book is that mayors around the world are realizing what the economic cost of loneliness is, and they're trying to figure out things that they can do as civic leaders. The ideas are really fascinating. They range from installing chatty benches in parks to encourage people to talk to one another. Mayors around the world are figuring out ways to create bartering centers within elderly care facilities to encourage people to drop in, to trade vacuum cleaners for blenders, and also talk with the folks in the elderly care center. At the same time, there's lots of people getting kind of creative about sort of making people come together in ways that benefit them. So what I'm hoping to do with my book is to add to that conversation by suggesting that bringing people together around kitchen tables, in living rooms, in parks, at restaurants, in order to talk. Giving circles are an almost free or cheap way to get people to come together, to do things together in groups, which is a way of having efficacy, building community and building belonging, which I think is a really good way to combat the loneliness epidemic that's kind of killing us.

What does the future hold for Hali Lee? 

I want to keep spreading the word about the power of groups. I think the future of philanthropy is collective. I'm not a politician or a sociologist, but I think the future of our democracy is collective. I think we need to move away from this selfish “me” frame to a more expansive “we” frame, and I want to be on that bandwagon until I can't any longer.