Full disclosure: Chai Lifeline is a client. I have spent years telling their story professionally, placing coverage of the camps, the crisis teams, the volunteers who show up when a family hears the worst sentence a doctor can say. I thought I knew the organization. Then I joined a WhatsApp chat, and I realized I had only known the press releases.
I should back up. Before the summer, I was in a slump. Not a crisis, nothing dramatic, just that flat stretch every founder knows when the work that usually energizes you starts feeling like a treadmill. I was hanging out with a friend before we both left for the season, and I admitted it to him. His answer surprised me. When I feel that way, he said, I give more. It sounds counterintuitive. When your tank feels empty, the last instinct is to pour out what is left. But he insisted that the math works backwards: Giving is the thing that refills you.
Around the same time, that WhatsApp group was sitting quietly on my phone with more than 1,000 members. What flows through it is not what you would expect. A request appears, posted anonymously on behalf of a family with a child fighting an illness. And then, within five minutes, 10 at the most, a collective of anonymous strangers covers it. Completely. Every time.
I have watched this group buy hats for an entire neighborhood of kids so that a child starting chemotherapy would never feel like the only one wearing one. I have watched it fund a night out for a couple whose child is in long-term treatment because a marriage needs oxygen as well, and parents of sick children almost never give themselves permission to breathe. I have watched it pay for a choir for a child in treatment who finds joy in singing, and for cleaning help for a mother who is spending her days in a hospital chair, and for a hundred other requests that no grant application on earth has a checkbox for.
That is the genius of it.
Institutional philanthropy funds programs. This funds moments. The requests are specific, human and small enough that no single giver carries them alone, which is exactly why they get covered at the speed of a group text.
Our tradition saw this coming. The Rambam taught that among the highest forms of tzedakah is giving where the donor does not know the recipient and the recipient does not know the donor. For eight centuries, that ideal required intermediaries, communal funds and paperwork.
It turns out it also runs beautifully on a group chat. Matan b’seter, “giving in secret,” is not a relic of another era. It is a thousand phones lighting up at two in the afternoon, and a family’s burden lifting before dinner, with no plaque, no donor wall and no name attached in either direction.
So I took my friend’s advice and changed one habit. Instead of just watching the chat for great stories and the professional reflex, I started giving every time something posted: $100 here, whatever I could there, in the middle of ordinary workdays, between calls and deadlines.
He was right. It became something close to an addiction, except the kind you would wish on everyone. There is a particular feeling in stopping mid-afternoon, sending money to a family you will never meet and watching the request close before your coffee is cold. The slump did not survive it.
There is a lesson here for those of us who work in and around Jewish philanthropy, and I say this as someone whose job is to get attention for good causes.
We spend our conferences debating donor pipelines, engagement strategies and how to reach the next generation of givers. Meanwhile, the most powerful giving vehicle I have ever seen is not a gala or a matching campaign or an endowment. It is a group chat where 1,000 people have quietly agreed on a single premise: When a family carrying the unimaginable asks for something, the answer arrives in minutes, and no one takes credit for it.
Zero friction, total trust, instant impact. Every institution asking how to make giving feel alive again should study why this works: The ask is concrete, the response is communal, and the reward is immediate. That is not a technology insight. That is a design insight, and it is portable.
The opportunity was staring at me from my phone the whole time. I suspect one is staring at you, too. Find a chat like this in your community or join ours. Start with a slump if you have one; it won’t last long. Stop in the middle of your day, send $20 and change the shape of someone’s week.
My friend was right about the counterintuitive math. The fastest way out of an empty stretch is to fill someone else’s.
