Philanthropy

Tis Better to Give Than to Receive

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Yeah, Yeah. Yeah. What­ev­er. Isn’t that just some­thing your mom always told you so that you would­n’t be upset when your sib­lings got bet­ter gifts than you? Well, lo and behold, maybe Mom was right!

Researchers have found that the mesolim­bic path­way is acti­vat­ed by char­i­ta­ble giv­ing. This area is one of the major path­ways where you find the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter dopamine, which is asso­ci­at­ed with the brain’s plea­sure sys­tem. Fur­ther­more, donat­ing also appears to increase the release of oxy­tocin, a hor­mone that acts as a neu­ro­trans­mit­ter and is involved in social bond­ing and build­ing trust between people.
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“Everyone a Changemaker”, Ashoka and Google

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What an event yes­ter­day night. My wife and I were for­tu­nate to vis­it the Google Cam­pus and attend the Sixth Annu­al North Amer­i­can Fel­low­ship Induc­tion Pro­gram of Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Pub­lic, a social ven­ture fund where we have been involved for a num­ber of years, and thanks to which (thanks Michele!) my wife and I met in the first place.

18 new Ashoka Fellows/ social entre­pre­neurs were elect­ed, and after a fun cock­tail recep­tion the cer­e­mo­ny began. Sergei Brin (Google Co-founder), Sheryl Sand­berg (who helped launch Google Foun­da­tion and google.org), Salar Kaman­gar (the mind behind AdWords) gave intro­duc­to­ry remarks. Salar explained how he first heard of Ashoka (through the book How to Change the World, by David Born­stein) and how he saw tremen­dous sim­i­lar­i­ties between Ashoka and Google: both [Read more…] about “Every­one a Change­mak­er”, Ashoka and Google

Microfinance, and a very sharp brain

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We would like to join oth­er blog­gers in con­grat­u­lat­ing Muham­mad Yunus for hav­ing been award­ed the Nobel Peace Price.

The gen­e­sis of micro­fi­nance, in Pro­fes­sor Yunus’ own words.

Not often can we find per­son­i­fied exam­ples of what we write about. For 3 out of the last 4 entries in this blog, I can not think of a bet­ter exam­ple than Muham­mad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank-that launched the field of micro­fi­nance.

The entries:

- The Learn­ing Cycle, includ­ing Con­crete Expe­ri­ence and Active Test­ing: in 1976, when he was a Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics, he gave a small loan to a num­ber of vil­lagers. He did­n’t preach. He acted.

- Reflec­tion, that led him to an Aha! moment : “If you can make so many peo­ple so hap­py with such a small amount of mon­ey, why should­n’t you do more of it”? (quot­ed in NY Times today). His direct expe­ri­ence, and this Reflec­tion, gave him the moti­va­tion to try and lit­er­al­ly change the way many poor peo­ple live world­wide. It led to the birth of microfinance.

- The joy of giv­ing: I am sure Muham­mad Yunus, and thou­sands of peo­ple involved in his work, has been amply reward­ed with free dopamine and oxy­tocin. To quote today’s Finan­cial Times, “With­out col­lat­er­al, the sys­tem has to rely on trust and social inter­ac­tion to secure repay­ments. It is these fun­da­men­tal aspects of human nature that can help for­ward not only devel­op­ment, but also peace”.

Plus, giv­en that he has announced he will donate the $1.4m prize mon­ey, we can pre­dict an even high­er dopamine and oxy­tocin release in his brain, cer­tain­ly high­er than in the brain of the writer of this sur­pris­ing arti­cle.

Good news: there is a sol­id pipeline of future Muham­mad Yunus­es, opti­mist and prag­mat­ic social entre­pre­neurs (“New Heroes”, accord­ing to PBS):
— A great book titled How To Change The World, that pro­files the field and some of its most inspir­ing participants
— The pio­neers in sup­port­ing social entre­pre­neurs world­wide: Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Public
— Anoth­er great foun­da­tion: The Schwab Foun­da­tion for Social Entrepreneurship
— The Change­mak­ers community
— And of course, Con­stant Learn­ing at Grameen

Final­ly, a post on resilien­cy. Enjoy the weekend.

Microfinance and a Very Sharp Brain

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We would like to join oth­er blog­gers in con­grat­u­lat­ing Muham­mad Yunus for hav­ing been award­ed the Nobel Peace Price.
[Read more…] about Micro­fi­nance and a Very Sharp Brain

The joy of giving, and the Cognitive and Emotional Health Project: The Healthy Brain

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Great arti­cle in this week’s The Econ­o­mist on The joy of giv­ing: Donat­ing to char­i­ty rewards the brain. Some quotes:

“Researchers at the Nation­al Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke in Bethes­da, Mary­land, want­ed to find the neur­al basis for unselfish acts. They decid­ed to peek into the brains of 19 vol­un­teers who were choos­ing whether to give mon­ey to char­i­ty, or keep it for them­selves. To do so, they used a stan­dard tech­nique called func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing, which can map the activ­i­ty of the var­i­ous parts of the brain. The results were report­ed in this week’s Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.”

…
“the researchers were able to exam­ine what went on inside each per­son­’s head as they made deci­sions based on moral beliefs. They found that the part of the brain that was active when a per­son donat­ed hap­pened to be the brain’s reward centre—the mesolim­bic path­way, to give it its prop­er name—responsible for dol­ing out the dopamine-medi­at­ed eupho­ria asso­ci­at­ed with sex, mon­ey, food and drugs. Thus the warm glow that accom­pa­nies char­i­ta­ble giv­ing has a phys­i­o­log­i­cal basis.”
…
“Donat­ing also engaged the part of the brain that plays a role in the bond­ing behav­iour between moth­er and child, and in roman­tic love. This involves oxy­tocin, a hor­mone that increas­es trust and co-oper­a­tion.”

You may won­der why the Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke is inves­ti­gat­ing this (hmm, is giv­ing to char­i­ty a Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­der?), but the Insti­tute is part of a part­ner­ship called Cog­ni­tive and Emo­tion­al Health Project: The Healthy Brain, among the Nation­al Insti­tute on Aging, the Nation­al Insti­tute of Men­tal Health and the Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke, that aims to “assess the state of epi­demi­o­log­ic research on demo­graph­ic, social and bio­log­ic deter­mi­nants of cog­ni­tive and emo­tion­al health in aging pop­u­la­tions, and the path­ways by which cog­ni­tive and emo­tion­al health may rec­i­p­ro­cal­ly influ­ence each oth­er. As a first step, a com­pre­hen­sive review of mea­sures that have been (or could be) used in epi­demi­o­log­ic research was under­tak­en. Mea­sures in four domains are reviewed: (1) cog­ni­tive health, (2) emo­tion­al health, (3) demographic/social fac­tors, and (4) biomedical/physiologic factors.”

Proven. Anoth­er mus­cle to train in a good Brain and Mind Fit­ness Pro­gram. Giv­ing to char­i­ties we care about, and doing unselfish acts.

On being positive

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One day after 9/11, I would like to depart a bit from the pri­ma­ry focus of this blog and add some per­son­al reflec­tions onBe­ing Pos­i­tive and on Appre­ci­a­tion, which is what we prob­a­bly need to sur­vive in these times.

I remem­ber a few years ago when, over brunch, my good friend Rohit pro­posed that Hap­pi­ness = Real­i­ty — Expectations. 

(Play with it. It is powerful)

A few months lat­er after this dis­cov­ery, at a pub­lic con­cert, while some friends were hav­ing a live­ly debate on this equa­tion, a near­by stranger pro­posed a nice refinement:

Hap­pi­ness = (Appre­ci­a­tion, of what we have, and can do) x ( Real­i­ty — Expectations)

Which is nice­ly phrased in the sen­tence I have read in a num­ber of places

We need Seren­i­ty to accept
the things that can­not be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and Wis­dom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Mahat­ma Gand­hi encour­aged us to “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

There is much good around us, and much more good of us can do. We prob­a­bly would ben­e­fit from hav­ing eas­i­er access to a CNN of Pos­i­tive News, of Kind Ges­tures, Unex­pect­ed Gen­eros­i­ty, Mag­ic Coin­ci­dences, Beau­ti­ful Growth.

Some con­stant sources of per­son­al inspi­ra­tion, encour­age­ment, and Appreciation:

- Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Pub­lic, and their con­vic­tion that “Every­one is a changemaker”

- The Schwab Foun­da­tion for Social Entre­pre­neurs, that sup­ports amaz­ing and inspir­ing agents of change worldwide.

No mat­ter our reli­gion, or lack there­of, we can ben­e­fit from what the book Daniel Gole­man’s Destruc­tive Emo­tions: How Can We over­come Them pro­pos­es as “A Gym for Emo­tion­al Skills.” Neu­ro­sci­en­tist Anto­nio Dama­sio opened new ground in his sem­i­nal Descartes Error book on the role of emo­tions in our decision-making.

How can one train this mus­cle of Appre­ci­a­tion? Well, no clin­i­cal stud­ies here, but my wife and I like to reg­u­lar­ly do an exer­cise pro­posed by Jef­frey Brant­ley in Five Good Min­utes: 100 Morn­ing Prac­tices To Help You Stay Calm & Focused All Day Long:

First, trav­el back, in your mind’s eye, to a time when you felt a healthy exhaus­tion, and let you relive that moment as vivid­ly as you can.

Then, remem­ber, re-expe­ri­ence, a lov­ing exchange that real­ly touched you. Pause. See the moment. Smell it. Hear what hap­pened around you.

Next, visu­al­ize the most car­ing ges­ture you have ever received, as full of details as pos­si­ble. Who gave you that gift of car­ing. How you felt.

Now, trav­el to the most mag­nif­i­cent place you have seen. Enjoy the views. Pause. Lis­ten. Smile. Appreciate.

Good night