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Chris Worman Sector is the safeguard for humanity. It is the wellspring of all that is good. And yet we have, again, undermined it by calling it voluntary, as if, as if it were voluntary to survive. (....)
Sanam That's Chris Wurman, the chief global strategist and partnership officer of Giving Tuesday. Hi, everyone. Welcome to If You Are In Charge with me, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. The show is brought to you by the Bijan Gheysra Foundation and my organization. ICANN, where for 20 years we've been working with women peacebuilders on stopping wars and violence around the world. Season two, episode two. And as you know, each week I speak to the world's doers and imaginers that are at the forefront of dealing with some of the biggest challenges that we face. And I do this because in my own universe, I work with women who become peacebuilders in war zones. And they are basically some of the most innovative, courageous people that I know. And I'm delighted to work with them because they inspire me each day. And I really wanted to have a podcast where we could talk to people who are inspirational and show us that there is a solution to every problem that we imagine. Now, this season, we really want to make an effort to stay in touch with you and to hear from you about ideas, suggestions for guests, topics and so forth. I wanted to share with you an email address to which you can write. It's info at ICANnpeacework.org. Info at ICANnpeacework.org. So if you have any ideas, please share with us. We will also upload a link to a newsletter that you can subscribe to to hear more. And for each episode, we will also share with you various links and resources if you want to learn more about the issues and the topics that we are talking about. So with that, a quick background on Chris and Giving Tuesday. It's an extraordinary movement available now where people can participate in 105 countries. It started in the U.S. and it came off the back of Thanksgiving and then Black Friday, which was all about consumption, and then Cyber Monday, which was even more about consumption. And Giving Tuesday was a way of trying to change the discourse and say to people, hey, you can give to causes, you can volunteer, you can participate in civic action and try and make the world a better place around the issues that you care about. So it's going to be an interesting conversation. An important one, given the news that we hear almost daily from coming from the U.S., but also across Europe of cuts in funding for social services, for international development assistance, and essentially a rise in funding for militarization. Now, as a peacebuilder, I really am challenged by what's happening because I look at these weapons and I get that we need to have defense and that there might be external enemies and so forth, but we also understand that the weapons that we're putting our tax money into are only useful if they stay entirely useless. And so the conversation with Chris is important because it's about the generosity of ordinary people, people like all of us, and the fact that when given a chance and when it's made easy, people are incredibly generous with their time, with their money in terms of wanting to participate in civic action. And the participant feel good just by being engaged. So the giving and the receiving are kind of part of, you know, two sides of the same coin. So a very interesting conversation about generosity and about the fact that we're talking about a sector that is often labeled as volunteerism or has been kind of maligned as social warriors and somehow kind of given a fairly negative or disparaging framing. (..) And yet we're talking about people who risk their own lives, whether it's for freedom of speech in, you know, across the Middle East or for peace in Yemen, or frankly at home in terms of the issues that we face here around rights and responsibilities and so forth. So keeping, you know, keeping our governments to account in constructive ways. The sector is under tremendous threat and it's going to need public support and understanding to keep going. (....) Today my guest is Chris Werman. He is the Chief Global Partnership and Strategy Officer at Giving Tuesday and Chair of the Board of the Wings Network, which is an organization, we're going to hear about it more, that brings together many of the big philanthropy organizations around the world and foundations together. And it's all about the business of generosity. Is that right, Chris? Is that the world you're in? How to make people generous?
Chris Worman Yes. And sort of the range of generosity from the individual to the more institutional.
Sanam And how did you get into this universe? (..)
Chris Worman It wasn't direct. I was in my university years, I had sort of fallen in love with community organizing and increasingly out of love with my degrees in classical music and classical theater. And somebody said, hey, you should think about arts administration. And so my first sort of forays beyond community organizing into civil society were really in the kind of fundraising and PR side of the arts. Then I ended up joining Peace Corps and I was in Romania starting in 2005. The European Union was coming, which meant all of the American money was leaving. And a lot of the more recognized, more formalized civil society entities were quite scared about where they were going to get their money. And after many, many, many, many trainings, sort of got into a conversation about, look, we can sort of go one organization by one organization. But what we're lacking in the country at the time was infrastructure for communities to come together around the things they cared about, the ways that they might actually give money to organizations and create that sort of community-based funding resilience that so many organizations so desperately need in the world. So I ended up starting the first community foundation in the country back in 2007. (.) And I've been in the space of sort of how civil society manifests in action with citizens as giving time and money and what that really means in the world. It's not, yeah.
Sanam It's interesting you say because there's so many aspects of this and it is such a critical moment right now, right? So we've seen the Trump administration come in and take a wrecking ball to USAID and $40 billion that these are the numbers they throw at us, that this is the amount that they give abroad. But when you then unpack it so often, it's really not that much because, you know, people are being paid and a lot of the money comes back to the U.S. for services provided by Americans. But there is that wrecking ball of, you know, ODA. In Europe, the Dutch, the British, the Germans in 2024 are just slashing their international overseas development assistance. Why does it matter? How do you talk to your friends and family or others that are not necessarily directly involved in this space? Why does it matter that we should have overseas development assistance, development, humanitarian, peacebuilding, which is the sector I come from? Why does it matter?
Chris Worman I think there are some things that philanthropy is well set up for. There are some things that overseas development assistance is well set up for. There are certain things that the more institutionalized side of giving, be it government or private foundations, will be able and willing to do that governments in country sometimes may not have the capacity or willingness to do. Sometimes in terms of things like human rights or peacebuilding, you know, sometimes the governments just aren't going to pay for that sort of thing and may not have the money to do it. Infrastructure. It's another space where if you think about things like the infrastructure for civic engagement and civil society, a lot of the places where it is lacking in the world, that isn't to say that the human intent isn't there. It very much is. But then the infrastructures you would need to sort of channel that intent, organize that intent, magnify that intent through civil society may be lacking. And who's going to pay for that? It isn't going to be local civil society because they're too busy taking care of what they need to take care of. It might not be their government because maybe their government doesn't really agree with the construct of civil society. So it's got to be somebody. And well, if you want sort of open society, somebody has to pay for the infrastructure, probably going to be somebody in the ODA space or larger philanthropies who've invested in these sorts of ecosystems. So there are times, you know, every there's a time and a place for these kinds of funds when there's a disaster, you know, when there's a humanitarian crisis, you need the sorts of large funding mechanisms and infrastructure and intermediaries to be there. You can't expect grassroots civil society to suddenly help recover a country or an economy after a major disaster. We would all love that they might have the capacity to do so. Their heart's in the right place. But do they have the money? Do they have boats? Airplanes? No, they don't. So there are those times where it is extremely critical. I think, you know, in a moment like this, there's also a moment of reckoning to say, and where were they maybe invested in things that were less critical, where it should have been somebody else? You know, you mentioned the 40 billion from USAID and the various other governments in the world that have cut budgets. When I, over the years, I've spent a lot of time working on sort of what is the actual size and scope of civil society? I was at TechSoup for many, many years. And TechSoup has about 1.7 million NGOs in its database globally. Gives you a really interesting look at the size of the social economy. And the most plausible numbers that I've seen anybody come up with and sort of composites of numbers, because nobody has really good data on this, would indicate that the economy, the social economy, all civil society transactionally, the turnover of civil society in a year is somewhere north of $3.6 trillion. (.) So somewhere closer to $4 trillion, which if you look at all ODA, plus all institutional philanthropy in a year, the number that you come up with is on the order of $400 to $600 billion in the best of times.
Sanam Wow, okay.
Chris Worman Which is a thousand times smaller. Than what's actually happening. Than what's happening. And that's coming from individuals.
Sanam And that's just the monetization, right? That's not the time and emotional and psychological and even security risks and investment that people make, right? And this is one of the things that I find fascinating that we say, okay, again, you know, we're sending money to organizations in Syria that have risked, and it's people who have risked their lives to create spaces to learn how to dialogue and mediate and negotiate. And in a way, you know, that's why kids are still able to go to school, or that's why HTS gets to go in and there isn't yet a civil war, right? We don't even monetize the contributions of human beings in terms of their, I mean, generosity in a whole other way, right? Like, how do you put a price on that?
Chris Worman Well, and how do you put a price on hope?
Sanam Yeah.
Chris Worman How do you put a price on agency? The idea that I think, you know, all of those numbers are important. You know, the, if we didn't have people giving money, then there wouldn't be the capacities to do the work that civil society does. And we all know we'd love more of it, these sorts of things. But the money is, the money is critical. However, it is the byproduct of this incredible idea that humans might actually leave the world better than they find it and what they learn through the engagement, the process of civil society. I think we all in a world where the trust in institutions, large institutions is not great. (.) We, we have to be looking at why. How do we end up here? There's been so much investment in sort of big D democracy for years and years and years, decades. It's kind of failed, if we're going to be honest about it.
Sanam And political parties and, and things like that, right? //S01: Off we go. Yes.// Yeah.
Chris Worman Correct. And much less institutions of justice, bilateral trade, global peace, these sorts of large D democratic institutions, the pillars of an open society, right? And a friend of mine who's been investing in that space for a long time, recently, when I was describing Giving Tuesday and what it actually does said, ah, this is so great because you're working on the personal democracy. The reasons that an individual through the process would understand why the big D institutions were needed, were necessary, were important to them. And I, I couldn't agree more. The money is important, but the actual, what people learn, what communities learn through the process of engagement in civic life is probably more important in its own way. (..)
Sanam And it's, it's fascinating because when you look at the sort of public cultural discourse, right, civil society, the sectors that we don't exist, people might know about a human rights activist or, you know, when I, I often do this test of saying, and when people ask me and I say, well, I work with women who become peace builders and immediately they'll go down a path of a girl's education or something like these sort of little things. But the essence of saying, you're living in a community and you care about that community and there is violence and you are taking the responsibility to go and talk to the police to say, hey, this is what we need or we need some channel so that there's community, the community can trust the local police and the local police can trust the community. And so these are, these, as you say, these are individuals who have incredible courage to sort of make, create those bridges. And, you know, I wonder whether partly in Western society, we've just taken it for granted that the state provides that service, even though, you know, if you're in a minority community in the States, it's not so, you know, it's not so secure and trusting, right? But we expect the state to give it in some sort of way. And, and we were disparaging to the, to those that, or society seems to be disparaging to those who want to be in public service, right? Is that something that you'd see happening?
Chris Worman Yes. And I think this, uh, podcast is called, if you were in charge, if I were in charge, one of the things I might have is a time machine and I would use it to go back and find the person who said voluntary sector and kick them in the shins really hard, right before they said it. Now I'm Quaker. I probably couldn't actually kick them, but I could figure out a way to make them not say the words because that has really undermined this, this community. You know, you're talking about a sector that is the best manifestation of humanity that provides the hope that provides the vision of what could be versus what will be if left to policy, which is inherently sort of reactive and backward looking or the corporate sector, which is not going to be in the long-term enlightened self-interest of society. It will be in the self-interest of itself. That's, that's capitalism. I get it. So this sector is the safeguard for humanity. It is where it is the wellspring of all that is good. And yet we have, again, undermined it by calling it voluntary as if, as if it were voluntary to survive. This is, this is antithetical to logic.
Sanam I'm an anthropologist. And I remember years ago, the very famous anthropologist called Ernest Gellner, and he wrote about what is civil society. And this has been like sort of in a way that my, my guiding post, because he says, you know, you have societies where you have your tribe, you have your church, you have your, you know, that clusters us in little components. But civil society is that place where we come together because we are all interested in planting trees or we are all interested in, you know, professional organization. It's a way of enabling alternative and our multiple identities to come together to forge and weave us together. And, and this is something that every society, especially in the age of extreme pluralism, we need, we need to be able to come together and say, despite you and me, you know, all of our supposed differences, we come together around the question of giving and philanthropy and generosity, right? It weaves the society together. And again, it's just that invisible canvas that's, that seems to be there and it's critical for peace, but it's, yeah, it's just taken for granted.
Chris Worman It is, it is where I think we refresh our understanding of a social contract and revalidate it. And the, the other, it's like, that's, it's an interesting metaphor or look at what civil society is. Years ago, I was reading a book, I think it was Paul Hawkins' book, Blessed Unrest, where he talks about civil society as humanity's white blood cells. And there's a pain point and the first human shows up and tries to solve that pain point because they're angry. Because in the words of Saul Alinsky, happy people don't change the world. That person shows up because they're angry. They wanted to stop whatever it is or start the thing that's going to solve the other problem. And if they do, job done. If they don't, they call their friends. And now you've got collective voluntary action and they try to solve the problem. And if they do, great job done. And if they don't, they form an NGO so they can raise money. And so they can ramp up their game and maybe get to the point where ultimately they change policy and they excise whatever the problem was in the first place. Which is an interesting arc to think about. Like all metaphors, it's not perfect, but it's one that I've, similar to how you've reflected on yours, I've reflected on that and sort of what that process means to people. Whether you ever get to the end point or not, you know, we have to, we have to have those spaces, as you said, that are beyond church, beyond the other things to come together and figure things out.
Sanam It's that question of, am I willing to look up and care about something which is beyond my own circle of concern? Or, you know, very often in my universe, you know, the reason why people get involved in peacebuilding is because they've experienced something horrific that happened to them and they're saying, I don't want this to happen to someone else, right? Not everybody has that compassion, but in the 30 years I've worked in this space, I find it everywhere, right? So I'm like, I'm not, because I'm like, am I crazy thinking that women become peacebuilders in war zones? They're like, nope, war breaks up. You find them, they're out there. So something in our DNA or something in the way that our brains are wired, but you know, you get, you get a lot more when you give.
Chris Worman And there's plenty of research that backs it up. You know, that, that act of giving people find joy in that they, they take agency, they feel more powerful. We have done a lot of research over the last couple of years, randomized, weekly randomized sample surveys that look at people's pro-social behaviors that they've exercised in the last week. Have you given, have you volunteered, have you taken advocacy positions, whatever. And their sort of polarization, their personal polarization. And one of the most fascinating statistics that has popped out of this is that on a spectrum of least polarized to most polarized individuals, regardless of socioeconomic status or political party affiliation, those who have volunteered in the last week are 1,500 percent more likely to be in the least polarized category than those in the most polarized category. 1,500 times more likely. Because what? Because they gave a little time and effort because they looked up from their phone. They connected with real humans and said, yeah, we can do this. And then they tried and they felt good, really good about it. They felt powerful. They felt trust. Even if whatever they were doing didn't work, that is almost entirely inconsequential. The social capital indicators go through the roof when people participate in civic life. And this is, you know, sort of the obvious antithesis to Robert Putnam and bowling alone. And his whole point, which was when we stop affiliating, when we quit going through these associative processes, we lose trust because we quit paying attention to
Sanam each other. We quit listening to each other. And we're now being programmed to be in our own little, little silos, whether it's, yeah, that's 1,500 times. That is, that's extraordinary, right? In terms of Giving Tuesday, so my exposure to Giving Tuesday was in the U.S. when, you know, it was Thanksgiving, it was Thursday, Black Friday was, you know, consumption. Cyber Monday. (.) And then Giving Tuesday was like the antithesis of that. So tell us a little bit about what's happened, how it's evolved. And where, now that it's gone global, where do you see the most generosity, you know, in terms of what people have and what they give or what sectors of society are we seeing? Do you have that kind of disaggregated data as well? (.)
Chris Worman Yes. And increasingly more of it, though, data gathering on these things is very hard. We have 30 people on the data team and they spend all their time with, we have 50 research collectives around the world who are looking at both things like how much people give, but also the intersection of generosity in time, money and voice with other issues. Conflict recovery, crisis recovery, gender, age, lots of different things. AI, where does AI fit into all this? Like there are a lot of interesting research groups. So Giving Tuesday the rest of the year spends a lot of time understanding this space. what motivates people, how they manage through their generosity. So that's a lot of what the organization has built over the last two years. Very global research capacity to help people understand this is how humans come together to solve collective needs, communal needs, not necessarily their own personal ones. Then to your point about war bringing out the worst and the best in people, people who've been through crisis tend to be the most generous. And people who are in hard, hard positions are the ones who are really coming together the most obviously to work on resolving their local problems. And this is something where often in our community, people will do that year round under the banner of Giving Tuesday. So building clinics in Sudan and DRC, under the banner of Giving Tuesday, wearing a jersey that says they're giving Tuesday volunteer. And it's not after Thanksgiving. It's a Thursday in April. And, you know, but this has become sort of a, it's like a global club, right? That is give, right? Yeah, it's a way that people affiliate with the concept of civic action. And I would hesitate to say who's more or less generous, because there are indices for that kind of thing. And I just
Sanam usually find them questionable. And I mean, I ask that because there's a tendency often for people to think that generosity is the check that you write, right? And how big is the check that you write? Sure. And what I've found often is that I'm asking people, you know, the check is the easy part. But really, I would really appreciate it if you would put your money where your mouth is, right? Because as somebody who might be big in the finance world or in the media world, if you say, you know, you might be giving us an anonymous check in the background, but if you actually have the courage to say what I'm saying, right, and open certain doors, that has more impact than, you know, the generosity that comes with that is very different to the generosity of the money. It's privileges we have and how we're willing to share those privileges.
Chris Worman Yeah. And if you look at the research on things, you know, sort of who gives the most as a percentage of their salary and places where, or their personal wealth and places where you can get that data, then people who have less give more as a percentage. And part of that's reciprocal because they've been a part of support mechanisms, but everyone has. If you think about, so, you know, the arts and culture side of our, you know, some of our childhood sports, these sorts of things that certainly people in more privileged Western societies would have grown up with, faith-based organizations. These are all civil society run. You know, the things that are outside of the school and not in your home tend to be civil society. And we forget that. But I think it's interesting as you were speaking about sort of the check being, you know, not necessarily the thing. The check is an important indicator of agreement, which is not the same as solidarity. And I think that
Sanam That's a very good point. That's a very, very good point. Yeah.
Chris Worman It's a distinction that I don't think I'd necessarily drawn until this conversation,
Sanam until four and a half minutes ago. I'm glad that it sparked some thoughts. Yeah.
Chris Worman It is welcome. And again, damn critical that people write checks because they agree with this and they, you know, they believe it's an indicator that they believe in it. It's not the same as standing
Sanam with you in the street. Yeah. Okay. So on that note, and we've already, you already mentioned, you know, if you were in charge, if you were in charge right now of this universe that we're looking at and this, this phenomenal kind of distinction that you made between the universe of generosity, the universe of philanthropy, government, if you were in charge, what would you be doing and what would you be saying and what would you be putting out in the world? (..)
Chris Worman It's interesting, you know, in these moments of collective crisis, you have an opportunity to look at the world and say, okay, what are the institutions that have failed? What are the institutions we need? And work towards the things that we need. We, I feel we largely failed to do that during the pandemic. And I hope that we do not fail to do that now. But I hope that this conversation about sort of a post aid world also comes with a very large dose of humility about what aid was or wasn't for whom and how much of the point, you know, the, as we raised earlier, as a percentage of global social economy drop in the bucket, an important one for certain things at certain times, humanitarian response, et cetera, extremely important for the rest of civil society, the millions of organizations, the many more millions of informal groups who never could have, would have wanted such money, less of an issue right now. Now they're being hit by a couple of forces in this. One is for communities who had relied on certain kinds of support that suddenly gone. So has their trust in the idea of organized civil society. That is something that we really need to take seriously. The other is what this allows governments to do, either those who want to step into the void or those who want a bigger void. This is an enabling factor in ways that are not good for civil society. We also need to talk about that. If I were in charge, I think what I would work with people to do is invest in those enabling infrastructures that are lacking and do that, you know, just very simply. If you think about things like how how easy it is for the average American or Dutch person where I live to give money to civil society, much less volunteer, much less all the other things we talked about, it is freakishly easy. I have so many options any time of day or night to do so. And the technology is there, the infrastructure is there, the cultural conversational infrastructure, it's all there. And it's being reinforced and not only just perpetuated, but evolved all the time. That needs the sort of foundations of that are not true in a place like Burkina Faso. The human intent is there. The potential is there, but the technology, the training, the support mechanisms that are locally rooted to build that civic sense collectively and then evolve it, not necessarily there.
Sanam And it's interesting because it's also, we're making it more and more difficult. So at ICANN, we run a fund and it's called the Innovative Peace Fund and we say, we will do the small grant making, right? The paper, the administrative burden and the legal burden that we take on because now we're imposing sanctions and we're imposing all sorts of other things. So even if somebody in an ideal world, it should be that you care about community peacebuilding in Burkina Faso or tree planting in Burkina Faso, there should be a direct click and you just hand over your 100 bucks and it goes. But we're actually making it difficult because of the legal restrictions. The other thing that I found interesting, what appalled me was that when we do the financial, when we do the online clicking, we have now financial institutions that are taking a 5% or a 4%, you know, and I'm like, can you guys not just, you know, why did I give 100? Can you just not hand over the 100 and let it be? Why do you have to take $5 out of that, right? It's such a lack of generosity. That's also kind of frustrating. But yeah, so you're talking about building and the enabling environment for people to be able to give.
Chris Worman Yes. And the enabling infrastructures. Like if we're going to, if we say enabling environment and we could agree what that meant, it would reside on infrastructures. And in some countries those exist and in some countries they don't. The idea that localization or some of these other movements within the development aid community could have manifested in a way that was, I'll just manifest it, period, was predicated on an idea that people had the infrastructure to do those things. And it's simply not true. Yeah. So there's work, I think, both in the domestic, in whatever country space, so that you can get to all of the community actualization side of things that we're talking about and the money.
Sanam Yeah.
Chris Worman And then there's the sort of foreign transfer and everything else. It's a long way to go. People are struggling through.
Sanam And it's interesting, again, because in a way, part of the model that we've had to deal with is that when you've had international organizations go into fragile context, they have, instead of building the local infrastructure, they've been hiring the staff and the good people and not, you know, and then they're there, you know, I remember with Iraq, lots of American organizations went in, they did what they had to do, but they hired Iraqis. They didn't really support the local organizations. And then the money ended and they left and they'd left very little behind. Right. And so that's also kind of the community or the international civil society sector has to have its own reckoning on these issues of what is it that we mean by localization. So, okay. So that's question one. Question two is if you were the billionaire right now, what would you be doing? If you were Mr. Musk right now, what would you be doing?
Chris Worman Well, there's no risk of that. No, I would build the fund for local infrastructure development. It's simply not there. And if we do not make these investments, then we're never going to get where we want to be in the sort of global civil society development community. Anytime people have made those investments, the return on those investments is exponential. It is orders of magnitude more than anything that people put in in the first place. You look at something like a website being developed for online giving in a particular country in Eastern Europe, of which I'm very familiar. And, you know, you're talking about $50,000 to $100,000 of work to build a truly robust online giving platform that has since generated nearly $100 million of local giving in that country. And this is not a rich country. Now, $100,000 to $100 million. Show me anywhere else that people have had that kind of return on their their social return on investment. You know, as you said, what actually usually happens is they show up, and then they take their infrastructure home with them, because that's what they were kind of paid to do. That's the opposite of getting people into a position where they can take their own sort of agency and route, the sort of equity mindset of making sure they have what they
Sanam need to do what they need to do. I have so many examples of this. So, you know, back in 1998, 99, the Ford Foundation gave the organization I worked for at the time, International Alert, an $180,000 grant with, you know, we were doing a global campaign women building peace, and part of it was get a Security Council resolution. So I was, you know, sent off to New York to do this. We got it. Like it was, you know, we built a coalition and we did all the work. And when I think about what that 180 has done in terms of the millions of lives, conflict prevention, violence prevention, I mean, it's really hard to monetize it. But they they've probably forgotten that that's what they did. Actually, it's, you know, yeah, I can. We started with a grant of $25,000 from the Channel Foundation, and it has leveraged and done such huge work. And so maybe that's that's the note I'd kind of end on. What gives you hope right now, when when you think about the world and, you know, the atmosphere and the and the culture of nastiness or meanness that seems to be in coming out emanating from the US? What is it that gives you hope? And what's the message you would want to send out to people who are listening? (..)
Chris Worman There have been an awful lot of nasty people in history.
Sanam That's this is true. That's true. This too shall pass.
Chris Worman Yeah, I mean, it will. And I think it'll take a long time. And I think it's going to be extremely painful for a long time as well. But, you know, I've I have a lot of hope in civil society and civic action and people's capacities to leave the world better than they find it for their families, if nothing else. And people do organize and they do solve problems. And it doesn't always look like an NGO. And that's okay. That's not the point. The point is that they're doing it. And I think this is really going to be a fascinating century for civil society. We are facing not just crazy shifts in governance and the idea of what a society should look like from a governing standpoint, but climate, the march of digitalization being so inequitable. We've got all of these major sort of trends, the mega trends of our poly crisis world, and none of them are going to really be easily survivable if civil society isn't centered and its intention to engage people in the work around dignity and rights. Otherwise, it all falls apart. So we have the potential. We have history in the sector of humans being their best selves and coming together that way. I have hope in that. We'll see.
Sanam Yeah. And that's, yeah, the secret is, as you say, volunteer. Generosity makes you feel better. And and it's critical to, as you say, to the weaving and the social cohesion, which is sadly, you know,
Chris Worman disappearing right now in so many places. Well, thank you for that. That was a great conversation
Sanam and much appreciated, especially since you just got off a plane. So, you know, the caffeine word. My pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. (........) Hey, Sos. How are you doing? Season two, episode two. My conversation with Chris Worman of Giving Tuesday, um, and about the concept of generosity and, and kind of people giving their time and their money for, for causes. What did you think of that conversation on the back of, you know, last weeks and other conversations that we've had about funding cuts and so forth? Is volunteerism something that people value? Was that something that was part of your, whether college life or, uh, at high
Soleh school? I mean, not to, not to complain about my stipend, but, you know, I would say that a lot of people that I know here are people in grad school, maybe not most, but a lot are, you know, working on topics that they think are important, like, for the world. And like, I, you know, I work on plastic pollution and sustainable fuels and things like that. I have friends who are kind of working on community housing infrastructure ideas and, you know, whatever, the list goes on and we're not exactly doing it for the money, you know, or for something like that. So I don't think people think about it in terms of charity, but it is like a doing something because you want to do something and because you want to kind of have that impact.
Sanam Yeah. So, so you're saying that you have a lot of friends who are, again, it might be self-selected, obviously, but in grad school working on...
Soleh I only select good friends, so...
Sanam This is true. So I was going to ask you, actually, you know, in my time when I was, when I was there, you know, finance was the big topic for, for a lot of the people that I knew, you know, was that, you know, those of us who are doing anthropology and things like that were slightly the odd ones out and kind of, you know, that the fact that we didn't want to go and work for consulting companies and big banks, we were the, you know, we were the exception to the rule, if you want. Is that, you know, is that still the case there or is it, you know, is it just pockets?
Soleh I mean, yeah, of course, like you still have that, you know, which, which is fair enough in a lot of ways. But I would say most of the ones that are, you know, you're like, well, this clearly isn't to make money are to do with like social impact and kind of societal changes and working towards something that, you know, you think is, is important and like needed in the world. So, yeah, I, there's, there are definitely different attitudes, you know, (..) maybe again, maybe it's just my bubbles, but I think it's pretty, like, I'd like to give the students here benefit of the doubt and say that there's a very large portion.
Sanam Thinking about what, what Chris was saying about how they have done the research around when, you know, the effect of people contributing or engaging in civic activism, you know, whether it's signing a letter for advocacy or, or, you know, volunteering or, or giving money, it fosters connectivity, which means it lowers polarization in, in, in, to some degree. But I sometimes wonder whether we have reduced the level of experiential opportunities for people, right? Like of, of people, you know, maybe it's just a stereotype. So everybody's on their phones and, and they're not really getting together. But that idea of being in spaces with people who think differently to you can, and kind of listen to each other. Is that it, do you feel as if things have become polarized and atomized, you know, or, or is it that it's still fairly robust in, in, in,
Soleh student settings? I think things are fairly robust in student settings. Obviously things skew one way, right? Like at, in higher education, things are always going to skew towards like the left generally. But I do think that there's a, there are a lot of debates and I think it can be, it can be kind of frustrating sometimes because I think a lot of people who engage in these debates or sometimes like when you try to engage in these debates, like people haven't actually thought about it all that much. Like there, there's a lot of repetition of kind of these classic talking points, whether they be like very like liberal, you know, wokey type or kind of more right wing. And sometimes it can be hard to break through that. Um, but I don't think it's like suppressed or anything, you know, like nobody's trying to stop one side of like a conversation that I'm having in the cafeteria. I think in, in the US, it actually can, like, from my experience, it can be a lot harder because there is a lot more kind of social enforcement of, yeah, I mean, not to use woke all the time, but like that kind of things and, and you can't like point anything out or call anything out without it, that you have to be very careful about the words that you use in a way that I think is somewhat true in the UK, but a little bit less true.
Sanam One of the things that, that Chris mentions, um, I think, I think he said literally, like, if I had a time machine, I would kick somebody in the shin for calling, you know, the social, the social sector, if you want social justice issues and so, um, the volunteer sector. And, and this idea that a human rights organization or anybody that's working on democracy or the kind of work that I do, peacebuilding, it's as if this is an added bonus, you know, like this is, this is like the cherry on top. It's really not necessary compared to other things and, and the other things that are of value or, you know, when you go and get make, you know, ton of money or, you know, using anything to do with technology as just as a...
Soleh Yeah. And that can be a big problem in the sciences, I think. Like the attitude that, you know, everything that's not like a science is kind of wishy-washy and not quite needed. And you see that right now with, with funding problems, like budget cuts and, and whatever the, you know, these kind of more softer things are, are going first. Green sciences, which is what I'm in is, you know, also on, on the out. But I mean, the, the term soft science is super or like, you know, soft anything is like super loaded with misogyny and all that as well, because it tends to be subjects that are more heavily like female and, and historically female and all these kinds of things. And so they're not seen as having as much value as something else. And I was, I was, I was again talking about this with a friend recently who does like pure math. And he even was comparing it to like, you know, some kind of history or English or whatever, where he was like, you, you know, you can't even talk, like, you can't even explain what he's doing without everything else that has been done in pure math. And it's so insular and only affects the other thing. And everyone, you know, you're like, oh, well, you know, everything that you discovered in pure math then has a effect on, you know, some star a billion years away. And it's like, okay, well, is that, are we going to have the argument that that's more literally impactful than study on, you know, whatever community is anthropologist is doing that to you might seem equally as irrelevant (.) to anything. But because it's kind of maths and it's numbers and whatever, I mean, I guess it's probably not many numbers, but lots of letters and equal signs, like, it's suddenly seen as more, more legitimate. Yeah, it's, it's so true. I mean, I mean, that's, that's kind of been prevalent
Sanam for a long time. I, you know, when I was growing up, and I would have conversations with, with my dad about what I should study, right. And it was like, well, we all do math, you know, in our family, we do math. And I was like, but I want to do English literature. And, and, and I would have these, you know, on the phone every three weeks, like, well, you should be an accountant. And then, I was like, but I don't really want to do accountancy. And then finally, when I said, I want to do literature, um, his, his response, because he loved poetry and Shakespeare and so forth, was, well, with English, you can do everything and anything, or everything and nothing, actually, is what he said. And, um, and I look at it, and I'm thinking, literature is our way of understanding each other. It's about empathy. It's about getting into a character's head, or it's about kind of expressing emotions. And, and it's a, there's a universal value to it. It's also about critical thinking. And yet, you know, STEM is the big thing. And, and, and, and, you know, bringing it back to what, you know, the first conversation, but we had about ecce in episode one, authoritarian states cut back on social sciences, because social sciences and literature and history and these kinds of things allow you to have multiple perspectives. Whereas math, two plus two is for wherever you are. And two plus two doesn't equal five, right? Ever. And so there's something about it in terms of restricting the way that we think in some ways, but, um, it's not perceived like that, right? Yeah. All right. Thank you for that. Um, anything else that you want to share with us?
Soleh Mm. Stop sending me AI videos on Instagram. (..)
Sanam Okay. I, I have, I, I did, I have seen a few recently and I was like, I'm sure that's AI. I
Soleh shouldn't send it. You have to look at the hands or something like, there's just always something
Sanam that's like slightly wrong, you know? Okay. All right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Well, maybe we have a conversation about, about figuring out AI stuff. It, it's kind of weird out there. Sure. All right. Maybe talk to you soon. And, uh, and, uh, I hope you have a really, really fun time the rest of your trip in Japan. Thank you. Bye. Bye. (.....) My thanks to the Bijan Reisar Foundation, my own organization, ICANN and Africa Digital Audio for making these podcasts possible. If you have ideas for topics or for people that I should invite and have a conversation with, please let me know at info at ICANNpeacework.org. Info at ICANNpeacework.org. You can also follow the events on our newsletter, which is on the ICANN website, same address. I really hope that the conversations, the ideas, the solutions, the hope and the inspiration that you've heard in these conversations keep you going over the next week and that you join us again. So stay well and see you soon. And I hope to hear from you. Thank you. Bye. Bye.