The Giving Game
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I’ve been really fortunate in the past few years, and I try to give back to causes I think are important. This Thanksgiving, I wanted to create a way to involve our kids in giving. I came up with an idea I call “The Giving Game”. Here’s what I did.
Our children are young and don’t fully grasp what charity is, what makes a good charity, or, honestly, much about the issues it tries to address. To simplify this for them, I picked five categories: Medical, Shelter, Food Bank, Animals, and Environment. For my older child, I also added a “Do Your Own Research” category where we could work together to find an organization to support. I cut up paper into little cards and drew a picture for each category, with a little bit of text about what it was for.
Next, I set a budget of $1,000 per person. This was real money, but I had already contributed it to a Donor-Advised Fund1, so the object of the game was to decide how to distribute it. I wanted to make the distribution more tangible for the kids, so I grabbed some money tokens from a board game2 and counted out 10 for each person, representing $100 each.
After I passed out the tokens, I set out the cards in a row and explained what each one was for.
- Medical: Helping people in disaster areas who need medical care (Médecins Sans Frontières)
- Shelter: Helping people without homes (Larkin Street Youth Services)
- Food Bank: Helping people who are hungry (San Francisco-Marin Food Bank)
- Animals: Protecting animals (Sonoma Bird Rescue Center)
- Environment: Land preservation and sustainable development (The Conservation Fund)
- Do Your Own Research: I help you pick a charity you care about
Then we took turns putting a $100 token on a card and split up the money. It was fun! The end results were:
- Medical: $800
- Shelter: $700
- Food Bank: $700
- Animals: $700
- Environment: $600
- Do Your Own Research: $500 (cause TBD)
Finally, I worked with my younger child to look up the charities in the Donor-Advised Fund and grant the money.
I really enjoyed this and hope we can make it a Thanksgiving tradition. If you try it, let me know!
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I use Fidelity Charitable. I recommend it because easy to get started with a Donor-Advised Fund. There’s no minimum balance, you can make small grants of $50, and the fees are reasonable. As a bonus, you can give anonymously and avoid getting spammed by every organization you ever decided to give money to. ↩︎
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I used tokens from For Sale, which is a game about buying and selling real estate. They worked well, but it bothered me a little that the tokens are worth $1,000 in the game. I don’t have Monopoly, but the $100 bills from that game would have been perfect. ↩︎