Americans should give freely to charity without hoping to receive something in return, writer Sallie Tisdale told about 50 students Wednesday evening in Harris Hall.
“You have to give your time and money away and then walk away,” she said.
Tisdale, a contributing writer at Harper’s and Salon magazines and the author of six books, gave a talk entitled “Giving vs. Giving Up: Service in an Uncomfortable World.”
The speech was sponsored by Northwestern Community Development Corps, Women’s Coalition and the Literary Journalism Seminar.
Tisdale, a registered nurse, has used her nursing experience working with “marginal populations” to inspire her writing.
These experiences showed Tisdale that you can’t think about yourself when helping others.
“When I say giving up, I mean giving up hope and fear, but mostly giving up yourself,” she said.
Illinois families with yearly incomes of $75,000 to $100,000 gave 7 percent of their money to charity, while those making more than $1 million a year gave less than 3 percent, according to a study Tisdale cited.
“Even though millions of people have more than they need – including me – they feel underfed … They fear a loss of power, so they hang on to what they have,” she said.
According to Tisdale, the average American household gives only 3 percent of its income, or about $1,600, to charity each year.
But because there is a surplus of resources, enough is never enough, Tisdale said.
“It’s inevitable that some will end up with less than enough, and it’s inevitable that some will end up with nothing,” she said. “The marketplace limits cooperation by its nature.”
This lack of cooperation extends to human relationships as well, Tisdale said.
“We can walk right past a panhandler who is clearly without the basics,” she said. “What is it in us that is so wounded, so hardened, that we can turn away?”
Tisdale said that in reality, most people are not all that different from one another.
Medill senior Melissa Harris, the campus outreach co-chairwoman for NCDC, praised Tisdale for having the courage to talk about unpopular ideas.
“She thinks about what people don’t like to discuss,” Harris said. “She puts herself in uncomfortable situations … yet she doesn’t claim to have all the answers.
