/ ˈmō-tiv /·noun.
The reason underneath the action. Causes are easy to list and harder to explain —
this page is the explanation.
Giving back isn’t a line item. It’s the point.
Martha’s Table
2114 14th Street NW. The building Martha’s Table ran from 1980 until 2019, and the one I grew up in. These photographs are from the 2010s — the same walls, the same three words painted on the front. A colleague from India once gave me the word her language has for it: nasib — the portion of a life that was written before you could read it. I walked past those three words every day as a child. It turned out they were mine.
It starts here. Martha’s Table,
in Washington, D.C., fed me, tutored me, and decided my future was worth investing in when my circumstances
said otherwise.
Then they did something rarer. Veronica Parke, who ran Martha’s Table for seventeen years and
built out the youth programs, put me on payroll in the sixth grade. Stephanie Thomas kept me there. By my
teens I was a camp counselor — teaching, mentoring, and training dozens of kids while still enrolled
in the teen program myself. A child of the house and an employee of it at the same time.
That is the whole idea, and I have been repeating it ever since: nobody has to be finished being
helped before they are allowed to start helping.
Education. Food. Opportunity. In that order, on the front of the building, for thirty-nine years.
If you give nowhere else, give here.
Childhood cancer
This one isn’t abstract for me.
As a child, I survived cancer.
It isn’t a cause I adopted. It’s one I was handed.
Childhood cancer is chronically underfunded next to adult cancers — fewer patients, less
commercial return, the same devastation per family. I give to the research. I also give to the part
almost nobody funds: what happens after.
Treatment ends and a child is expected to simply resume being a child. Thriving after cancer is its
own work, and the programs that carry a family through it are the first things cut. A family I never met
once paid for a child’s trip to Disney World after treatment ended. That never shows up in an annual
report, and it never leaves the person it happened to.
Children’s National,
in Washington, D.C., does both — the research and the after. I support them now, and one day I hope to give them more than a donation.
Opportunity for young people
A child’s ZIP code should never be their ceiling. I back the schools, programs, and mentors handing
young people keys to doors they were never given.
Community
Neighbors, churches, the local organizations that hold a place together. The biggest changes get built
out of the smallest.
“The most selfish thing I do — and the thing that gives me the most joy — is giving.”
— after Denzel Washington, who put it into words first
If you lead an organization doing this work well, tell me. I’m always looking for the
next door worth holding open.
