“Help others without any reason and give without the expectation of receiving anything in return.”
– Roy T. Bennett
Recently, while volunteering at the Meatloaf Kitchen, a food service for hungry New Yorkers, a guest named Sam told me something surprising: Bombas socks are “hated” by the homeless community in New York City.
Bombas is a clothing company that has built a strong reputation for its one purchased = one donated policy. When you buy a pair of socks or underwear from Bombas, they give a pair to someone in need. According to the company’s website, they have donated 75 million items to date.
Sam’s problems with the socks made a lot of sense. They are very tight up through the calf, and do not effectively neutralize odors. Neither of those features matter for Bombas’s regular customers, but for someone spending hours on their feet each day, and without access to laundry services, both render the socks relatively useless. “The first thing we do when we get a pair is cut the top off to relieve our circulation,” he told me.
Whether or not this is true for everyone, it raises an important question:
What good are 75 million free pairs of socks if the recipients can’t use them?
There are many examples of this issue in foreign aid, which has a bad habit of giving people things they can’t use, but I suspect we have all experienced this firsthand at one point or another. A friend of mine was once surprised when a hungry man on the subway turned down a free granola bar, only to realize that the man had no teeth. No amount of free granola bars would have been useful to him.
At the Meatloaf Kitchen, new volunteers are often discouraged to discover that some guests take the food and sell it elsewhere in the city. The behavior appears to conflict with the organization’s mission and undermine the impact it has on the community. “That could be going to people who need it.”
I felt similarly when I first went to the Meatloaf Kitchen, but have since come to see the behavior as a manifestation of different individual needs. Some guests are most in need of a meal in the moment. Others need food for later that day, or later that week. And some are better served by the few dollars they can earn selling the food to someone else – if they’re willing to invest hours of their time to do so, who are we to say they don’t need it?
Serving these communities effectively requires me to dispose of any expectations I have of how the good I’m doing will be received. It’s not all smiles and gratitude, nor is it guaranteed that what I have to offer will be useful. And that’s okay. If the ultimate goal is help someone, then it’s their needs that come first, not mine.
It might not make for compelling marketing, but maybe Bombas should give Fruit of the Loom products to the homeless community, or simply take the money they would have spent on donated socks and gift it directly. At the very least, they should talk to Sam. If it’s true that the company’s socks are disliked by those who receive them, then Bombas has lost sight of the original purpose of their one purchased = one donated policy – helping others.
The same applies to the things that we give one another. A great article in The Atlantic last year highlighted the ways that gift-givers prioritize their own needs over the recipient’s, with one study finding that givers preferred “reaction-maximizing” gifts (new puppy) over “satisfaction-maximizing” gifts (new vacuum). We all have expectations of the magical moment when someone opens our gift, and it’s easy to let that moment override the original purpose of the gift itself.
My conversation with Sam reminded me of the importance of asking two questions before giving to others:
- Am I prioritizing their needs as a recipient over my needs as a giver?
- Am I still willing to give if the outcome falls short of my expectations?
– Emmett
What I’m Reading:
All Together Now – Morgan Housel
“Controlling your behavior amid uncertainty can be hard enough. Controlling your reactions to other people’s behavior is way harder. Fear is more contagious than any virus, and can instantly push people to react in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a moment prior.”
2,000 Years of Kindness – Maria Popova
“Nothing broadens the soul more than the touch of kindness, given or received, and nothing shrivels it more than a flinch of unkindness, given or received — something we have all been occasionally lashed with, and something of which we are all occasionally culpable, no matter how ethical our lives and how well-intentioned our conduct.”
What I’m Listening To: