America’s Heritage of Generosity

This past month, the Hamilton soundtrack has been on repeat in our house.

If you've spent any time with Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical, you know how it works its way into your head. What I didn't expect was how thoroughly it would work its way into my girls' heads and hearts. Both of them are teenagers now (we celebrated my youngest's birthday just last month 🎂), and somewhere between the car rides and the kitchen sing-alongs, I've watched them start to fall for this glimpse into how our nation came to be.

It brings me joy watching my kids understand what it’s like for a people to reach for something bigger than themselves. They're not just learning lyrics. They're learning that a group of young, flawed, divided, and deeply uncertain people staked everything on an idea – and weren't at all sure it would work.

That’s one of the elements I love about Hamilton. The Great American Experiment wasn’t a sure bet.

We tend to think of history as inevitable, but the truth is that the people living through it were anxious about their country's future. They argued. They doubted. They wondered if the whole thing would hold.

I couldn’t help but wonder – has every American generation felt that way? 

The founding generation feared the experiment would collapse. The Civil War generation watched the country nearly tear itself in two. My own father was drafted during the Vietnam War, in a decade when plenty of people were certain America had lost its way. And today – well, you don't need me to make the list.

Angst about our nation isn't new, and I find it strangely reassuring. It's nearly as old as the nation itself. I think it shows that we care – that if we want our nation to be sustainable, we have work to do. 

What I want to do today is step back from the moment and mark something we don't celebrate nearly enough: a heritage of generosity that runs all the way back to our nation’s founding, and even further.

(This also happens to be the 200th Wave Report since I started the great experiment that is this column. 🎉 As someone who preaches marking milestones, I couldn't quite let it slip past unmarked. I'll share what writing 200 consecutive Wave Reports has taught me next week. 😊)

A Heritage Older Than the Nation Itself

We have a rich heritage of generosity in North America, and it begins before there was a United States at all.

The earliest acts of philanthropy on this land were by Native Americans. The Pilgrims recorded in December 1620 the aid of a Patuxet man named Squanto, who served them as a guide and a teacher when they had no idea how to survive.

In what would become the United States, the earliest recorded fundraising drive came in 1643, when three pastors raised £500 for a fledgling school called Harvard.

By the nation's founding in 1776, the roots of private philanthropy were already deep, leading to the establishment of churches, clinics, schools, orphanages, libraries, colleges, and hospitals.

You don't have to take my word for it. A few decades after the founding, a young Frenchman named Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States and was struck by something he hadn't seen anywhere else – the American instinct to band together and do something:

"Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite… Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools." – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

(Oh, and so you know you aren’t alone, I had to look up “fêtes” and “antipodes” 🤣.  Fêtes are celebrations, and antipodes are “any two points on the Earth’s surface that are directly opposite to each other” – in other words, we might say “to the ends of the earth.”)

Read that list again. Churches, schools, hospitals, books, and missionaries. Tocqueville was describing the very heritage of generosity we were already living.

Recurring Giving Was Born Here, Too

Here's the part that still amazes me – the earliest documented case of one-to-one sponsorship in this country dates to May 24, 1815. A group of missionaries in Bombay, India, wrote a letter to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Salem, Massachusetts. The letter proposed that donors "sponsor" children while they lived in missionary homes and schools.

In the months that followed, the Board reported that the plan was "very captivating," and that "contributions and communal subscriptions for this object exceed our most sanguine expectations."

“Communal subscriptions.”

More than two hundred years before the subscription economy reshaped how we shop, stream, and give, our nation's first recurring giving program was already being described as a "subscription." I love the ring of that.

💡 Takeaway: Recurring giving in the United States is not new. It dates back to the nation's foundations, more than two centuries ago.

For Most Charities, Recurring Giving Was Out of Reach

And yet, for almost all of those two hundred years, recurring giving remained out of reach for the vast majority of charities.

It took infrastructure, scale, and technology that only the largest organizations could afford. If you were a small or mid-sized nonprofit, a true recurring program was mostly a dream.

The legacy of that lingers. Even today, according to Neon One's 2026 Recurring Donor Report, the average nonprofit has just 25 recurring donors. For most organizations, recurring giving is still a sliver of the whole.

But that is changing – and faster than almost anyone realizes. The subscription economy didn't just reshape how we consume. It quietly tore down the barriers that kept recurring giving out of reach, putting it within reach of nearly every charity for the first time in our history.

At Our Best, We Strive to Be Better

Celebrating our heritage of generosity does not mean pretending our track record as a nation and a people is spotless. It isn't. Every generation – including ours – has fallen short. 

But here is what I love about us when we’re at our best: we strive to be better. And generosity is one of the clearest places you can see that pattern play out.

The United States was ranked the most generous country in the world from 2009 through 2018 by the World Giving Index. But in recent years, we’ve slipped. By 2024, the final year of the index, the United States had fallen to 6th in the world. 

That's a humbling fact. But it also reminds us that being a leader in the world means we can’t stand still. We must move forward. We must strive to be better. 

Amidst the headlines, there is a bright spot on the horizon. Even as overall giving has gone essentially flat, sustainable recurring giving is growing. 

Abby Jarvis and the team at Neon One looked at giving to more than 4,000 charities. They found that while donation revenue for the average charity grew just 1.53% from 2023 to 2025, revenue from recurring giving grew 36.25% over the very same period. You can see their full Recurring Donor Report here. 

More people are choosing to give to more causes on a recurring basis than at nearly any other point in our history.

Recurring giving accounts for a fraction of most nonprofits' revenue. But it is growing faster than any other form of generosity I'm aware of. That's a nation – and a people – reaching to be better.

💡 Takeaway: Recurring giving is still a small slice of most nonprofits' revenue – but it's growing faster than any other form of generosity, and it's finally within reach of nearly every charity.

What I Hope My Girls Inherit

It's easy right now – especially, I think, for those under 40 – to absorb a story in which America is mostly the sum of its failures. I understand the critiques. I don't wave them away. Some of them are fair, and facing them squarely is part of striving to be better.

But I hold a more hopeful – and, honestly, a harder – view. The foundation is here. When we do the work, this nation has been, is, and can continue to be a light in the world.

America’s heritage of generosity is part of that foundation. It's older than the nation. It’s survived every generation's angst. And right now, in the rise of sustainable giving, I see it doing what it has always done – finding a new way to express a very old and very beautiful instinct.

So as we mark 250 years of the Great American Experiment, that's the heritage I hope my girls inherit. A story that includes the discipline and the joy of generosity, the gift of a country worth being grateful for, and the conviction that we must always reach to be better.

I’m going to do my part, and I pray they are willing to do the work in their generation to make America a better, more generous place.

I'm grateful I was born in this nation and at this time in history. I’m proud to be an American. 

Wherever you are reading this from, I hope you can appreciate the importance and influence of generosity.

Happy 250th birthday, America. 🎂🇺🇸

Until next week… Surf's Up! 🌊

  – Dave