A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kristof, Nicholas D., [date]

A path appears : transforming lives, creating opportunity /

Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-385-34991-8 (hardcover)—isbn 978-0-385-34992-5 (eBook) 1. Charities. 2. Humanitarianism. 3. Fund-raising. 4. Social action. 5. Social service.

I. WuDunn, Sheryl, [date] II. Title. hv48.k75 2014

361—dc23

2014006734

Cover design based on a design by Chip Kidd

Cover photographs: (top) © Li Ding / Alamy; (bottom, left to right): Audrey Hall, Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi, Audrey Hall, Nicholas Kristof; (back, from left to right): Samantha Bouch, Jonathan Sprague, Nicholas Kristof, Audrey Hall, Georgia Court/Courtesy of Vital Voices Global Partnership

v3.1_r5

For our families, who raised and nurtured us with love,

and who sometimes drove us wild as we tried to nurture them.

That means you: David and Alice, and Sondra, Sirena, and Darrell

and Ladis and Jane

and Gregory, Geoffrey, and Caroline

And also to all of you around the world who have taught us that

witnessing the world’s troubles isn’t depressing but inspiring—

because crises bring out the innate helpfulness in people, and

because side by side with the worst of humanity, you see the best.

Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally, there is nothing—but as people walk this way again and again, a path appears.

—LU XUN, CHINESE ESSAYIST, 1921

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE. GIVING OPPORTUNITY WINGS

1. Introduction: A Meaningful Life

2. A Drop in the Bucket

Changing Lives, Bead by Bead

3. From Anecdote to Evidence

Doughnuts with CARE

4. The Land of Opportunity—If You Catch Them Early

Save the Children, in the USA

5. A Thirty-Million-Word Gap

A Summer Springboard for Kids

6. Who Grabs the Marshmallow?

Mrs. Grady and the Boy Who Made Her Cry

7. Coaching Troubled Teens

A Milestone for Jessica

8. The Power of Hope

A Kenyan Named Kennedy

9. A Doctor Who Treats Violence

Renaissance Giver

10. Attacking Sex Trafficking

Shana’s Comeback

PART TWO. REFORMING THE ART OF HELPING

11. Charity: In Search of a Revolution

The Biggest Bang for the Philanthropic Buck

12. Madison Avenue Helps the Needy

Lessons from a Master Pastor

13. Scaling Social Good

Impossible, Possible Task: A Happy, Healthy Meal

14. Doing Good While Being Big

The Perfect Product: Cheap, Clean Water

PART THREE. GIVE, GET, LIVE

15. The Neuroscience of Giving: A Natural High

The Most Boring Aid in the World

16. When Social Networks Dig a Well

One Girl, in Memoriam

17. Survival of the Kind

Philanthropy by the Poor

18. Healing Through Helping

Encore Careers

19. A Hundred Flowers Bloom

A Hundred Million Books

20. A Giving Code

Six Steps You Can Take in the Next Six Minutes

A Gift List

List of Useful Organizations

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Other Books by This Author

PART ONE

Giving Opportunity Wings

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

A Meaningful Life

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Rachel

Beckwith wouldn’t admit it, but her ninth birthday had been just a little disappointing. A girl living in the Seattle area, she had been shocked by a lecture in her church about people worldwide lacking clean water. So instead of birthday presents, Rachel had asked people to donate to an organization called charity:water that drills wells in impoverished villages around the world. Rachel aimed to raise $300 for her birthday, and she closely tracked the contributions that came in on her birthday page on the charity:water website.

All kinds of people, she saw, were celebrating occasions by raising money on the site to drill wells for needy people living half a world away. Liz and Kirk Ward married and used their well donation page as a wedding registry. Ezra Magaram raised $5,804, more than twice his goal, for his bar mitzvah. Frank and Megan Danna marked the birth of their daughter, Emma, by hosting a charity:water page that raised $735. Timmy Ho gave up alcohol for a year and raised $1,306. Erica Hanna turned a weight-loss struggle into a money-raising effort for a well. Rachel was excited to see all these people raising money so successfully, but her own birthday campaign felt a bit dispiriting. She raised only $220, much less than her goal.

Rachel, encouraged by her family, had early on shown a desire to give back. When she was five years old, she learned at school about an organization called Locks of Love, which uses hair donations to make wigs for children who have lost their own hair because of cancer or other diseases. Rachel asked to have her long hair shorn off and sent to Locks of Love. It was her first haircut, so she had very long hair, but she said she wanted to help the cancer kids, recalls her mother, Samantha Paul. After the haircut, Rachel announced that she would grow her hair long again and donate it to Locks of Love after a few years. And that’s what she did. Rachel found giving to be enormously satisfying, and that’s what led her with great eagerness to set up a birthday fund-raiser through charity:water. It was just frustrating, though, that each time she went on the Internet, full of hope, to see her birthday page, the total would be unchanged and short of her target.

Then, less than six weeks after her ninth birthday, tragedy struck. Rachel was driving with her family on the highway when two trucks collided. One truck spilled logs onto the highway, causing a thirteen-car pileup. The Beckwith car was in the middle, and although other passengers in the vehicle weren’t seriously hurt, Rachel was critically injured. In the next few days, as friends and church members comforted the family and prayed for Rachel’s recovery, they also sought some more tangible way of showing solidarity. Remembering her birthday campaign for clean water, they began to donate to it on the charity:water website. Contributions climbed past her $300 goal, then past $1,000. As the little girl struggled for life in a hospital bed, and with everyone feeling helpless, donations surged past $5,000 and then $10,000. Family members gathered around Rachel’s hospital bed were soon able to whisper to her—not knowing if she could hear them through her coma—that she had set a record by exceeding the $47,544 that Justin Bieber had raised for charity:water on his birthday. I think she secretly had a crush on him, but she would never admit it, says Samantha Paul. I think she would have been ecstatic.

It became evident that Rachel would never recover, and her family made the heartbreaking decision to remove her from life support. She died surrounded by a loving family and by a growing legend about a little girl’s last fund-raiser. People all over the world, moved by Rachel’s big heart, went to the website and donated, often in $9 increments. A five-year-old girl sent the entire contents of her piggy bank, $2.27. Samantha Paul spoke eloquently about her daughter’s dream, and that encouraged further ripples through social media, sending the total surging past $100,000, then past $500,000. In the end, Rachel’s campaign raised $1,265,823—enough to provide clean water for 37,000 people. Social networks managed to transform a tragedy into something triumphant as well, a celebration of Rachel’s life and values that, halfway around the world, will save children’s lives and improve their health. A year after Rachel’s death, Samantha traveled to Africa and was stunned to see the impact that her young daughter had had on so many Ethiopian villages.

For her ninth-birthday party, Rachel Beckwith aimed to raise $300 to help build a well through charity:water.

For a mother, there is of course no salve that can erase the pain of losing a nine-year-old daughter. But Samantha Paul was gladdened to see what her daughter had accomplished, and she was moved that the villagers were both giddy at getting clean water and profoundly sympathetic about her loss. Giving wells couldn’t dissipate the grief but could turn it into something at least bittersweet, creating waves of meaning to commemorate a loss that otherwise felt infuriatingly random. At times, it was a little overwhelming for me, Samantha remembers. I talked to a woman who had children of her own, and she was in tears. She was genuinely touched and grateful about what Rachel had wanted. She was telling me that she’s talking to her children about Rachel as a lesson in love and giving. These people have far less than what Rachel had, and knowing that they’re also learning a lesson in giving and unconditional love from Rachel—that was really, really moving. As the vehicle drove away from that village, bouncing over rutted roads, Samantha Paul hunched over and cried.

Lester

Strong had a very different childhood. When he was in the third grade, his teacher told his parents that their son was failing school and was basically not teachable; the school used the words mentally retarded. His parents should not bother wasting their time trying to give little Lester a formal education, for he was suited just for manual labor and at best might learn to live independently. The teacher humiliated Lester by putting the boy’s desk in the hallway and leaving him there on his own, stigmatizing him as an uneducable dunce. Lester was one of eight children in the Strong family, living just outside of Pittsburgh, and his parents—his father had only an eighth-grade education—were too overwhelmed to help much. He seemed to be one more African American boy who would never get a shot at a quality education.

Fortunately, Lester had three mentors: a barber, a minister, and the mother of a friend, and they all told him that he could learn after all. They checked his homework at night, looked over his report cards for signs of hope, and coached him on how to behave at school. Most important, they told him he could make it. These adult mentors transformed Lester’s life. He ended up repeating third grade but then soared, becoming an honors student in the fourth grade and later graduating first in his high school class. He was chosen as a National Merit Scholar and attended Davidson College on a scholarship, then went on to Columbia Business School. He spent a career in television as a reporter and executive, rising through the ranks to become anchor of a nightly news program in Boston.

Lester Strong

In his later years, he sought greater fulfillment. I felt the pull to do something more meaningful, to give back, he recalls. I wanted to stop children from being written off, as I almost was. So at sixty, Strong began a new career as chief executive of Experience Corps, an organization that uses volunteers over the age of fifty-five to mentor children as he was once mentored.

I know the power of an older adult really giving loving and structured attention to a child who has not been accustomed to receiving it, Strong says.

Experience Corps now has 1,700 volunteers mentoring 30,000 students from kindergarten to third grade across the United States, typically in low-income schools. An Experience Corps volunteer tutors a small group of children for fifteen hours a week for the entire school year, helping kids use the library, pick books, and, above all, appreciate the thrill of reading.

Dr.

Gary Slutkin was back in Chicago, his hometown, feeling restless. He was a rumpled infectious diseases specialist who had spent most of his career in San Francisco and Africa, battling tuberculosis, AIDS, and cholera. But he had burned out in refugee camps, his marriage had fallen apart, and now it was time to be nearer to his elderly parents. He had no clue what to do for work.

As he explored options, Slutkin began hearing about gang violence in Chicago, about ten-year-olds shooting other kids; this was shocking, but it also sounded more like Somalia and other places he knew. Slutkin began to study inner-city violence and pored over graphs of homicides and shootings—and to an epidemiologist they all seemed oddly familiar.

It hit me: this is an infectious disease, he said. The more Slutkin looked at urban violence, the more he felt that it had been misdiagnosed as solely a crime problem when in many ways it was a contagion analogous to cholera or leprosy. As with other contagions, an infection depends upon exposure among susceptible people who have low resistance or compromised immunity. Slutkin saw that an epidemic of violence is more than just a metaphor; in some ways murder actually spreads like a contagious disease.

Dr. Gary Slutkin applied his knowledge of infectious diseases to tackle inner-city violence in American cities.

It is just as tuberculosis begets tuberculosis, or flu begets flu, Slutkin says, that violence begets violence.

Once Slutkin had the insight that violence could be considered, in part, an infectious disease, he decided to tackle it as a public health problem and slow the epidemic. He started an organization called Cure Violence, and turned to ex-convicts and former gang members to act as health outreach workers and interrupt the contagion. When someone is shot, they go to the hospital room to counsel against a retaliatory hit. They gather intelligence on threats and negotiate peaceful solutions. More broadly, they try to change community norms so that those who use violence are scorned rather than respected. Violence is learned behavior, says Gary Slutkin. Violence can also be unlearned behavior.

In recent years, the Cure Violence model has spread to other cities in the United States and abroad—even to Iraq and Colombia—and results have been remarkable. Careful evaluations have found that Cure Violence can reduce serious violence by one-quarter or more, at a negligible cost. Gary Slutkin thinks that with some tweaking and enough resources, the model could reduce homicides by 70 percent.

Rachel

Beckwith, Lester Strong, and Dr. Gary Slutkin reflect a yearning to express our humanity by finding innovative and effective ways to give back. We crave meaning and purpose in life, and one way to find it is to connect to a cause larger than ourselves. This book is about innovators who are using research, evidence-based strategies, and brilliant ideas of their own to prevent violence, improve health, boost education, and spread opportunity at home and around the world—and to suggest to the rest of us specific ways in which we too can make a difference in the world. Some of these people we highlight raise or contribute the money, such as Rachel and her family and admirers who made something inspiring out of a tragedy. Some are organizers, such as Slutkin and Strong. Many more are foot soldiers. Together, they are all part of a revolution in tackling social problems, employing new savvy, discipline, and experience to chip away at poverty and injustice. On many issues ranging from failing schools in America to intestinal parasites in Africa, there are fascinating new approaches to making a difference; in some cases, the progress is startling.

So many social problems in the twenty-first century seem intractable and insoluble. We explore Mars and embed telephones in wristwatches, but we can’t keep families safe in the inner cities. We can map subatomic particles such as gluons, and we can design robots that drive cars, respond to speech, and defeat grandmasters in chess, but we grudgingly accept failure in our struggles to keep kids in school, off drugs, and out of gangs. Many of us know that it’s wrong and unfair that boys growing up in certain zip codes are more likely to end up in prison than in college, but we throw up our hands and surrender to the exigencies of ghetto life. Violence and poverty, whether in Congo or Chicago, remain towering realities.

We started our married life together as foreign correspondents for The New York Times, and we have wondered for years how we can do a better job addressing the needs around us. Not everyone can help fight crime in a city’s worst neighborhoods or volunteer in schools, so most of us are left to engage in piecemeal efforts such as a donation here or there. Like many Americans, we have day jobs we need to keep, and we have been busy raising our children; that has left us looking for great causes and people to support in modest ways. We aren’t regular churchgoers who focus our giving on a particular religious establishment, and although we wanted to lend a hand, we never knew how to choose among the appeals from nonprofits that inundated us. Basically, we were mystified about how best to assist at home as well as abroad. So we investigated how one can do a better job of making a difference, how one can help institute effective change. This book is the fruit of our labors.

Americans are among the most generous of people, though perhaps not the most generous. The World Giving Index, which tries to measure generosity across countries, varies in its annual results, but over five years Australia came out at the top, Ireland second, and the United States third. Almost three-quarters of the $335 billion that Americans donate to charity each year comes from individuals. Philanthropy cuts across social class, and poor and middle-income Americans are particularly generous. Strikingly, those in the bottom 20 percent of incomes give away a higher percentage of their money (3.2 percent) than those in the top 20 percent (1.3 percent). About two-thirds of Americans donate to charity each year, an average of about $1,000 per man, woman, or child.

Helping people is harder than it looks, however, and good intentions aren’t enough. People rarely give money away as intelligently as they make it, and frankly, much charitable giving isn’t very effective. We decided that our focus should be on expanding opportunity worldwide, because talent is universal, but opportunity is not. We have seen great talent residing in a trailer park in Kentucky, under a tree in Darfur, and in a remote hillside shack in Burma. One obstacle to expanding opportunity is the repression of women and girls in much of the world, and we described those searing challenges in our book Half the Sky. Now we are broadening the lens to examine other obstacles to opportunity and how they might be overcome.

Obviously there are good causes and solutions that do not involve opportunity: funding hospice care for dying cancer patients, protecting abused animals, bolstering the arts, supporting one’s church or temple, or, in the spirit of the Make a Wish Foundation, making a dream come true for a pediatric cancer patient. Those are commendable efforts and we endorse them. But we also face the transcendent challenge of spreading opportunity so that a person’s prospects depend less on the lottery of birth. Almost half the kids born worldwide this year will have strikes against them—they’re girls in societies where that is a handicap, they lack access to decent schools, they’re born in violent vortexes such as Somalia or gang-ridden neighborhoods of Baltimore—making it extra hard for them to live up to their potential. They are the losers, but so is the world, for it is robbed of their contributions. Spread opportunity around, and these people can flourish and grow. We spend trillions of dollars treating the symptoms of poverty (the United States alone has spent $20 trillion on means-tested social programs since 1965), and much of that is essential. But the more important challenge is to address underlying causes, and it seems that those of us who have won the lottery of birth have some responsibility to use our good fortune to help address these fundamental inequities.

The good news is that experts are gaining a much better understanding of how to make an impact. Researchers are developing new evidence-based approaches, and more charities are starting to measure and track their results, so there is an emerging science of how best to make a difference. Anyone can harness this science and be reasonably confident that donations are having an impact, through interventions that until recently were unavailable or uncertain. Evidence Action, an aid group based on the pioneering work of development economists Michael Kremer of Harvard, Esther Duflo of MIT, and Dean Karlan of Yale, allows a donor to deworm a child in Africa or Asia for 50 cents a year. Indeed, recent research has found that this is a cost-effective way of making a child healthier and more likely to attend school. The improved health and education from deworming will allow that child to earn 20 percent more as an adult—all for a penny a week today. Or, for a donation of $1.98, Evidence Action can provide a chlorine dispenser so that an impoverished family gets clean drinking water for a year. That has been shown to reduce diarrhea, a major factor in child deaths, by 40 percent.

If you prefer to help American children, a $25 program can reach a pregnant American woman who smokes and explain how doing so puts her child at risk, leading 14 percent of those pregnant women to quit smoking. Smoking during pregnancy increases testosterone in the uterus, with long-term effects on the behavior of male offspring in particular. Men whose mothers smoked when they were in utero are significantly more likely to be imprisoned as adults. We’ll see how such initiatives to reduce substance abuse during pregnancy, or to help teenagers avoid pregnancy, can have far-reaching benefits for society as a whole.

For $20 a year, you can pay for an impoverished child in America to get a prescription for reading from a doctor during pediatric visits, along with children’s books. This program, Reach Out and Read, carried out by a network of doctors and medical providers, gives books to young children and advice to parents on reading to their kids to promote brain development. The program substantially increases the vocabulary of the children, as well as the proportion of parents who read regularly to their kids. These aren’t magic wands that make problems disappear overnight, but they are simple, rigorously tested ways of chipping away at challenges around us. To put it another way, these are paths to opportunity.

It’s also much more feasible today, through the Internet, to see the impact of your contribution, for a wave of social entrepreneurs have built organizations that act as bridges between donors and beneficiaries. One young American, Conor Bohan, spent time after college as a ski bum in Europe and then, looking for something different, found a job in 1996 as a high school English teacher in Haiti. The most outstanding girl in his school was Isemonde Joseph, and Conor was bewildered to hear that she planned to attend a secretarial course after graduation. He asked her why she didn’t aim higher. She explained that her dream was to become a doctor but that her parents, who had never finished primary school, could not afford university tuition. Conor lent her $30 so that she could apply to medical school (in Haiti, students enter medical school as undergraduates), and when she was accepted, he used his savings to pay the $3,000 annual cost of Isemonde’s medical education. Isemonde did her part, too, studying by candlelight and sometimes walking five miles each way to school to save on the 12-cent bus fare. To help more students like Isemonde, Conor set up the Haitian Education and Leadership Program, or HELP, which offers university scholarships to the most outstanding straight-A high school graduates from across Haiti. To make the program sustainable, the scholarship recipients commit to contributing 15 percent of their salaries back to HELP for their first nine years of employment. More than 150 students are in university on these scholarships—and Isemonde is now a doctor.

The benefits of outreach flow in both directions. It’s not only the Isemondes who gain, but also those who help. A growing number of American students are learning about the world and about public service because their schools support schools in poorer countries, sometimes even building them. Through a group called World Assistance for Cambodia, it is possible to build a three-room school in Cambodia for $45,000. Other Americans find their own entry point. At a guesthouse in Haiti, Seth Donnelly, a teacher at Los Altos High School in California, ran into a local principal named Réa Dol. That chance encounter has led to an ongoing relationship, with Los Altos High School raising $200,000 for Dol’s new school for impoverished Haitian students. We could never do this without the Los Altos students, Dol told us as she showed off the new school. Every summer a group of Los Altos students visits Haiti to meet their counterparts and help them with English. It would be too glib to say that the Los Altos students have gained as much as the Haitians, but there’s no doubt that the exchange has given the California students a perspective on the world that they never would have garnered in the classroom.

Aid projects are also run better—and often more transparently—these days because increasingly there are local, home-grown project leaders such as Dol who know the terrain and operate much less expensively than foreign aid workers. Whether in the Bronx or a Haitian slum, it’s invaluable to have solutions bubbling up through local leaders, who can get buy-in from the community for new projects.

We have written before about Tererai Trent, a Zimbabwean villager who received only a year of elementary school education, and she’s now creating something new. Tererai was married at age eleven to a man who beat her, and she was an uneducated cattle herder when a meeting with Jo Luck, then the head of Heifer International, led Tererai to write down her goals. It seemed absurd, but Tererai wrote of her ambition to study in the United States, to earn a college degree, an M.A., and even a Ph.D. Then she wrapped the paper with these goals in plastic, placed it in a tin can, and buried it under a rock in the field where she herded cattle. She began taking correspondence classes, did brilliantly, and eventually was admitted to the University of Oklahoma on a scholarship. After earning her B.A., she returned to Zimbabwe, dug up the tin can and piece of paper, and checked off the first goal. She flew back to America for her master’s, earned that degree, and returned to dig up the paper and check off the second goal. Finally, at Western Michigan University, in 2009, Trent earned her doctorate—and went back to the cattle field in Zimbabwe, dug up the can, and checked off her very last goal.

Now Dr. Tererai Trent is working with Save the Children and building schools so that other children can achieve their dreams as well. She started a foundation named Tinogona—the name, which in the Shona language means it is achievable, is her personal credo—and in 2014 opened her first school, in her home village. When Tererai talks to Zimbabwean parents and children about the importance of educating girls, when she plans new schools in remote villages, she has far more credibility than any outsider ever could.

Tererai Trent visits students in front of the school she helped build in Zimbabwe.

Successful people often scorn those who are poor or homeless. A Princeton University scholar, Susan Fiske, has used scans to show that the brains of high-achieving people see images of poor people and process them as if they were not humans but things. Those who have made it sometimes see poverty as a moral failure and perceive in themselves the triumph of a simple narrative: you study hard, work assiduously, sacrifice for the future, obey the law, and create your own good fortune. Yet that pathway is much less accessible if you are conceived by a teenage mom who drinks during pregnancy and so you are born with fetal alcohol effects. Likewise, if you’re born in a high-poverty neighborhood to a stressed-out single mom who scolds you more than she hugs you, in a home with no children’s books, you face a huge handicap. As we’ll see, a University of Minnesota study found that the kind of parenting a child receives in the first three and a half years is a better predictor of high school graduation than IQ.

The upshot is that for now, one of the strongest determinants of who ends up poor is who is born poor. As Warren Buffett puts it, our life outcomes often depend on the ovarian lottery. For all our talk of the American dream, it has emigrated, and there’s now greater economic mobility in Europe than in the United States. An American boy in the bottom 20 percent in earnings has only a one-in-twelve chance of making it to the top 20 percent over a lifetime, compared to a one-in-eight chance in class-conscious Britain. We’ll dig deep into the cycles of poverty and deficits of education that are so damaging in the United States and other countries, and into strategies that have shown success in snapping the cycles. As we’ll see, early interventions—beginning in pregnancy and infancy, and continuing through preschool—seem particularly cost effective in breaking the cycle of poverty. Our past efforts have often failed in part because they come too late.

John Rawls, the brilliant twentieth-century philosopher, argued compellingly for judging a society’s fairness by considering it from behind a veil of ignorance—meaning we don’t know whether we’ll be born in that society to an investment banker or a teenage mom, in a leafy suburb or a gang-ridden inner city, healthy or disabled, smart or struggling, privileged or disadvantaged. That’s a shrewd analytical tool—and who among us would argue against funding nursery schools if we thought we might be that deprived child trying to get in? Let’s remember that the difference between being surrounded by a loving family or being homeless on the street is determined not just by our own level of virtue or self-discipline but also by an inextricable mix of luck, brain chemistry, child rearing, genetics, and outside help. Let’s recognize that success in life is a reflection not only of enterprise and willpower but also of chance and early upbringing, and that compassion isn’t a sign of weakness but a mark of civilization.

The challenge is to nurture a culture of altruism and empathy, seeking to imbue an instinct for social engagement. That is to say, it’s not you or me, but we. That is already beginning to happen, and the progress in expanding empathy over the past 250 years is stunning. The first large social movement on behalf of others—rather than demanding more for oneself—was the British antislavery movement that began in the 1780s, and the first international relief effort in response to global poverty came during the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. (The sympathy was limited: Queen Victoria asked the sultan of the Ottoman Empire not to donate £10,000 to save the Irish because that would have outshone her own gift of £2,000.) Today, almost any university bulletin board will have a poster appealing on behalf of some faraway group, but in historical terms that is a recent phenomenon. There’s probably more regard for chickens and cows today than existed a few centuries ago for slaves or foreigners. Princeton University professor Peter Singer is the philosopher of this growing humanitarianism, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker its chronicler, the singer Bono its muse, and it has a vast and growing army of ordinary donors and volunteers.

This is an area that is sometimes perceived as discouraging, but that’s a false rap. Some of the greatest successes the world has experienced have come from movements to address inequities or injustices, from slavery to hunger. Just in the last generation, Mothers Against Drunk Driving helped change norms about drinking and driving, saving thousands of lives every year. Environmentalists managed to ban leaded gasoline, reducing infants’ developing brains’ exposure to lead and adding several points to the average child’s IQ in the United States and abroad. Improved access to contraceptives has reduced the teen birth rate by more than 50 percent in the United States since 1991. The child mortality revolution has used vaccines, treatments for diarrhea, micronutrients, and improved nutrition to reduce the number of child deaths worldwide each year from 20 million in 1960 to 6.6 million today—even as the number of children has risen. The World Bank now aims in effect to eliminate extreme poverty, which was the condition of the great majority of humanity for most of our existence as a species, by 2030. Huge challenges and injustices remain, including in the United States and other wealthy countries, but the progress is a reminder of what is possible if we forge ahead. We don’t have perfect tools or endless resources, as individuals or as nations, but we can do better if we put our hearts and minds to it.

We wrote this book mostly to encourage others—rich and poor alike—to join in this push to improve the world. We’ll first try to address the basic skepticism that so many people have about whether giving or volunteering really can make a difference. We will also explore how some social change leaders and executives are rethinking how best to help, in some cases endorsing new approaches such as the use of for-profit companies that generate cash to make them sustainable.

There’s a good deal of cynicism about charities, some of it deserved, but the pitfalls needn’t deter anyone from seeking to have a substantial impact on other people’s lives. In a postscript to each chapter, we will spotlight a person or organization to demonstrate how change can happen.

Talk about helping others can easily sink into soggy sentimentality, even sanctimony. But the most important counterpoint is that reaching out to try to help, especially when we do it as a social activity, isn’t a Gandhi-style sacrifice. It’s a source of fulfillment, even joy. Over the past couple of decades, a growing stack of evidence has shown that social behavior—including helping others—improves our mental and physical health and extends life expectancy. One study on mortality following 7,000 people found that the risk of death among men and women with the fewest social ties was more than twice as high as the risk for adults with the most social ties, independent of physical health. Maybe this deep-rooted social element in all of us explains our yearning for a life of meaning. We wonder about our purpose; we care about our legacy.

Certainly the practical evidence is mounting. Among adults with coronary artery disease, those people who are socially isolated are 2.4 times more likely to die of heart attacks. Social isolation of female rats accelerates their aging, increases their incidence of mammary tumors, and shortens their lives, although it’s impossible to know if the effects on humans are similar. Recent research indicates that one biological pathway for this impact of social isolation is that it increases chronic inflammation, particularly for men, and that this inflammation in turn causes ill health and death. Of course, there are many ways to become social without giving: one can simply join a country club. Yet the evidence suggests that social activities that involve helping others are particularly healthful and fulfilling. Altruism is a powerful force for health and happiness alike, and it seems to be deeply embedded in human neurochemistry.

In experiments, toddlers not yet able to speak attempt altruistic behavior, offering comfort (even offering to share a teddy bear) to an adult who appears to have injured a finger. If you scan the brain of a person who is injured and also that of a witness to the injury, the areas activated are similar; at a neurological level, we are pained by other people’s suffering. The pleasure centers in the brain that light up in brain scans when we receive gifts, eat fine food, flirt, or have sex also light up when we help others. We underwent brain scans ourselves so that our pleasure centers could be monitored as we made charitable donations. Ah, but we’re getting ahead of our story. For now, let’s just emphasize that to help others isn’t a heroic burden but a transcendent source of fulfillment in our busy, often materialistic lives. There are few more selfish pleasures than altruism.

So think of giving back not as a dreary means to a tax deduction but as a chance to inject meaning, wonder, and fun into life. Social organizations have emerged to help others through hosting dinners (Dining for Women) or partying at a bar (Beers for Books). There are countless other such initiatives, for elementary school children, grandmothers, and everyone in between.

A generation ago, we didn’t have much more than hunches to guide us in trying to make a difference and build a life of greater meaning and satisfaction. Giving back was then what we did in December, hunched over a checkbook and relying on guesswork. In recent years, as we said, advances in neuroscience and economics—and a flowering of carefully monitored experiments—have given us much greater insight into what works to create opportunity worldwide, and much greater prospects for personal satisfaction from giving.