About The Practical Altruism Project (The long version)
A look at altruism through an historical and philosophical lens and why this project matters
By Peter Aronson
The Practical Altruism Project
Published on September 23, 2024
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The purpose of this website is to start a conversation about practical altruism (PA). It’s a concept as old as humans on earth. I’m convinced that the more people talk about it, the more people will do it. In a world that’s increasingly polarized and traumatized politically, socially and environmentally, this can only be a positive thing.
A practical altruist, as I define it, is an individual who does volunteer work using their career-learned expertise in order to help others or a cause. (Some people call this work skills-based volunteering. More on that below.)
The examples of practical altruism are as many as there are fields of work and as varied as the needs there are in our society. An experienced plumber volunteers to restore drinking water for families that lost it in a hurricane; a doctor provides medical care for victims at a disaster scene; a retired English teacher helps students from disadvantaged communities with their college essays; or a proven leader provides crucial guidance to a nonprofit, putting it in a better position to help the people it serves.
All the work is done voluntarily. The individual has decided to use their expertise to help others. They may or may not be retired. It’s a practical, sensible application, applied practically and altruistically. It's a simple concept.
Surprisingly, the term practical altruism barely registers when researching altruism. When looking for books about or Googling “practical altruism,” the term "effective altruism" (EA) pops up repeatedly and in countless rows - organizations devoted to and promoting it and books, articles, blogs and courses offered about it. EA espouses a data-driven, unsentimental approach to helping others through monetary giving, a cost-benefit analysis to determine what’s the most efficient way to save the world from poverty, disease, global warming and the overall apocalyptic end to humankind.
This strict, impersonal dollars-and-cents approach is not surprising, given the philosophical moral underpinnings of the EA movement and the devastating wealth gap in America and throughout the world, where a tiny percent of the population controls an overwhelming amount of the wealth.
I am not writing about EA, nor am I taking a position pro or con about the subject. I happily acknowledge and applaud the billions that filter through the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors to help those in need.
But I choose to write about PA, a much different, non-monetary, more personal altruistic practice that virtually anyone can participate in - you don’t need excess money, or even the desire or ability to give away even a small portion of your assets. You just need experience and skill, and the altruistic desire and ability to share that experience and skill as a volunteer, which usually involves significant direct contact with an individual or individuals in need, often providing assistance in a one-to-one, or in a small-group setting, often highly personal, often highly effective and often highly rewarding.
Different ways to look at altruism
Those who have and do study altruism have defined it in different ways. Stephanie Preston, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, wrote in her book The Altruistic Urge that when “most people hear the word ‘altruism,’ they might imagine a saint who relinquishes world possessions to feed the poor, or a hero who rescues a stranger from a burning building.”
She focuses on the “altruistic urge,” where a “person feels compelled to approach a vulnerable victim in immediate need of aid.”
Matthieu Ricard, in his book Altruism, also recounts those who believe true altruism involves risking their lives or giving up a lot to help those in need. Oft-cited examples include the man who dove on to a New York City subway to save another person or the many individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
However, Ricard does not adopt this rigid definition himself, removing risk from the equation, instead adopting what I would call a more inclusive approach to defining altruism, writing, “Authentic altruism does not require that you suffer from helping others and does not lose its authenticity if it is accompanied by a feeling of profound satisfaction.”
C. Daniel Batson, who has studied and written about altruism for decades and is the author of Altruism in Humans, believes in the empathy-altruism hypothesis (as opposed to self-interest-induced altruism), meaning that an empathetic concern for others motivates individuals to be altruistic towards them, with “the ultimate goal of increasing the welfare of one or more individuals other than oneself.”
Batson, a professor emeritus of social psychology at the University of Kansas, says that while altruistic actions or motives are not always positive, he says preliminary evidence shows that empathy-induced altruism is a “potentially powerful force for good.” He says that those individuals who express empathy-induced altruism potentially are less aggressive, less derogatory, more sensitive, more forgiving, more cooperative, more positive, more willing to help others, more responsive to friends and romantic partners, happier in life, with more self-esteem and a greater sense of fulfillment with less stress and increased longevity.
Overall, Batson says the evidence suggests that “empathy-induced altruism is a more pervasive and powerful force in our lives than has been recognized.”
Becoming a practical altruist
To become a practical altruist is not difficult.
If you want to apply the skills you’ve learned in your career to help others, it requires setting aside some time, probably a few hours a week. It may require some trial and error until you find the right fit.
It usually involves finding a nonprofit that needs a practical altruist’s skills. There are approximately 1.5 million 501(c)(3) charitable nonprofits in the United States. There are many ways to locate a nonprofit that needs a PA’s services, including talking to neighbors, friends and family about options in the community, viewing neighborhood internet sources, or conducting searches on such sites as the IRS nonprofit search engine, GuideStar, VolunteerMatch.org, TaprootFoundation.org, Catchafire.org or another IRS site that provides info on volunteer work with the federal government.
If you think you have skills that no one needs, you almost certainly are mistaken. Nonprofits are chronically underfinanced and understaffed. They survive on volunteers and they need skilled volunteers.
A perfect example is Assaf Rutenberg, an IT specialist who as a volunteer opened a computer lab within Broadway Community, a homeless shelter and soup kitchen located in a church basement in New York City. Being able to provide computer and internet services to homeless and unemployed individuals has been extremely beneficial for the shelter and the community.
“I don’t think we’d be able to provide the robust employment assistance work that we do without Assaf’s effort,” said Isaac Adlerstein, Broadway Community’s executive director. He said Rutenberg, a volunteer, now working with a newly-hired, part-time paid staff member, created the facility and now helps guests write resumes and navigate job search websites.
“They are dealing with folks with a variety of technical proficiencies,” Adlerstein explained. “With folks who have varying work experiences, with a population that, generally speaking, is often high need. Rutenberg meets with people, one on one, listens patiently to them, helps them get their resumes on paper, helps them create cover letters and then helps identify and apply for jobs that the folks are qualified for.”
Rutenberg is one of the individuals I am profiling on this website. These stories are about successful, hard working, positive-minded individuals doing a good deed, which is applying their skills to help other people.
Thinking about practical altruism
For me, the seeds for The Practical Altruism Project were planted by Broadway Community’s Adlerstein. He made me realize something that I didn’t realize before, namely that I could accomplish much more as a volunteer by applying skills I had learned in my career.
Before I really knew Adlerstein, I volunteered at Broadway Community helping stuff lunch bags for the center’s meal program. Although this was helpful work, I didn’t feel I was making a significant difference (there was no shortage of volunteers), and I certainly wasn’t using any of the writing, editing or counseling skills I had learned in decades as a journalist, writer and lawyer.
A few months after I stopped volunteering, Adlerstein emailed me and asked if I wanted to participate in a mentorship program called Panim el Panim, face to face in Hebrew, working with homeless or formerly homeless individuals as they worked to better their lives through support programs, housing and job opportunities. Adlerstein also asked me to help individuals in the Panim program write and tell their personal stories. He knew, I think better than I did, how this would allow me to utilize my skills.
As I began working with two formerly homeless individuals, Morgan and Isaac (not Adlerstein, a different Isaac), I felt an immediate purpose for and connection to my skills and the important work I was asked to do. Frankly, I could see that Morgan and Isaac were benefitting from the skills I was applying. (Morgan’s, Isaac’s and now, also Clarence’s stories, told in their own words, can be found on Broadway Community’s website.)
I soon realized I was doing what I came to call practical altruism. I enjoyed the concept so much, I continued and took on other practical altruism projects (writing articles for an environmental nonprofit, the New York League of Conservation Voters, and assisting high school seniors with their college essays at South Bronx United, a soccer/education program for youth in the South Bronx).
I knew I was helping people and I didn’t need research to tell me that this work also was beneficial for my physical and emotional health.
Once this realization crystallized in my mind, I decided to find out how other individuals were participating in practical altruism, as a way for others to see the light Adlerstein had shown me.
I am not claiming practical altruism is new. Since time immemorial, farmers and hunters helped neighbors, friends and family grow their crops and hunt for food. Ricard, in his book Altruism, traced the origins to our distant ancestors, hunters and gatherers, who lived in small tribes, creating a society “based on reciprocity and cooperation.”
And today, no doubt, there are many, many thousands of people, if not millions, out there doing practical altruistic work. But it’s not identified as such, and it’s not talked about or written about as practical altruism.
I hope to change that.
The origin of helping others
Volunteer work, in the form of helping fellow humans, goes back to the origins of human history. The Bible talks about helping others. The words “compassion” and “kindness” are mentioned dozens of times in the biblical text. The story of the Good Samaritan in Luke, when a man helps an injured man on the side of the road, has become part of sermonic lore, an often-told tale of doing the right thing. The concept of giving, of helping others, of being altruistic, is clear in Deuteronomy, when the words suggest a tithe every three years for widows, orphans and travelers. Jews, Catholics, Protestants and other faiths have interpreted these words and adopted their own system of giving, whether it’s volunteer work or monetary contributions, wrote Robert Wuthnow, a professor of sociology emeritus at Princeton, in Acts of Compassion, Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves.
“With so much material to work with, every denomination and faith has produced its distinctive interpretation of why and how people should love their neighbors,” he wrote.
Ricard, in his book Altruism, explained the theory of “reciprocal altruism” developed by Robert Trivers, the theory about the creation of long-term relationships among people that involve mutual aid. Ricard said that those involved in reciprocal altruism will “derive long-term advantages,” adding that “therefore it is in the interest of individuals to help each other over the long term …”
According to Ricard, even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution touches on these issues.
Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex: “As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.”
It’s the sympathies and mutual cooperation that ensues from it that are key. “Contrary to widespread misconception that Darwinism leaves no place for altruism,” Ricard wrote, “evolutionist theory insists on cooperation between individuals and on the development of cooperation.”
This cooperation with, or helping, others through history has more examples than I could possibly state. In medieval England, volunteers helped the poor receive medical care. In the United States, as detailed in By the People, A History of Americans as Volunteers, by Susan K. Ellis and Katherine H. Campbell, organized volunteer work was fundamental to the building of our country, starting with Puritan farmers combining their human power to clear land and build houses, barns, schools and roads, to a volunteer army in the 1600s and 1700s. In 1736, Benjamin Franklin founded the first volunteer firehouse. Spies working for George Washington during the Revolutionary War were volunteers. And, according to By the People, Samuel Morse, founder of the telegraph in 1832, “worked without pay for eleven years before the government recognized his invention as worthy of support.” Later in the 1800s, volunteers began counseling and supervising individuals on probation. There were volunteer peace officers, volunteer teachers, volunteer court officials, volunteer nurses and doctors, and volunteer social service programs, including benevolent organizations helping Blacks freed from slavery. Religion prompted the beginning of such volunteer organizations as the YMCA, founded in 1851.
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America in the 1830s: “I have seen Americans making great and sincere sacrifices for the key common good and a hundred times I have noticed that, when needs be, they almost always gave each other faithful support.”
Countless individuals risked their lives as volunteers in the Abolitionist Movement. Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881, following her volunteer service helping wounded soldiers in the Civil War and in the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870 France. (In Europe, she had learned about the International Red Cross, based in Switzerland.) Throughout American history, countless individuals have volunteered for causes they believed in, from fighting in the Revolutionary War and Civil War to advocating for temperance and suffrage to feeding the hungry during the Great Depression and helping the country on the home front during both world wars. The last half of the 20th Century to the present day has seen expanded volunteerism in certain movements, with individuals fighting for peace, civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, abortion rights, voting rights, environmental conservation and gun control, to name just some of the movements. It’s fair to say that tens of thousands of people volunteer for political candidates during elections.
The annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service, because Dr. King believed in service to others.
In his 1963 collection of sermons published as Strength to Love, Dr. King wrote: “[E]very man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ ”
Dr. King saw altruistic endeavors as a moral imperative. Others might disagree. But we can all agree on the benefits to society.
Many American corporations see volunteer work as a moral imperative and employees seem to agree. Fortune reports that companies with robust volunteer work programs have lower employee turnover, and Forbes reports that corporate volunteer programs are good for business and good for employees’ mental health. According to Forbes, about two-thirds of companies surveyed offered paid volunteer work to employees and 40 percent of the Fortune 500 companies offer volunteer grant programs, whereby the company provides grants to organizations where employees volunteer regularly.
Double the Donation, Goodera.com and a study by Boston College’s Center for Corporate Citizenship highlight the benefits of a company developing an organized program that coordinates skills-based volunteer, or pro bono, work for its employees with nonprofits, citing such commonly needed expertise in marketing, communications, financial management, fundraising, graphic design, tech support, teaching support and mentorship. The corporate names range from pro bono challenge and corporate citizenship to talent for good and service sabbatical.
This skills-based volunteer work is wonderful and needed, and does, partially, fall under my definition of practical altruism, because individuals are often using their work skills to help others. However, I will not be focusing on these individuals, or on what corporations, law firms or their employees are doing in the volunteer sector. This volunteer work falls outside the scope of The Practical Altruism Project, because these individuals are employees of an organization and their volunteer, or pro bono, work falls under the overall umbrella of their paid job.
The benefits of volunteer work
According to the most recent U.S. government figures, from 2021, 23 percent of the U.S. population 16 and over, or 60.7 million people, formally volunteer through an organization. Nearly 51 percent of the population in that age range, or 124.7 million people, “informally helped their neighbors between September 2020 and 2021, during the height of the pandemic,” according to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 11 million people did volunteer work on an average day in 2022 across the country, seven million women, four million men.
Clearly, this work also benefits the volunteer.
“Specifically, the more hours of volunteer work, the greater a person’s happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem, sense of mastery, and physical health, and the lower his or her depression,” a study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior found.
As noted by Batson previously in this article, and put forth by the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic and the National Alliance on Mental Health, research shows that doing volunteer work offers significant health benefits, especially for adults 60 and over.
The benefits include better physical and mental health for those who volunteer, including lower rates of depression and anxiety, feeling less stress and an increase in self-esteem and positive feelings about others. These positive feelings activate the reward center in your brain, forcing the release of serotonin, dopamine and endorphins, said Dr. Susan Albers, of the Cleveland Clinic. Helping others gives the volunteer a better sense of purpose in life, with all this adding up to “lower mortality rates” for those who do volunteer work.
Adam Grant, a professor of psychology at Penn’s Wharton School and author of Give and Take, cited study after study indicating that volunteer work increases happiness, life satisfaction, self-esteem and can, in some cases, provide the volunteer - the giver - with more energy to succeed in their general life’s work.
He cited the example of Conrey Callahan, a young teacher at Overbrook High School in Philadelphia, who faced burnout at this inner-city school because of the many obstacles to teaching, such as chronic truancy, crime, students’ personal problems and a graduation rate of only 54 percent.
Callahan was part of Teach For America (TFA), where teachers typically spend two years with the program at their assigned school. Despite being overwhelmed, Grant wrote, Callahan decided to give more, volunteering as a TFA alumni mentor and then, with friends, starting the Philadelphia chapter of Minds Matter, a nonprofit that helps low-income students prepare for college.
These altruistic efforts gave Callahan an emotional boost, and “instilled confidence that she could help the students struggling in her own classroom,” Grant wrote.
“I know what I’ve started is really making a difference with these kids,” Callahan told Grant. “What I’ve seen in three months is a big change for them, and they make me realize how great kids can be.”
Although Grant was not writing about practical altruism, it turns out that Callahan fits my definition of a practical altruist, a volunteer using her experience in her chosen field, in this case as a teacher, to help kids better prepare for college.
What Callahan realized is one of the beautiful things often utilized by practical altruists, the ability to use skills one to one with another person, the practice of looking someone else in the eye with a sense of offering and kindness that neither the altruist nor the beneficiary may have experienced before. It may allow the practical altruist to offer something of themself that they didn’t know they had, or it may just be a continuation of their normal way of being.
For Donna Frylinger, a volunteer at an agency helping child abuse and sexual assault victims, the more she volunteered, the more confidence she had to help others.
“As you serve others, your inner strength grows,” Wuthnow wrote in Acts of Compassion, in describing Frylinger and others. “You are then better able to help others. The whole process is a kind of upward spiral.”
Frylinger told Wuthnow: “[T]he longer you do caring things, the more good feelings you have; it will just kind of mushroom, and then you will be even more able to help other people.”
It’s worth thinking about this trickle-up effect, in more ways than one.
Altruistic efforts can be contagious
“We are much more likely to do the right thing if we think others are already doing it,” wrote noted Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, in The Life You Can Save.
Adam Waytz, a professor of management, organizations and psychology at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, wrote in The Power of Human that “Not only does human persuasion inspire action, but human action also inspires people to copy that action: people do as others do.”
I agree with these authors that empathy begets empathy.
The Giving Pledge, where billionaires publicly pledge to give away a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes, seems to be a good example, because these extraordinarily wealthy individuals may be encouraged and motivated by their wealthy and philanthropic peers stepping up.
When the movement was started in 2010 by Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, there were 40 philanthropists on the public list. As of July 2024, there were 244 individuals (or couples) from 30 countries.
In their initial pledge letter, Bill and Melinda Gates wrote that group discussions and meetings about philanthropy led to the realization that a public pledge could inspire greater action.
“Everyone who attended was inspired by listening to the others’ passion and encouraged to do even more,” they wrote.
In The Life You Can Save, Singer wrote about New Jersey businessman and philanthropist Gaetano Cipriano, who explained that he is a major supporter of a Newark soup kitchen based in a church where his father once attended mass, as well as a supporter of a youth squash-education program, which helps with mentoring and education. Cipriano told Singer, “I can’t change the world, but I try to make my little corner of the world a little bit better everyday.”
This exact same principle applies to every person who is a practical altruist. Their volunteer work, wherever and whatever it may be, will in fact make the world a little bit better place. It has to, because if you improve a person’s life, even just one life, then that person, and the world, is better off. If 10,000 individuals each help one person by utilizing their expertise, then 10,000 people are better off. If a million people do the same thing, then one million people have learned something or been the recipient of an act of kindness and the applied knowledge and assistance, and this leaves them in a better place than before.
There are few people who can’t do this work. If you’ve had a job, you have developed certain skills. These are skills you can either pass on to others, or apply to help others. Often, when people retire, they are tired of what they’ve done for years and they want to try something entirely new. I get this.
A retired lawyer may decide to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity and help build houses. A retired teacher may decide to work in a shelter cooking meals for homeless individuals. These are all excellent altruistic pursuits and are to be commended, but I would argue that an individual can do more good as a volunteer if they apply their expertise in their volunteer work.
After all, expertise is, well, expertise in a certain field, allowing an individual to perform certain volunteer tasks better than a non-expert would do it.
As I have done my research, I have realized that there are many people doing the same thing I am doing. The first profiles on this website to be published over the next few months will reflect that: an old friend, a retired psychologist, has been a practical altruist for years, doing important work for the Red Cross. A working artist is helping underprivileged kids in art workshops. An actor who had learned to apply for grants when she ran a nonprofit theater, now uses her skills to help a homeless shelter raise grant money to feed the hungry and house the homeless. And then there’s the retired Air Force general, who now sits on the board of three veteran-themed nonprofits, using her leadership skills and knowledge of the military to help those who have served in our armed forces. Like I said in the beginning, the list of practical altruists is endless. My search to find more is on. I will be profiling many of them on this website.
If you are a practical altruist, or think you know of one, and the practical altruistic work has been performed for at least a year, please reach out. If you found this website interesting, please let others know. Thank you!
email: paronson@practicalaltruism.com
website: practicalaltruism.com