Crowdsourced Compassion: Accepting Help in The Age of Crowdfunding

Now that hybrid relationships are mainstream and commonplace, how do we consciously co-create new norms around supporting each other and being in community?

"People are donating money to us! I don't want to be taking people's money!"

Angela was looking up at me, confused about what was going on. Per usual, I had no idea what she was talking about.

"What's going on? What do I need to fix?" I was grumpy because with everything else going on, the last thing I felt like dealing with was a social/public imbroglio.

Angela had hip surgery last week and Christine, one of our many great neighbors, offered to set up a meal train for us. When Angela told me about it, I thought it was just a phrase like ‘call tree’, referencing a community practice.

Little did I know that Meal Train was a full-on crowdsourcing platform like GoFundMe.

"Christine sent me the link to what she had set up and I don't know if I turned on the donations thing or if it's standard. That's how people are giving us money." She had set it up while she was on oxycodone, so who knows what buttons she clicked.

I looked at her phone and, sure enough, some of the people she sent the link to had sent us money. One of them was

Steve Arensberg

, a dear friend who also happens to be an employee who's currently out on family medical leave.

She stopped showing me her phone and started voicing the options. "It has a goal of $2,500. I'm not sure how that got set. Or we can turn donations off completely."

"Before you click on anything else, let's take a step back and think about this from first principles, then decide what to do."

She said okay but kept clicking buttons. She muttered out a few more options before I said "Are you ready to talk about this?"

She put her phone down because when either of us asks if we’re ready to talk, it means devices need to be put aside. It’s hard to have a real conversation and mess with a phone at the same time.

About a decade ago, a friend decided she wanted to go on a trip, even though she couldn't afford it. She created a GoFundMe campaign and sent it to her friends and community.

Angela and I didn't quite know what to make of it. I can't remember whether it was the way she asked or our own stuff that made it feel weird. It felt like it fell into the gray area between a gift and an expectation.

At the same time, we were already going to get her a birthday present or split a meal with her sometime soon anyway. What was the difference between us buying a birthday present or a meal rather than contributing the same amount to what she wanted to do?

With that in mind, we didn't have a principled reason to not support her trip besides it falling into that gray area.

Our friend's request fell into two gray areas: the previously-mentioned gray area between an expectation and a gift and the gray area between the social and economic domains of our lives.

I first consciously considered the different domains via Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. He pointed out that each domain has different behavioral norms and interactions can get awkward when we mix them.

Consider that it's normal to ask your friends to help you move but it'd be awkward (for many people) to offer to pay your friends to help you move. It’d probably feel awkward to receive payment. At the same time, it's a reasonable expectation that you feed your friends during or for the effort.

Economically, this doesn't make sense. Whether you spend $15 a head for food or give your friends $15 shouldn't matter. And $15 is a paltry payment for a few hours of physical labor.

The rich insight is that if you were to offer your friends $15, they'd immediately evaluate it economically and might feel offended. But if you ask them to do it without compensation, they likely won't evaluate it with an economic lens and thus might be happy to do it.

There are all sorts of folkway anomalies when it comes to these dimensions. For instance, it's expected that you pay a neighborhood kid when they watch your cats or kids, but most people would find it awkward to pay them adult minimum wage for their labor.¹

Like many folkways and mores, how we navigate the difference between the economic and social dimensions of our lives is mostly unconscious, intuitive, and occasionally awkward, as we negotiate outliers in real time.

"Is $10 too much or too little for babysitting?", we ask the parent in front of the babysitter and wait for the parent to do some social calculus that factors in fairness for their child, acceptability for their neighbor, what they're trying to teach their child, and how much of a pain in their ass it'll be for their kid to have relatively too much cash.

While I could and want to go on about the insight and anomalies, I'll rein it back in and apply it to our present topic. Our friend's request, on the face of it, seemed to shift the request from a social request to an economic request merely because it was a direct-ish exchange of money. It looked closer to a friend paying you to help them move than a friend buying you dinner because you helped them move.

About a decade ago, one of my clients died unexpectedly and, at the request of his widow, I stepped in as what we'd now call the chief of staff to transition the business so that she could run it. It was a hard year-ish of unexpected, never-before-encountered, and one-off situations that account for some of my hair loss.

One of the more challenging situations emerged when someone started a crowdfunding campaign on behalf of the widow and her husband's family without consulting them about whether they wanted it. My client had a large platform and was a beloved beacon for so many people, so the campaign took off.

There was only one problem: the widow and family didn't want that and were deeply uncomfortable with it.

Because it was something I didn't want the widow or family to have to deal with — they were grieving a lost husband and son — I contacted the host of the campaign and insisted that they close the campaign down. They were originally resistant and didn't understand what the problem was, but I conveyed that it was neither of our places to understand the family’s reasons. They had their reasons and that was enough for me.

In one of the many conversations I had about this, the well-meaning host said something along the lines of "Look, Charlie, people are grieving, want to do something to help, and don't know what to do. This is simply their way of helping. The family doesn't have to keep the money — they can donate it to a cause."

That point about people wanting to do something to help and not knowing what to do stuck with me. It was one of those unfortunate moments where a lot of well-meaning people were doing an ostensibly good thing that was out of alignment with the values of the people who needed to be centered at that time.²

I'd been leading, advising on, or being in deep online communities for almost a decade before my client's passing, but that experience caused me to grapple with a lot of things I'd wondered about for years. My client had created a global community of people, with community gatherings happening around the world. While we had done a lot of work to create a self-organizing community, he was still the paragon of the community, as much as he didn't want it to be about him.

While I understand that a lot of people's experience with online communities is either shallow or ephemeral, the communities I'm in or advise on creating are much tighter, connected, and deep. People know each other's kids, create their own meetups, and join each others' success packs.

These communities transcend mere economic and transactional relationships, and yet, many are founded on economic relationships.

Take the PF Academy that we formally closed last year. Despite all of our efforts to play the roles of matchmakers and relationship catalysts so that people formed connections with each other instead of us, the fear and sadness that many of our members had was that the community and inter-member relationships would end when the Academy ended, too.

It's only been three months since the Academy closed and we evolved some of the elements of the Academy into our premium membership, so it's a bit early to tell how those fears are going to play out. I will say that it feels different, but I'm not a particularly good gauge for that since I've been in a whirlwind for a few months between the Level Up Retreat, prepping for Angela's hip surgery, assisting her between meetings (she has crutches, but there are a lot of daily tasks like showering, getting pants and socks on, and carrying things that she can't currently do).

That relationships in online communities start and/or are found in the economic domain creates all sorts of awkwardness because they're hybrid relationships. They're not purely social and they're also not purely economic - they’re both.

This means those unconscious, intuitive, and sometimes awkward negotiations either don't apply or have to be worked out with people we think we really know (because people in non-local relationships often reveal more about themselves than they do with people in their physical communities — wow, that’s a post from 2008 about this) but aren't quite sure are true friends or forged family, rather than customers or service providers.

It's unsettling to grieve, feel sad for, or be excited for someone you've never met as much as you might a "real" friend or family member. And yet, that's exactly how many of us feel about our ecosystem of non-local friends and forged family. I'm as likely to drop everything to ride with my non-local friends and forged family as I am with my local ones.

To make matters even more awkward, we have to figure out how we're going to navigate these relationships behind screens, at an unprocessable scale, and often in public or semi-public contexts. The difficulty and inescapability of these navigations are some of the many reasons online community leaders burn out or that hot online communities don't last more than three to five years. Fighting Dunbar's number is costly and you probably won't win because it's baked into our DNA.

These hybrid relationships existed before social media — shout out to all my AOL, ICQ, and forum peeps — but social media, and the creator economy it enabled, took the joys and challenges of those relationships from the fringe to the mainstream. It’s one of the many examples where technology is shifting our culture faster than we can keep up with.

Over the last two or three quarters, Angela and I have been talking about how we're going to be better neighbors. Not because we have to be better neighbors, but because it's more in alignment with who we are and who we want to be.

But, really, being better neighbors ties into us not feeling in alignment with our values around community. We haven't been the caliber of friends we want to be to our friends, either.

I wish I could just say that it's been the last few years' intensity to blame, but it's been the last decade's intensity — it started with the aforementioned chief of staff stint since at the same time, running and being in Productive Flourishing was a full-time, all-in effort. There were lots of 16-18 hour days as I transitioned two companies to operate without their founder.³

I transitioned from that gig to platform-building so I could get a good book deal for Start Finishing and give it a good run, to COVID-times, to launching and staffing up for Momentum while working on the Team Habits launch. Sprinkle in starting a paid online community and resurrecting private retreats and you have, well, a lot.

Okay, you have Way Too Much, and that's before you add in Angela's health journey, having a de facto hospice home for ancient cats, and a few family deaths, including my dad's passing in 2022.

We haven't been the neighbors and friends we'd like to be simply because we haven't had the capacity for it. We've been unwinding some things to create more capacity and margin in our lives.

Our thought was that we'd be practicing being better neighbors and friends by showing up and contributing first. We have such generous, kind, and wonderful neighbors and friends that we feel like we have some work to do to reestablish mutuality. We've usually been there when neighbors and friends reach out, but we haven't been proactive and present with them.

Leave it to us to think that we need to start by giving and doing — that's such an Enneagram⁴ Two (Angela) and Nine (me) way of navigating relationships. What our friends and neighbors know about us is that we're terrible at asking for help. Sometimes we're terrible at receiving help, even if we don't ask for it.

We're so bad at it that many of our friends and neighbors usually don’t know what we've been going through. And the ones who do know what we're going through have to insist and/or flat tell us what they're going to do. We've taken self-sufficiency way too far to the degree that it's blocking the way we want to be in community.

The only reason our neighbors knew about Angela's hip surgery was that she mis-texted someone and Christine saw her out walking on her crutches. But over the next few days, they probably would have seen her on the medical scooter we rented so Angela could get herself to the physical therapist down the road and get outside when the sun shines.

But even before Christine spotted Angela and kindly offered to set up the MealTrain, I’d been nudging Angela to allow her friends to be a part of this process. They want to help but don’t know how, and while we would be able to figure out how to get through the next three months on our own, doing so is inconsistent with being in community the way we want to be.

So it seems that our first step to practice being better friends and neighbors is to allow ourselves to let our good friends and neighbors be who they are and let them do what we'd do for them if we could. Damn, that's uncomfortable, and damn, that's the work for both of us, individually, and as a family unit.

Of the many things I teach and coach people through, asking for and accepting help is likely the hardest of my principles for me to apply consistently and well.

My suggestion that we address Angela's anxiety from first principles was a call out for us to try to respond more thoughtfully to the scenario rather than react to the murk of it. In fairness, I'm also not on oxycodone and in pain, so it’s much easier for me not to be reactive.

“Is the problem that you’re not okay with receiving money from friends and loved ones?” I already knew the answer to the question, but we had to establish some first principles. After all, people give us money every day, whether it’s by becoming premium subscribers, buying some of our products, or paying for services. But we can be fine with it in the context of market/economic exchange and not okay with it in social contexts.

“No, I’m fine with that if that’s how people want to help.”

She thought a little bit more about it.

“It’s awkward that Steve gave us money. And I don’t want people to think that we expect them to give us money.”

When I heard people were giving us money, my first inner reaction was a concern that people thought I couldn’t take care of my wife and that I needed their help. I felt it but didn’t hold onto the worry about other people’s perceptions or beliefs because I knew that I was projecting my head trash into other people’s motives.

Angela was also projecting her head trash onto other people, too. Her spiritual growth edge over the last year since being diagnosed with EDS has been around accepting the limited capabilities she’s had for decades rather than fighting those constraints. We’ve all been losing that battle with her.

Our friends, forged family, and neighbors cared and wanted to help, not because I was inadequate, but simply because they cared and wanted to help. It’s the kind of people they are. I didn’t want our head trash and bullshit to block others from being the great souls they are.

“Okay. At this point, Steve is far more than just an employee. He cares and knows I’m carrying a lot with him being out. He just wants to help and knows it’s not an expectation. Also, it’s Steve, so we can talk to him about it to make sure.”

I continued, “As far as giving money, that’d be what I’d do in this situation, too. I wouldn’t want to fool around with gift cards or meal delivery services. I’d hit the button that was easiest for me and also gave them the most flexibility with how they use the money.”

Unstated in the conversation for both of us is that we know that “food is love” — I didn’t do a first principles run on it because it wasn’t what was making us uncomfortable.

“Barb spent a few hours making food for us because that’s the kind of thing she loves to do and that’s the way she wants to help. So many of our friends and forged family can’t do that because they’re not local. Even if one of our peeps was local, I still might send money to them because I don’t have an afternoon to cook and I’d dread it. Why not let people help us the way that works for them?”

“What about that goal, though? It makes us seem like we’re out to get a certain amount of money. If donations are on, we have to have a goal.”

“Can we make it a dollar? That’d allow us to receive money without making it seem like we’re on a campaign or have a goal around it.”

“Yep.”

She picked up her phone and poked around a bit.

“Okay, I left it on and turned it to $1. And, cool, I found that I can send updates through the tool, so I can tell people that we don’t expect them to give us money.”

By the time she had messed around with that, a few other people had sent gift cards and monies.

Instead of being uncomfortable and worried about it, we felt (and feel) grateful, supported, and excited. Which is exactly what I believe others wanted us to feel.

I’m sharing today’s essay in hopes that it helps you navigate this world of hybrid relationships that will become ever more commonplace. You and your family may come to a different position on it than Angela and I did, and that’s completely cool.

But culture is not an unmalleable given — we create and change it together.

At the same time that we see the destructiveness of social media and some parts of internet culture, the same technologies are creating real relationships that span the real and virtual worlds. We get the same quiverlip when we see one of our online friend’s babies walk for the first time as we do our local friends and family. We miss non-local people when they’re gone, temporarily or forever.

We see people we care about and who we want to help but don’t know what we can do. We can’t just pop over and sit with them, hug them, take them food, give them care respite, or pull their cans to the curb.

And while thoughts and prayers are nice, they can also feel hollow, both ways. Sometimes you want to provide something that fills hearts and bellies. And, let’s be real, sometimes you want something that fills your heart and belly.

Maybe supporting a MealTrain or GoFundMe is an aligned way for you to help the non-local people you care about. Maybe it’s an aligned way for your community to support you. I hope my writing about it normalizes it as an option either way.

As much as I provide tools to help you do your best work, my real job here isn’t merely to help you be more productive — it’s to help you thrive. Thriving requires a community and communities create cultures.

Co-create your community and culture well.

p.s. There are enough of you who will email me to get the MealTrain link for me and Angela that I’m providing it here because responding to scores of emails is going to be hard to do right now. I think that’s also where Angela may be giving updates about how she’s doing, but I’ll not commit her to anything.

1. This is one of the contributing factors to why household labor is undervalued; we don't use fair market rates to determine its value, but the uncompensated labor of women and children is exceptionally high-value labor that is invisible and/or discounted in economic reasoning.

2. This may be one of those scenarios where the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many, but I’m only 65% sure of that.

3. An expensive lesson that I have had to learn multiple times is that there’s a big difference between operating without a founder and significantly growing without a founder. The former is simple; the latter, nigh impossible without funding to hire pros who know how to do that. Founders are the growth engine for their ventures, up until the point where they’re stifling the growth of their ventures.

4. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, pick up Susan Piver’s great book, The Buddhist Enneagram.