3 of 3 | Are We Showing Up in Gift Mode?
This is the last in a three-part series on reclaiming the ethic of the gift in contemporary fundraising. If you’d like to read the first two installments, they can be found here.
We’ve spent the first two essays in this series trying to find our place in a story we thought we already understood. The gift, after all, is everywhere in our work. It shapes our language, our systems, even our job descriptions. We call them gifts. We call them givers. We build entire operations around what we assume is the authenticity of a gift. But our posture rarely matches the depth of the structure we invoke. In the first essay, we asked whether we were truly showing up in gift mode—whether our expectations aligned with the story we claimed to inhabit. In the second, we looked beneath that story to name the actual economic modes at play: sale, coercion, and gift—and we asked whether our practices were deliberately blurring those lines rather than offering clarity and distinction.
Still, one illusion remains: the idea that the gift is the softest, safest mode we can choose. It’s a comforting thought, but it isn’t true. The gift, when understood on its own terms, is far more exposing than the market and more destabilizing than the state. The market runs on equivalence—this for that. The state enforces obligation—compliance in exchange for protection. But the gift invites something riskier: transformation without guarantee. It opens a relationship without controlling how it will unfold. That makes it unpredictable—and often uncomfortable. The gift carries more ethical weight precisely because it lacks the built-in protections other systems provide.
This is, at its core, an ethical conversation. And in most institutional settings, ethics are often framed in terms of rights—what we’re entitled to, what protections we can claim, what boundaries should be respected. Rights matter. They protect dignity and prevent abuse. But they are not the same as care. They are not enough to sustain the entirety of the gift. Rights define the edges of obligation, but they do not show us how to live inside those edges with one another. They assume equal footing, while gift relationships often begin in asymmetry. And while rights might govern what we owe one another in theory, the gift asks what we owe one another in practice.
This becomes especially clear for those whose job is to facilitate the movement of gifts between donors and their beneficiaries. The people who move the gift on behalf of institutions find themselves in emotionally complex, structurally unequal roles. They are expected to embody empathy without burning out, to remain authentic and present, and to hold boundaries without breaking connection. That’s not procedural work. It’s relational labor. And we will never get it right by relying on rights alone.
So in this final essay, we’re asking more than whether we’re showing up in gift mode. We’re asking what is required of us when we do.
And we are not only asking what the gift expects of the giver, but also what it asks of the receiver. What messy contradictions emerge in the gift relationship? What risks lie hidden beneath the surface of generosity? The gift is not a simple good. It is morally complex, structurally unstable, and emotionally demanding. To inhabit it honestly is to take its demands seriously—perhaps for the first time.
When we approach the gift as simple and easy, we become careless with it. We come to it expecting efficiency, predictability, and control—when what it actually requires is presence, patience, and care. Over time, even authentic relationship gets reframed as tactic. Connection becomes something to leverage. And slowly, the relational core of the gift begins to erode—until all that remains is something efficient but hollow. If gift mode is to mean anything at all, we must reclaim its demands, its difficulty, and its uncertainty.
Titmuss and the Ethics of Blood Donation
In 1970, Richard Titmuss published The Gift Relationship, a careful study of blood donation systems in the U.K. and the U.S. His argument was simple: when people give freely, it strengthens the social fabric. But his conclusions were far-reaching. He showed that voluntary giving wasn’t just ethically preferable; it was structurally necessary for a healthy, caring society. In the U.K., where blood was donated without compensation, the system was safer, more inclusive, and more effective. In the U.S., where blood was often bought and sold, inequality grew, exploitation increased, and outcomes worsened.
Titmuss offered a blueprint for what an ethic of care could look like. He didn’t idealize donors or dismiss the need for institutional structure. What he showed was that systems rooted in the gift—not in commodity or tax—could scale trust, dignity, and mutual regard. But only if they were protected. Only if the relational character of the gift was preserved through structures that honored its logic. When institutions treated the gift like a commodity, they didn’t just mislabel it—they damaged the very relationships that made it possible.
Titmuss pushes us to examine our own institutional design. Have we built systems that recognize and protect the gift—or simply extract it? Are our stewardship practices grounded in a true ethic of reciprocity, or just a shallow form of customer service? Are we designing for shared meaning, or for individual donor satisfaction? The gift may be given freely, but if the surrounding structures fail to grasp the fullness of what’s at work, they erode the ethic of care. And what remains isn’t a gift—it’s an imitation, hollowed out by ease and convenience.
The lesson is clear: the gift can’t thrive in hostile conditions. It has to be nurtured, not mined. That means resisting the urge to turn generosity into data, to treat every donation as a metric, or every donor as a managed asset. If we want the gift to be more than a gesture, we have to build systems aligned with its values. The alternative isn’t neutral—it’s corrosive. A gift treated like a commodity eventually behaves like one. And a culture that forgets how to give without strings eventually forgets how to relate without them.
Vaughan and the Maternal Gift
Genevieve Vaughan, author, activist, feminist, and a leading voice in movements around the Gift Economy and Matriarchal Studies, challenges the dominance of exchange and market logic. In her view, the foundational human relationship—the one between mother and child—is not transactional but one-directional. It is giving based on need, not mutual benefit. She sees this as the original form of generosity: the instinct to respond to need without calculating return.
Vaughan reminds us of our discomfort with asymmetry. Market logic teaches us to value fairness, reciprocity, and equivalence. But gift logic, at its core, accepts the imbalance. It dares to give first, without conditions. It dares to receive, without hesitation. This is unsettling for institutions trained to track outcomes and ensure balance. Vaughan challenges us to recognize that care is not symmetrical—it is responsive.
This is where fundraising often breaks down. We try to smooth over the unevenness. We avoid emotion, reduce stories to slogans, and turn gratitude into routine. But that doesn’t protect anyone—it strips away the very logic that makes the gift possible. An ethic of care means recognizing that relationships aren’t equal, but still treating them with dignity. It calls for more than protocol. It calls for attention—the kind that notices. Presence—the kind that stays. Trust—the kind that doesn’t need to control.
Vaughan reminds us that care isn’t about keeping things equal—it’s about creating belonging. The maternal gift makes room for dependence and doesn’t ask to be paid back. That’s hard for professional systems to accept because it breaks the usual logic of inputs and outcomes. But in real life, our most meaningful relationships—between coworkers, neighbors, across generations—often depend on this kind of uneven giving. If we want a culture rooted in gift ethics, we’ll need to relearn how to stay present with the imbalance—and allow it to shape us.
Bourdieu and Misrecognition
Not all care is care. Not all gifts are given freely. In The Logic of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu shows how gifts can become tools of control—ways the powerful turn money into influence. What makes this work, he argues, is misrecognition: when a power move gets mistaken for generosity. The more selfless a gift appears, the harder it is to question—and the stronger its hold becomes.
When a wealthy donor gives and gets a building named after them, we call it generosity. When a foundation funds a grantee and expects compliance, we call it partnership. But Bourdieu sees something else: exchange dressed up as virtue. A gift becomes a strategy to protect status.
That doesn’t mean all giving is manipulation. But it does mean we have to ask: who benefits from the appearance of purity? Who gets to define what the gift meant? If one side gives and the other becomes indebted—while only one side sets the terms—that’s not a gift. It’s a quiet form of coercion.
Rights language often tries to correct for this by setting standards and preventing abuse. But it can’t undo the deeper harm: when generosity becomes a means to secure control rather than relinquish it. Bourdieu forces us to ask what a gift allows someone to claim—loyalty, silence, virtue. That’s the real danger: not just the size of the gift, but the symbolic power it creates, and how that power gets spent. Performative generosity is so corrosive because it hides domination inside the language of care. A true ethic of care would ask not just what the gift is—but what it’s actually trying to do?
Derrida and the Impossibility of the Gift
No one pushes the question further than Jacques Derrida. In Given Time, he makes a maddening but important claim: the gift is impossible. Why? Because the moment we recognize something as a gift—when we name it, say thank you, or feel indebted—it becomes part of an exchange. A true gift, Derrida says, can only exist if it leaves no trace, if it passes without acknowledgment and never loops back to the giver.
He’s not rejecting the gift—he’s trying to protect its depth. He’s warning us against turning it into a tool, a tactic, or a transaction. The gift isn’t meant to be efficient or trackable. It isn’t a line item or a performance metric. It breaks the usual logic. It opens a door to transformation—but not on demand.
That’s the point: the gift isn’t something we manage. It’s something we make room for. We don’t control its timing or impact. We tend to the conditions. We stay present. We get out of the way. That’s what an ethic of care requires: responsibility without control, stewardship without ownership.
There’s freedom in that. If the perfect gift can’t be engineered, then we can stop trying to manufacture it. We can focus instead on cultivating spaces where generosity is more likely to emerge—where people are seen as participants, not prospects. The gift may vanish the moment we try to hold it—but in that vanishing, it leaves behind its grace.
What the Gift Requires of Us
The gift is not safe. It binds. It reveals. It unsettles the systems we try to keep clean and predictable. But it remains the most human way we know to organize our shared life. It fosters belonging, trust, and change. And because it runs on meaning instead of control, it is also the easiest to distort. When we treat the gift like a sale, we reduce it to price. When we treat it like a tax, we reduce it to duty. When we pretend it is simple, we avoid its demands.
Still, much of our sector continues to operate from what Dr. Lesley Alborough calls an instrumental view of fundraising— a perspective that treats generosity as a behavior to trigger, and fundraisers as technicians who simply need the right tools. In this frame, fundraising becomes a strategy detached from mission. The gift becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself. And what’s most expected of it is that it be predictable, measurable, and efficient.
This is the trap. We say we want depth, but we build systems for control. We say fundraising is part of the mission, but run it like a marketplace. We say we believe in transformation, but settle for transactions. In doing so, we strip fundraising of its moral weight. We drain the gift of its meaning.
To show up in gift mode is to choose a harder path. It means attending not just to money or metrics, but to the care of relationships. It means holding asymmetry with integrity, seeing need without condescension, and refusing to reduce the work to what can be managed. It means building institutions that understand fundraising not as a revenue function, but as moral work—because it mediates relationships that can either wound or repair.
The gift is not a tool. It is not a tactic. It is an ethic—a way of being, a practice with its own ends. If we try to use it to get what we want, we will miss it entirely. The question is no longer just whether we’re showing up in gift mode. The question is whether we’re ready to carry its weight—together. Sometimes as givers. Sometimes as receivers. Always as participants in something we do not control.
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, Founder, Responsive FundraisingWriting Projects
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