Taming of the Gift
Taming the Gift is an attempt to understand how modernity has domesticated the gift and, in doing so, diminished its power in everyday life. Contemporary fundraising is not the origin of this domestication, but it may be its most sophisticated expression.
This series is not an argument against professionalism, nor is it nostalgic for the past. Institutions need structure. Responsibility requires coordination. The question is subtler: What happens when the systems built to steward generosity quietly reshape its meaning? When they diminish the experience? When they ultimately impede the very movement they were designed to facilitate?
Many of the questions the professional fundraising community asks are downstream of what we explore here. We don’t want to debate tactics. We want to understand questions far more fundamental than messaging strategies, donor segmentation, or journey optimization.
Our assumption is that the gift does not respond favorably to domestication. It retreats. It becomes harder to find. This withdrawal is not apathy, nor is it moral failure. It is feedback—feedback that too many of our colleagues cannot hear.
Drawing on everyday fundraising practice, social theory, and lived experience inside institutions, this series traces how generosity became legible, reliable, and safe—and asks what was lost in the process. The work often feels shallow not because people lack conviction, but because systems reward compliance over courage, measurement over encounter, and institutional legitimacy over relational presence.
This project is not a reform agenda. It is an effort to see clearly. To distinguish the machinery from the work itself. To notice where the container has been mistaken for care.
What does it mean to give and receive once the gift has been domesticated? And what would it take to recover generosity as something relational, risky, and alive?
Part One: The Domesticated Gift
The first half of the series focuses on diagnosis and genealogy. It begins with what it feels like to work inside systems that require everything to be visible, manageable, and contained—where risk is treated as failure and judgment is slowly displaced by procedure. It then traces how modernity became a machine for domesticating what was once wild, relational, and unpredictable, naming three forces—externalization, rationalization, and disenchantment—that reshaped generosity into something functional, legible, and thin.
Available Essays
Part Two: Wild Generosity
The second half will turn toward remembering and recovery. It will argue that generosity cannot survive abstraction and must return to the particular: real people, real places, real needs. The goal will not be to abandon modern systems, but to make them conscious again—tools that serve the gift rather than contain it. These essays will ask what it might mean to re-member generosity, restoring the relational encounters that make the gift feel alive.