How to *really* help after a communal tragedy

Photo by Alicia Mary Smith on Unsplash

After national or international tragedies, we often see an outpouring of support in the forms of donations and volunteer efforts. 

And that’s a beautiful thing; humans empathize, feel the pain of others, and want to do whatever they can to alleviate that pain. 

The potential problem with that is that often, while the underlying problems that cause these national tragedies are ongoing, the efforts to address them end up being short-lasting. 

So how can we use the momentum we feel today to create long-lasting action that doesn’t burn us out? Here are some tips:

1. Whenever you’re making a plan, ask yourself what you can keep up over time: It’s often a balancing act to find the amount of work you can do sustainably while pushing yourself to do as much as you can. But try to optimize for longer-lasting impact, even if that means you’re doing a little less right now.
   
   A monthly donation is often more helpful to organizations and individuals than a one-time donation. A commitment to volunteer somewhere every month for one hour is often more helpful than volunteering for a whole day right now. That’s because after press-worthy events that bring social issues to our attention, organizations are often flooded with support, so it’s when they need your help the least.
   
   So if you want to make your support count, it’s often most helpful if you spread it out over time instead of doing it all when you’re feeling most motivated. When you feel fired up after hearing about something awful happening, that’s a great time to pick an ongoing way to support the cause.
   
   
   

2. Find ways to keep up your motivation: It’s hard to keep up any behavior that isn’t fun, and often the most important work isn’t the most enjoyable. But there’s no reason you can’t insert some joy into your work to make the world a better place.
   
   In fact, the field of behavioral economics has shown that consistently doing something not-very-fun along with something you enjoy, a behavior called “reward bundling,” can help you keep up that behavior over time.
   
   So if you’re volunteering, can you do it with a friend you enjoy hanging out with? If you have to volunteer by yourself at your computer, can you listen to music while you’re writing e-mails to your representatives? If you’ve set up a recurring donation, can you treat yourself to something nice (it doesn’t even have to cost money) when the monthly donations go through? Even when the issues you’re working to eliminate are deeply serious, your approach to addressing them are allowed to be joyful. And in fact, that joy can help you keep it up your work over time.
   
   
   

3. Decenter yourself… by taking care of yourself: The most effective work gets done when you’re focusing on the needs of those in danger as opposed to your own needs for validation/ feeling like a good ally. But it’s nearly impossible to focus on others effectively if you haven’t had your own needs met.
   
   So if you’re doing any sort of work for others, you absolutely, non-negotiably MUST take especially good care of yourself.
   
   This is something I’ve seen a lot of well-intentioned people try to skip. And I’ve never seen anybody… even the most resilient, badass, and caring of people… pull it off.
   
   When I was volunteering at a suicide hotline, I remember watching a woman working so many hours that she told me she got about six hours of sleep a night. She seemed like she could do anything-- she was training for several marathons, she had a full time leadership position at an impressive job, and here she was doing an overnight suicide hotline shift with me.
   
   I told myself the narrative that she was just someone who was somehow able to completely put their own needs aside in order to help others.
   
   Two months later, I found out that she quit the hotline.
   
   You can’t help others sustainably if you’re not taking care of yourself. Especially on days where you know you’ll be volunteering or doing work for others, make extra certain that you’re doing what you can to well-slept, well-fed, and generally feeling as good as possible.
   
   If you try to go into volunteer work while feeling like garbage, you may not see the repercussions immediately, but over time, your level of engagement with the cause you care about is likely to drop dramatically.
   
   Please trust me on this one. Please make sure you’re taking care of yourself when you’re doing work for others.
   
   
   

4. Till your acre: I once had an incredible mentor who was the founder of a successful social justice organization and had put her own safety on the line many times to support the systematically oppressed.
   
   During one of our meetings, I told her I wanted to get more seriously involved with supporting refugees coming to the U.S. It was a popular issue to support at the time, and I was angry and distraught to hear countless stories of injustice that were circulating in the news.
   
   I couldn’t have been more surprised at her response to my enthusiasm:
   
   “Don’t do it.” 
   
   I was shocked. This was coming from a woman who was *always* trying to get people involved in her activism.
   
   But she continued: “You need to focus on tilling your acre.”
   
   She told me that if farmers stopped focusing on their own land and tried instead to till other farmers’ acres, we’d all starve for lack of food. Farmers need to focus on tilling their own acres, and they need to trust that others will do the same. She told me that what I was doing was enough (and to be honest, she knew me well enough to know that if I did much more, I’d have burned out-- which is exactly what happened when I didn’t listen to her advice).
   
   Learn from my mistakes and listen to my mentor. You won’t be able to till all the land in the world. That’s okay, and in fact, that’s a good sign that you’re both doing good work and that you’re paying attention to all that’s left to do. So pick an acre and till it.
   
   Or in the words of Rabbi Rami Shapiro, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now. Love mercy now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
   
   
   

5. Expect to make mistakes and plan to have self-compassion: There is no such thing as a perfect ally. You can’t mind-read what the best ways are to support others, and even if you do all your research and do a great job educating yourself, you are going to inadvertently harm people from time to time. That’s completely normal. Even the most famous and impactful activists make mistakes and hurt people by accident. Harming others by accident doesn’t mean that they (or you!) are bad people.
   
   So get prepared to make some mistakes.
   
   I recommend reading up on how to have self-compassion and on how to apologize. Both skills are absolutely necessary for long-term activism.
   
   
   

Of course, this isn’t everything, but hopefully these can serve as a guide for how to direct your rage, sadness, and anything else you might be feeling into action that can best serve those in need.