Philanthropy: Overcoming Shame, Transforming Lives
A journey from inherited shame to purposeful advocacy for the children who deserve to be seen, heard, and supported.
I’m learning—slowly and deeply—what it truly means to be a philanthropist. And I’ve learned this much already: it is not work for the faint of heart.
This calling is hard because my days are spent doing the very thing my father taught me never to do—asking people for money. Growing up in Malawi, he would gently scold me if I so much as eyed a neighbor’s mango or lingered near someone else’s plate. “Don’t bother people for their things,” he’d say. “Your mother and I will give you everything you need.” His pride was quiet but unshakeable; even the smallest hint of asking felt like betraying that pride.
So the muscle memory of shame remained. A twist in my stomach each time I picked up the phone or typed an email ending in a donation link. For years, that twist convinced me I was doing something wrong, something needy or selfish. In the beginning, I could barely bring myself to ask friends for help. I’d rehearse the request until it sounded like an apology instead of an invitation.
Then, almost without noticing, something shifted. The ask was no longer about me—it was about them. The girl in Ntcheu who walks six kilometers to school and still arrives early because she refuses to miss a lesson. The boy in Mzimba who lost his father last year and now sells charcoal after class so his sisters can eat. When I speak today, I see their faces. I hear their silence—the silence they carry because no one has ever asked the world to make room for them.
The day asking for money stopped feeling like begging was the day I started feeling like their lawyer. My job is to step into the courtroom of someone’s inbox, office, or dinner table and argue the most compelling case possible for children who cannot be there to speak for themselves. I present the evidence: their grades, their grit, their dreams, the miles they are willing to walk and the hunger they are willing to endure just to hold a pencil and write the future they imagine. My voice becomes theirs. My courage—borrowed from them—becomes mine.
And something astonishing happens every time someone says, “I’m sorry, not right now.” I discover that I am still standing. Rejection does not undo me; it refines me. Each closed door strengthens my resolve, sharpens my storytelling, steadies my hands. Persistence stops being a buzzword and becomes something bone-deep—part of my character, not just my job.
So yes, philanthropy is not for the faint of heart. But it is for the becoming heart—the heart learning to stretch wider than childhood shame, to hold both gratitude and grief, to ask and keep asking until the “yes” finally comes. A yes that sends a girl to university who never believed the word campus could belong to her.
I am proud to do this work. Proud of the discomfort, because it means I am growing into the woman these children need me to be. May every ask I make be rooted in their stories, not my fear. May the old voice whispering “don’t bother people” quiet down and make room for a bolder one that insists, “Bother them. These children are worth the bother.”
And may the day come when the uncomfortable act of asking dissolves into something simple and sacred—the ordinary miracle of transformed lives. First in Malawi, and then wherever the next child is waiting for someone to speak on her behalf.
