Returning to reciprocity: What I learned working outside the circle my grandmother lived inside

Willie Mae’s Circle

My grandmother, Willie Mae, grew more than she could ever use. Her yard was thick with far more vegetables, greens, and flowers than one household needed. She didn’t sell the surplus or even store it up against some future scarcity. She gave it away—to neighbors, to people she passed on the street, to anyone who looked like they could use it.

As a child, I understood this as generosity. I know now it was something else, and the difference is the reason I’m writing this essay.

I learned the difference firsthand. When I visited her, and we walked into town—to the store, to the church, past the porches—I was recognized and welcomed. Not because anyone really knew me, but because they knew her. I was Willie Mae’s granddaughter, and this fact of my existence encircled me. The warmth my grandmother had spent years cultivating came back to me, her descendant, on a street where I was otherwise a stranger.

That is not how generosity works. Generosity would have made my grandmother a benefactor and her neighbors the beneficiaries. It would have drawn a line running in one direction, from the person who has to the person who needs. What held me on that street ran in every direction at once. Willie Mae had spent a lifetime helping to cultivate a circle of mutual trust and obligation, and that circle held me too, even though I had done nothing to earn it except belong to her.

It took me almost 30 years—and a career spent trying to do good from outside such a circle—to find the word for what she had helped create and knew implicitly. The word is reciprocity.

The central mechanism

Generosity and reciprocity are both words used to talk about the impulse to give. But they are not the same, and the difference between them is not a matter of degree or emotion. It’s structural.

Generosity keeps the giver at the center. Reciprocity distributes the center.

Generosity leaves the giver in charge. The giver decides what to give, to whom, on what terms, and for how long. Meanwhile, the receiver stays a receiver.

Generosity and reciprocity are both words used to talk about the impulse to give. But they are not the same, and the difference between them is not a matter of degree or emotion. It’s structural.

Reciprocity dissolves that arrangement. In a reciprocal economy, no one is only a giver or only a receiver; mutual obligation and trust extend in all directions. The relationships hold everyone together, including people who did nothing to earn their inclusion—people the community simply encircles and holds. A visiting granddaughter, for instance.

I have come to believe that this distinction is among the most important and least understood aspects of the work I have spent my career doing. Much has been written in our field about charity versus solidarity, about trust-based practice and shifting power. Many of us understand the challenge but I’ve spent years unable to name it myself, even as I helped people move money for a living. I could name it eventually only because I had lived inside the alternative before I ever entered the profession.

Outside the circle

I did not set out to study any of this. I set out to change the world, which at 21 meant moving to New York for a job at a women’s leadership nonprofit and a salary that made the city a daily act of improvisation. I learned two things quickly. The first was that recent college graduates at well-meaning nonprofits are sorely underpaid. The second was that the real power in the sector sat with the funders. I left and joined the Peace Corps, convinced that I could do more good on the ground in South Africa than in New York.

When I came back, I followed the path toward power: I earned a master’s degree and moved to the funder side, hopeful that proximity to the money would mean proximity to change. What I found there was more complicated than I expected: There are two different philanthropies occupying the same buildings and institutions, and people rarely distinguish between them.

One is the business of philanthropy. Bound by the tax code and capitalism’s logic of perpetual acquisition, the business of philanthropy is organized around building, preserving, and cautiously deploying assets. It is structured to keep donors on top of every decision and the best it can produce is generosity. The other is the culture of philanthropy—the older, deeper thing that occasionally breaks through, when resources move to sustain relationships and build communities rather than to demonstrate a strategy and perpetuate control. The culture of philanthropy emerges as an expression of the deep power of reciprocity and mutuality, not to mention their emotional companions, love and joy.

I could feel a culture of philanthropy welling up when I worked with good people striving to do good things. But most of what I was paid to do was the business of philanthropy: generous at best but controlling at worst.

I had grown up witnessing a reciprocal economy without a name for it. Now I spent my days inside an economy built on a different logic. Eventually, I began to see how generosity, the pinnacle of the business of philanthropy, can lead to impact even as it displaces reciprocity. I began to see this while working with communities impacted by gun violence. As a grantmaker, my charge was to fund the most promising research—work that could advance policies to reduce gun violence across the United States. To be clear, the work was effective. It led to reductions.

I had been funding solutions designed by outside experts. What these communities needed was for those of us with resources to listen to their diagnoses: they needed investment in community cohesion, in the sorts of resources already available in neighboring communities, in the rebuilding of trust and safety from the ground up.

But when I listened closely, I learned more. Time and time again, mothers who had lost their children to gun violence told me what their communities needed was something different: not just different policies, real investment. Young people who had been both victims and perpetrators of violence told me something similar. They said: No policy you fund will ever end what we’re experiencing. What we actually need is investment in our communities. Not just as a violence prevention strategy, but because these communities have been systematically stripped of resources—and so divested from opportunity and trust.

That’s when I began to understand the gap in my approach. I had been funding solutions designed by outside experts. What these communities needed was for those of us with resources to listen to their diagnoses: They needed investment in community cohesion, in the sorts of resources already available in neighboring communities, in the rebuilding of trust and safety from the ground up.

The shift is fundamental: from working to change policies that affect a community to supporting a community as it works to strengthen itself. From funder control to community partnership. The former, done well, can have an impact. The latter, done well, can be transformative.

What I couldn’t have learned by studying it

There’s a kind of knowledge that only practice delivers, and I got mine by helping to build a giving circle on the South Side of Chicago.

At first, I was skeptical. We were bringing together a group of women whose only affinity was a desire to invest in Black women and girls in Chicago’s South Side and South Suburbs. I also knew what it would cost us: to sit in rooms with women doing this work, to listen to their strategies and constraints, to genuinely defer to their leadership rather than our assumptions about what was needed. That kind of showing up is harder than writing checks.

And yet, when we came together to pool our resources and collectively vote on grants—when we stepped back from individual control—something shifted. We built accountability with the women leading organizations we funded and were present when women who had been self-funding received their first grants. They grew their organizations to serve entire communities. In those moments, we learned what we didn’t know: about their brilliance, their sacrifice, their dreams and manifestations.

We found new spaces for joy, new relationships, and a multigenerational circle of women—we call ourselves Queenmakers—who show up for each other because others have shown up for us. It’s reciprocal, which means we have to keep showing up, keep listening and keep following the leadership of women who know their communities better than we ever will.

Eight years since its founding, it’s rare that I enter a space or attend an event in Chicago without being greeted by a fellow Queenmaker. But what matters more is that the women and organizations we’ve invested in are still thriving—and that we’re still learning from them.

Building the giving circle taught me about the demands reciprocity makes. It asks you to stay when a check would let you leave. It asks you to be accountable and subject to correction, like the other members of a community. That difficulty is not a flaw. It’s the model working. It’s what generates the trust that funding from outside can never produce. The benefit is being encircled and held, like I was with my grandmother.

Nothing new under the sun

Reciprocity is nothing new, of course. I had felt it first in Willie Mae’s town, but she was practicing something with an ancient lineage. The sociologist Marcel Mauss, who studied gift exchange across cultures a century ago, found the same architecture everywhere he looked: giving, receiving, and giving back—not as a courtesy but as the very thing that holds a community together across time.

Black women in this country have repeatedly built similar structures—church benevolence committees that circulate offerings back to families in crisis, mutual aid networks that outrun any grant cycle, rotating savings clubs that let women pool capital when banks refused to serve them, and civic organizations that carried education and advocacy when the formal economy refused to.

These practices emerged under conditions of profound exclusion, and that’s part of what makes them worth studying. Racism and sexism excluded Black women from the accumulation economy. So Black women built structures that worked outside that economy. Black households, the data show, give a larger share of their income to charity than white households do, even though the typical Black family has about one-sixth the wealth of the typical white family.

The research on wellbeing tells the other half of the story: Beyond the threshold of basic security, more wealth has small and diminishing returns for well-being. The strongest predictors of a good life are quality of relationships and sense of purpose. The people with the most money report some of the highest rates of isolation we measure. I don’t cite this to be provocative. I cite it because it matches what I saw from both inside and outside the circle of reciprocity—that the logic of accumulation, followed faithfully, delivers you to a place of illusory control and deep loneliness, while the circle my grandmother lived in and tended produced community, care, and belonging. The latter, not the former, is the model we should seek to understand, learn from, and extend. Reciprocity, not generosity, is the way forward.

Returning

I called this essay “Returning to Reciprocity” because none of it is new. It is a return to something human beings have always known—something the communities pushed out of the accumulation economy have kept alive while the rest of us looked away.

My grandmother wasn’t building a model. She was practicing a different way of living, and it gave her something no amount of accumulation reliably delivers: a town full of people who knew her name, and who therefore learned mine. She understood, without any of the language I have spent two decades acquiring, that what you give away inside a reciprocal economy doesn’t leave. It comes back around.

The question I am left with—for the sector, and for myself—is not how generous we are willing to be. It is how large and how honest a circle we are willing to step inside. It is, finally, a question about what we owe one another. My grandmother answered this question every morning in her garden. Most of us are still learning how to come back around.