Giving Tuesday is upon us. Don’t miss the moment to help. | Opinion

Some people don’t think individual acts of charity make a difference, but 340 million Americans can make a massive combined impact.

Sarah Cross
 |  Opinion contributor

Giving Machines debut in Virginia for Giving Tuesday

People can donate to six area and global charities at Giving Machines at Ballston Quarter. This is the first time the Giving Machines are in Virginia.

Fox – 5 DC

This Giving Tuesday, celebrated on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, matters more than you know. As America gets ready for our 250th birthday in 2026, the country feels like it’s in crisis.

Yet people have forgotten that solving our nation’s biggest problems depends on everyday people. The most important thing we can do is donate – not only our money, but also our talents and time.

Giving Tuesday is proof that Americans are beyond generous. In 2024, more than 36 million people gave $3.6 billion to worthy causes, but donations are just one part of how Americans try to solve problems.

Most people volunteer, in ways large and small, yet some don’t think their actions are enough to drive lasting change. A Pew Research Center study found that more than half of Americans no longer believe we can solve big challenges.

Working together, we can make a difference

It’s a reasonable worry: How can one person move America forward? But we aren’t talking about one person. We’re talking about 340 million Americans, all of whom can make a massive combined impact.

Consider how Americans built education. While it’s now taken for granted that every child has access to schools, in the 1900s, and even before, Americans had to work to make that happen. Families, churches and community groups built schools nationwide, largely before the government got involved.

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Or consider how people have tackled drunken driving. It was a national scourge for many decades, yet in the late 1980s, a group of Boston professors, reporters and scientists worked with local restaurants to start what’s now known as designated driving.

The list of inspiring actions goes on. Even massive national undertakings like the Civil Rights Movement ultimately succeeded because individuals first stepped up, supporting victims of oppression, organizing sit-ins and showing the nation a better way.

Americans still have the capacity to overcome any obstacle – and crucially, it’s what we want.

Yet only a third of Americans are actively involved in their community. The best way to find the meaning we all want is to realize that we can help solve even the most seemingly insurmountable problems. 

Ways to help are staring us in the face

Take the nationwide crisis of foster care. There are more than 400,000 kids in the system, staring at the likelihood of difficult lives. However, there are also up to 400,000 churches that could help these kids and their families come through tough times and reunite.

There’s a group called CarePortal that developed a digital platform to connect volunteers at churches across the country with local families in need. It could easily increase its reach if more people got involved.

Or take the crisis of poverty. There are more than 36 million Americans struggling to make ends meet, but there are about 35 million small businesses that can think creatively about job training, apprenticeships and flexible work options, to say nothing of big businesses with even more resources.

At the end of the day, companies are made up of people. People can choose to try new things.

Whatever the challenge, we have the capacity to overcome it. Addiction. Homelessness. Mental health. Instead of waiting for big solutions, we can all drive smaller solutions that add up to be far more effective.

Signs of progress are everywhere

You may not realize it, but such solutions are in the news all the time. A formerly incarcerated barber in New York City is using his barber shop to provide haircuts for autistic people. A black belt instructor in Detroit is mentoring kids by teaching martial arts. A California woman is helping homeowners stock local food banks with fruit from the trees in their own backyards.

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The list goes on, endlessly on. We just need to see these stories for what they are. They’re individual threads in a big and beautiful national fabric, created by millions of innovative problem solvers.

And for the record, contributing like this is inherently unifying. A major reason why Americans are at each other’s throats is that we’ve forgotten the power of our own action.

We’ve come to expect that others will act, and when it doesn’t work, we get angry for the mounting sense of crisis. Yet it’s hard to be angry when you’re busy taking action. It’s hard to hate others when you’re partnering with them to make a difference just down the street.

Americans must reclaim this culture of individual action before our country’s many big challenges really do consume and cripple us. As our nation prepares for the next 250 years, it’s no exaggeration to say that our future is on the line.

This Giving Tuesday is the ideal time to recommit ourselves to the deeply fulfilling and desperately needed work of solving problems ourselves.

Sarah Cross is senior vice president at Stand Together, a philanthropic community that tackles the root causes of our country’s biggest problems.