‘Tis the season. There’s eggnog and lights and holiday parties a plenty. Merriment and jingle bells and a gift giving frenzy.

But let’s not forget the annual reports, holiday mailers, mass appeals and, of course, the multitudes of holiday address labels, personalized just for me, to remind me to give, give, give.

There is so much need, and so little time. Tax deadlines are upon us, after all. (See #3, here.)

And doesn’t my mailbox know it. For it is bearing the burdens of the world these days.

And as the junk mail stacks up and mass appeals and data statistics grow, I start to feel so small, small, small. Tiny isn’t just for Tim, after all.

Because amidst the holiday mountain of need, I feel like little more than a mole.

So you can imagine my joy when amidst all the reminders of poverty and need and great, great loss and destruction, I received from a friend a copy of Ode magazine and was reminded, by the story of just a regular guy, that even in the midst of big, big need there is space for small, but significant contributions.

Whew.

And not only that, but the possibility that it’s the smaller scale work that tends to do more good than the big, huge, bureaucratic efforts. At least, that’s Dick Grace’s theory, and he seems to know what he’s doing.

In Ode, he was featured for his very personal approach to his Grace Family Foundation, which accepts only as much money as he can personally oversee in terms of assessing situations and visiting schools and families.

No fancy monitoring and evaluation schemes. No complex matrices of impact. No annual reports.

Just checking up on people to see if their lives are better. “Personal involvement is the key to successful philanthropy,” Grace says in Ode. “It’s like the difference between the millions spent on foreign aid, which often go to waste, and the smaller sums devoted to micro credit—a more small-scale, human, effective means of combating poverty.”

Which makes sense, if the Nobel Prize is any indication. Just ask Muhammed Yunus.

Because when philanthropy is personal, problems don’t have to be seen in terms of their grandeur to warrant funding dollars or attention. They can be talked about in terms of people, in terms of families, in terms of individual lives.

Which is why I like Grace’s philosophy that, “You don’t have to be wealthy to do good. You don’t need just money for philanthropy….People are never too poor or too inexperienced to be effective on their own.”

A welcome reminder this time of year, when my mailbox is housing a mountain of need and I find myself shrinking in the face of it.

Because philanthropy’s primary goal is to make problems smaller, not people.

In the “can-do-right-now” spirit of the Women’s Foundation, I offer my first blog in my first week as Director of Communications and Philanthropic Programs!

I am Siobhán O’Riordan and I am delighted to both be joining the Foundation and bringing all my communications and programmatic expertise from eight years in Boston-area philanthropies. My work in philanthropy is fueled by the thrill of connecting; nothing brings me greater satisfaction than bringing people and ideas together on a path of discovery and learning. There are many ways to navigate the worlds in which we all live and pass between, yet the paths most traveled are ones of friendship, community and hope.

I believe that philanthropy – both the act of giving and receiving for the greater good – provides just the right place for meaningful connection, real community building and the rooting and growing of hope that together, we can make the difference. I look forward to meeting and learning from you all! Feel free to say hello at soriordan@wawf.org.