Text by Catherine Newman

Imagine you’re walking past a shallow pond where a tiny child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. Do you rush in and rescue the child? Of course. What if it means ruining your new shoes? Of course — even if they’re really, really nice shoes. You don’t think twice.

Philosopher Peter Singer, ethics specialist and author of

“The Life You Can Save,”

who is famous for his thinking on the topic, argues that we are, ethically, in just such a position all the time: 1.4 billion people are living below the international poverty line of $1.25 a day, and 30,000 children die daily of diseases and malnutrition that our money (the cost of, say, a pair of shoes) could prevent.

Couldn’t we be doing more? Shouldn’t we?

Betty Londergan is. Figuratively speaking, the philanthropist-blogger has ruined a whole lot of shoes — and when I talk to her over the phone, she expresses nothing but joy about it.

Portrait of a Philanthropist


“I don’t know why I’m crying,” Londergan says, crying and also laughing. “I’m optimistic, without doubt. I’m so much more aware now about entrenched poverty; if you have a roof over your head, you’re one in a hundred in the world. But people are bringing so much intelligence and passion and backbreaking labor to these problems that it makes me feel very hopeful. And trust me when I say I’ve gotten much more than I’ve given.”

Which is amazing, really, given how much she’s given: Come December 31, it will be $36,500: $100 a day for 365 days, donated to nearly as many different causes and organizations (chronicled in her blog).

And the thing is, at the risk of sounding like one of those celebrity-rag photo captions (“Brad and Angelina shop for frozen pizza just like you do!”), Betty’s a lot like us; that is, not someone you’d immediately peg as a philanthropic heroine.

Actually, before she started giving her money away a year ago, Betty was in a position that’s painfully familiar these days: She’d lost her job in advertising and wasn’t optimistic about securing another one, given that she’s now, as she puts it, “approximately 250 in carbon-dated ad-hipster years.” She and her husband had watched their investments eddy away down the drain with everybody else’s. “I was literally sick — so angry and frustrated,” she says. “It was such an ugly side of me. I didn’t want to be that person. The only way I was going to get over it was to give most of my money away on purpose.”

Holy nonattachment, Batman! But then, part of you knows she’s right when she says, “Giving away money is the absolute antidote to fear and insecurity about money. Desire and clutching cause suffering — and when you let go, it’s a beautiful thing.”

Betty’s not a nun or anything (though, she jokes, she’s hoping the project turns her into an honorary Buddhist “without meditating!”). She’s just a regular person: one with both a modest past — “I think my mother rationed out every slice of lunch meat we ever ate!” — and a modest present: “We’re not rich. I’m actually really neurotic about finances. But my daughter got a scholarship to college, and I had this small inheritance from my parents that I wanted to spend doing something good. I’ve been blessed beyond belief.”

Selling the Idea of Giving


Betty’s like the love child of Mother Teresa and Don Draper: generous, of course, but also infectiously enthusiastic and delighted, self-ironic and hilarious. She could probably sell rain to Seattle, only now she’s selling the idea of giving, with her superengaging and wildly inspiring daily blog posts: “Every day I end up talking to someone who’s doing something really extraordinary — part of this web of interconnected people who are trying to make the world better in their different ways — and it’s so exhilarating. I’m just blown away by them.”

By, for example, Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu of the Smallholders Foundation in Nigeria, which is currently training thousands of young people in sustainable crop cultivation. By Khalida Brohi in Pakistan, who devotes herself, under constant threat, to the prevention of honor killings there, and 23-year-old Maggie Doyne, founder of the Kopila Valley Children’s Home in Nepal, and a woman living with AIDS in North Carolina, and… I finally force myself to interrupt Betty, given that it’s been nearly an hour since I asked her which donations have most inspired her, and she has stopped gushing only long enough to laugh or cry — both of which she does easily.

The charities might seem all over the place — and actually, they are, representing Betty’s divergent passions, requests sent from around the world, and also, she admits, her own “ADD.” “I thought I was going to be methodically choosing big charities, and it hasn’t been that way at all,” she says. “If something moves me, then I follow my heart.”