The United Nations and the Origins of Giving Tuesday
Giving Tuesday would not exist if not for the UN
Here’s a fun fact about Giving Tuesday: it exists because of the United Nations; a conference at the 92Y; and a very different social-media era than the one in which we inhabit today.
It’s hard to imagine a time before Giving Tuesday. By now, it’s locked into America’s holiday season calendar. But Giving Tuesday didn’t just come from nowhere. Rather, you can draw a straight line from the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York every September to the ubiquity of Giving Tuesday today.
It may sound odd… but trust me. I was there!
To understand the origins of Giving Tuesday, you need to temporarily suspend everything you know about the pernicious influence of social media on politics and society in 2025.
Fifteen years ago, the social media landscape was much, much different. Twitter was a new and exciting platform — many users in less developed countries flocked to it because it primarily used an SMS-based interface, requiring neither a smartphone nor expensive data. Instagram was still an independent company, not yet bought by Facebook. (Meta didn’t even exist!) Meanwhile, Facebook users would mostly just see updates from their friends. The newsfeed algorithm had not yet been rolled out — let alone designed in such a way to spark maximum outrage. The “surveillance capitalism” that sustains today’s social media giants had not yet firmly taken hold.
It seems like a quaint, bygone era. And it was.
Back then, people of good conscience who were genuinely concerned about social and political progress could believe that social media may be leveraged for good. It was in this context that a partnership was born between the United Nations Foundation, the 92Y in New York, and Mashable — then an upstart media company covering web culture and technology — around a conference called the Social Good Summit.
The first Social Good Summit was in September 2010, held at the 92Y, a cultural institution on the Upper East Side of New York. I was there (and I might have even moderated a panel or two). The Social Good Summit was designed as a kind of counter-programming to the United Nations General Assembly underway fifty blocks south. Just as social media was opening up new space for political and social debate, the three day event at the 92Y would serve as a kind of “People’s UNGA” to discuss how this emerging technology could be harnessed to advance social and economic development and human rights.
The programming in those early years was a cross between diplomats, presidents, and prime ministers in town for UNGA — who gave talks about using social media for social progress — and extremely earnest users of social media who believed in the collective power of networks to do good in the world. (This was before the advent of “influencers” as a distinct métier, but that’s basically what they were.)
In 2012, some of the key drivers behind the Social Good Summit — including Henry Timms and Asha Curran of 92Y, and Kathy Calvin and Aaron Sherinian of the United Nations Foundation — held a meeting in which the idea of a “Giving Tuesday” was conceived. As Henry Timms told me later that year, “You have Black Friday and Cyber Monday — so why not Giving Tuesday?”
And so, the idea was born. The conveners of the Social Good Summit tapped the networks of the influencers they had brought together the previous two Septembers, and voilà — it quickly went viral, to the point where we can hardly remember a time before Giving Tuesday. And the world is better off for it.
Social media is a darker place today, to be sure. But I haven’t personally lost my belief that it can still be harnessed to do some good in the world. To that end, I’ve teamed up with some other Substackers this holiday season to raise money for GiveDirectly.
In short: GiveDirectly facilitates unconditional cash transfers to communities in the developing world as a tool to fight extreme poverty. Regular listeners to the Global Dispatches podcast may recall this episode from August about a GiveDirectly program that offered cash transfers to pregnant women in rural Kenya, resulting in huge declines in infant and under-five mortality. Unconditional cash transfers are genuinely effective, but they are also politically fraught, so government aid agencies have not yet coalesced around them. This makes it an area where philanthropy — i.e., your contributions — can make a real difference.
Here’s how you can help. Go here. It’s special link just for my audience. Once there, make a contribution and post about it — you guessed it — on social media.
Pretty much everything about social media is terrible today. But just maybe we can still harness it to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.