Recap: A Fireside Chat with Hali Lee
An evening with the Boston Foundation Equity Funds
March 31, 2026
What does it mean to be a philanthropist? For most people, the word conjures images of a new hospital wing, a museum exhibit bearing a donor’s name in large font, or a billionaire directing fortunes from on high. Hali Lee, philanthropy leader, founder, and author of The Big We: How Giving Circles Unlock Generosity, Strengthen Community, and Make Change, has spent her career dismantling that image and replacing it with something far more powerful: us.
On March 31, at the Edgerley Center for Civic Leadership, the Boston Foundation’s three Equity Funds—the Equality Fund, the Latino Equity Fund, and the Asian Community Fund—co-hosted a fireside chat with Lee that was as much a homecoming as it was a conversation. Moderated by Danielle Kim, Executive Director of the Asian Community Fund, and welcomed by Scott Knox, Executive Director of the Equality Fund, the evening brought together donors, community leaders, nonprofit professionals, and philanthropists for a wide-ranging dialogue about who giving is really for and what it looks like when communities take it back.
Lee opened with a provocation she has spent two decades building toward. The story of philanthropy in America, she argued, has long been narrated as a story of wealth concentrated in the hands of a few. Meanwhile, the generosity of people of color, immigrants, Indigenous communities, women, and LGBTQ+ individuals has gone uncounted and uncelebrated. “That’s just historically wrong and unfair,” she said.
We are, she argued, living through a second Gilded Age, with wealth disparities that exceed even those of the era of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford. And when we rely on the ultra-wealthy to solve the problems of the rest of us, it breeds a dangerous passivity. “Our system works best, and maybe only, when we, the people, care enough to get educated and care enough to link arms and care enough to do something about it.”
The Loneliness Connection
The conversation then turned to the other crisis at the heart of Lee’s book: loneliness. Americans are dying younger than they should because of what researchers call deaths of despair, rooted in social isolation: addiction, mental illness, and suicide. The answer, Lee argued, isn’t expensive or complicated.
Lee shared the story of a small-city mayor who tackled elder isolation by creating a simple barter station at a community center, a place where people could exchange goods and, while they were at it, have tea together. “Loneliness is one of those things that we can solve, and it doesn’t need to cost a gajillion dollars.” Giving circles, mutual aid networks, community gardens, and equity funds are all, in her framing, containers for something essential: the rebuilding of belonging. “The beautiful and hard truth about building belonging is that it’s only something we can build if we do it together.”
The Kitchen Table as an Organizing Tool
One of the most beloved moments of the evening came from a story that didn’t make it into Lee’s book, cut from the manuscript but too powerful to stay on the cutting room floor.
Lee’s 97-year-old mother-in-law, known affectionately as Akka, lives in rural Connecticut. Around age 90, she learned that a state legislative seat in her region was competitive and that she wanted to support the challenger, a younger woman named Maria. So Akka called the campaign office with a simple question: What can one 90-year-old lady do?
Together, they devised a plan. Akka hosted a weekly tea party at her kitchen table every week for the 12 weeks leading up to the November election, welcoming six community members at a time to meet the candidate. Over 12 weeks, she hosted 72 individuals. The election went to a recount. Maria won by 57 votes, and campaign debriefs credited Akka’s tea parties as having made a material difference. Maria has held the seat for three cycles since.
“If Akka can use her kitchen table to affect political change in her area,” Lee said, “then certainly every single one of us here can do the same.”
Traditions of Generosity
The room itself became part of the story when Lee invited attendees to share where they had first learned about generosity. What followed was a testament to the richness of collective giving traditions that rarely appear in any formal philanthropic record.
Sophan Smith, a member of the Asian Community Fund’s Advisory Committee, described the Cambodian tradition of giving money rather than gifts at weddings and funerals, carefully recording each contributor’s name so the favor could be returned. Kristen Halbert of the Hyams Foundation recalled her church pastor passing the collection plate a second time, spontaneously, for a neighbor who had just had a baby or lost a job. Lazaro Lopez, on the Advisory Committee of the Latino Equity Fund, shared how his parents, who fled Cuba and Colombia, bought a three-family home in Jamaica Plain and brought their entire families to live there.
Lee shared her own version: the Korean geh she participated in with friends in Brooklyn, where five women pooled money monthly and took turns with the pot. Across the country, she has heard of gehs where the pot reaches $100,000, used to start businesses, make down payments on homes, or send children to college.
The broader point was essential: remittances, informal support to family and friends, the rotating savings circles of dozens of cultures, none of it counts in the U.S. Giving Report. “We’ve got to expand the aperture of what gets counted,” Lee said.
On Third Spaces, Neighbors, and the Role of Community Foundations
One of the most resonant passages of the evening came when Lee invoked Columbia Journalism School Dean Jelani Cobb’s observation that the fundamental building block of a functioning democracy is neighbor. She connected this to the 2,000 Boston residents during the era of slave patrols who resisted, not necessarily because of shared political beliefs, but because someone was taking their neighbor. “Don’t mess with my neighbors”: six words that felt both prescient and timely.
This led to a direct challenge to the leaders, boards and staff of the Boston Foundation and other community foundations. What would it look like, Lee asked, for a community foundation to fully step into the role of third space, the civic gathering place that, as Robert Putnam has long warned, we are losing?
Community foundations, she argued, are uniquely suited for this role. They are grounded in place, anchored in values, and through equity funds, they serve as conduits to communities they might not have reached a generation ago. “I’d much rather come to my community foundation to have quarterly conversations or monthly learnings about what’s happening in town and what I can do about it.”
What Solidarity Looks Like
Lee closed by returning to a too-often unseen power of community philanthropy: that receiving a grant from people who look like you carries a weight that no foundation letterhead can replicate.
Reflecting on the Asian Women Giving Circle, she recounted funding a group of queer Asian activists who wanted to march openly in Manhattan’s Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade, something never before permitted. With a modest grant, they made history. A grantee partner later reflected that receiving support from the Asian Women Giving Circle felt like having a group of aunties cheering on the sidelines.
As the evening wrapped up, Lee left the room with a challenge, not just for individuals but for the institution itself. “Lean into that a little more. What does it mean that all these people have joined this place? What can we do together as a bigger ‘we’?”
Former Boston Foundation board member and Latino Equity Fund co-chair Zamawa Arenas offered a fitting distillation: community, care, and connection. “If we hold true to that, no matter what forces of philanthropy are pushing us, that is where we come from.”
The Boston Foundation is Greater Boston’s community foundation, working in partnership with donors to build and sustain a vital, prosperous, and equitable city and region. The Equality Fund, the Latino Equity Fund, and the Asian Community Fund are three Equity Funds hosted at the Boston Foundation, each driven by the principle of “by community, for community.”