Giving Tuesday – beyond the spend fest

Eleanor Cater
CEO
2 December 2025

You may have noticed the growing phenomenon of Black Friday which encourages us all to spend, spend, spend in the lead up to Christmas. The Black Friday frenzy originated in the USA, evolving as a chaotic day, directly after Thanksgiving, when crowds of shoppers descend to scoop up bargains. Cyber Monday soon followed, encouraging the shopping frenzy to continue, online.

In contrast, Giving Tuesday was a deliberate response to the consumerism of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Launched in 2012, the idea was simple: after a day focused on grabbing deals (Black Friday) and another day for online shopping (Cyber Monday), how about a day dedicated to giving back? The Tuesday following Thanksgiving was nominated as a day that celebrates generosity and encourages people to donate to charities, volunteer, or help their communities.

Giving Tuesday is today, December 2nd, and over the years it has become a global movement, expanding to over 80 countries. While New Zealand is a long way from the USA we also find ourselves with many of the pressures to spend, spend, spend in the lead up to the festive season, and Black Friday deals creeping more and more into retailer practice.

Yet all the New Zealand data is pointing towards a grim festive season for many, as the cost of living bites deeply for Kiwi families, and many of our tamariki must accept the crushing reality that Santa does not treat all children equally.

Giving Tuesday could provide that moment in amongst the madness to pause and consider, could we as Kiwis, renowned for our culture of manaakitanga and generosity, do better than spend at this time of year? Could we give? Could we build more purposeful movements for giving?

It’s also really hard to give well into communities, there can be a dizzying array of needs, which can lead to ‘analysis paralysis’, or not knowing where to start. However, through our work across New Zealand, we see a growing trend of Kiwis increasingly curious to know who is doing great work, and where their donations and time would be best spent. Community Foundations, 18 of them around the country, are not for profits and they help local people discover how they can give well into communities. Often that can mean getting to know who the changemakers are locally and investing in their work. As Nobel prizewinning economist Elinor Ostrom wrote, local people “have the strongest incentive to get the solution right” and there is no one who knows what your community needs more than those closest on the ground, who know the challenges and can see the solutions.

Community Foundations also specialise in setting up legacy funds that stretch beyond your lifetime, and often these are established through gifts in wills (or bequests), which are pooled and invested, creating new community funds. These funds are changemaking for local communities and – bonus - they are often very fulfilling for the givers themselves (as one person said to me recently about her personal legacy fund “it brings me great joy,” which seems a particularly fitting sentiment at this time of year).

Right now, New Zealand needs all sort of givers – those who give now to charities to address immediate needs – such as giving to City Missions, Women’s Refuges and food banks - and those who are thinking about how they will really ‘shift the dial’ for the long term, stepping into spaces that explore hard to fund areas such as climate initiatives, child poverty, homelessness, family violence and rainbow causes.

Giving Tuesday could be a time to reflect – what sort of giver are you? And could you give more purposefully into your local community? Giving Tuesday might be humanity’s gift to itself at this time of year, helping us to reconnect with our sense of generosity and community spirit, in amongst the giddying spend fest going on all around us.