The Challenge

How We Got There

Greater Hartford Gives Foundation had just launched a new giving strategy: help donors fund the conditions that create a problem, not just one organization's response to it. Food insecurity was the first focus area.

Most giving starts with charitable instinct: to help the person right in front of you. That instinct isn't wrong, but left on its own, it produces one-off gifts and treats a system complex as if it were an individual problem. You can tell someone that food insecurity is systemic, but that rarely changes how they give. Getting them to feel it usually does more, and that's a design problem.

That's what the Foundation asked us to solve, with about a month to do it.

The Approach

First, we got donors close to community members' lived experience. Working with Hands On Hartford, we built two portraits grounded in real people's experiences: Rose, 56, single, managing cancer, navigating the pantry system with a walker, and Maya, 30, who became guardian to four siblings overnight while working full time. Before donors saw a single statistic, they spent dinner walking through a week of Rose's and Maya's decisions. We designed the exercise so the trade-offs these women made felt real, without manufacturing hardship.

Then we pulled back. We took one real policy change, the 2025 federal SNAP cuts, and traced it through four layers of the food access ecosystem: the neighborhood pantry, the regional distributor, the state's advocacy infrastructure, and back down to Rose's and Maya's own kitchen tables. Donors got to watch one decision made in Washington land on two lives in two very different, equally inequitable ways.

Experts from End Hunger Connecticut! interjected over the course of the evening and widened the lens on what the room had just experienced. They told the story of a one-week emergency grocery card program that helped hold off a $72 million loss to the local grocery economy, which gave donors a concrete picture of what aligned giving can accomplish.

The evening closed in silence, with donors writing down what they were committing to.

Early on, donor questions were about individuals: Who does Rose call? What's the one best resource for Maya?

By the end, their individual-focused charitable instinct had become more systemic. Donors committed, in writing, to advocating for state SNAP funding, bringing the decision walk exercise to their elected officials, and pushing for more coordination across hunger organizations. One donor named a specific coalition they want to carry the work to.

In the reflections, you see lines like: "These problems are colossal and won't be solved by philanthropy alone" and "This is not apolitical." These comments were written by donors. More than $1 million in commitments followed within weeks. One donor's gift at the event that night began what the Foundation's VP of Advancement called "the outcome you hope for but cannot manufacture."

What Changed