Why I gave $8,000 to a stranger's mission trip

She raised $8,185 from eleven people. I was $8,000 of it.

By Aaron Stalberg · 20 September 2026

In July 2021 a woman in Colorado posted a fundraiser. I had never met her and we had no friends in common. She had been accepted onto a Discipleship Training School with Youth With A Mission, and she needed the course fees. The plan was three months of study in Kona, Hawaii, then an outreach placement somewhere she would not find out until she got there.

I put in $8,000.

I am writing it down because people tend to land on one of two reactions, and I think both of them miss the point. Some assume it was an absurd amount to hand to a stranger. Others assume there must be something underneath it, a debt or a connection or an old favour being repaid. There is not. She was short by roughly what the trip cost, and I could cover it.

What I think giving is actually for

Most giving follows a feeling. Something moves you, you act on it, and then the feeling passes and the giving stops. I have done plenty of that myself, and I do not think it is worth much. It costs nothing and it changes nothing.

The version I am more interested in is the one you decide on before the feeling arrives. You pick a standard, and then you meet it on the days when it is inconvenient, when nobody is watching, and when you get nothing back. Whether the money actually moves is the only test that means anything.

I am aware of how that sounds coming from someone writing a page about his own donation. I went back and forth about publishing this at all, because a person who announces what he gives has usually taken most of the reward already. What tipped it is that I have two daughters. I would rather they grew up watching their father do this than hearing him describe it.

Why the size of it mattered

There is a version of this where I give $50 and feel good about myself, and I want to be honest that I understand the appeal. It is cheap, it is easy, and it lets you think of yourself as someone who helps.

But the gap was the whole problem. She was not a little short. She was short by about the cost of the trip, and $50 would have moved her from "cannot go" to "still cannot go". Money that does not change the outcome is not really help, it is just joining in. I would rather do one thing that changes something than fifty that make me feel like a decent person.

What happened afterwards

The campaign finished over its target and she went. I did not ask her for updates and I have never contacted her. That was on purpose. The point was for her to go, not for me to have a relationship with having helped. If she ever reads this, I hope the trip feels like hers and not like something I did.

The part I am less comfortable with

None of this makes me a good person, and I would be suspicious of anybody who described their own donation that way. I do not know whether she finished the programme or what she is doing now. Writing a cheque is the easy end of helping somebody. The people who do the hard end are the ones who turn up week after week for years, and that has not been me.

So I will put it no higher than this. I want to be the best version of myself, and I have come to think that is not a place you arrive at. It is something you practise, badly at first. Deciding to give and then giving is one of the few parts of that I can point at and say I did it rather than meant to.