The word, generosity, comes to us from the Latin language. . .
In the middle ages, generosity was used in connection with royalty. It was viewed as a role royalty played to care for those who were subject to them. Royals owed being generous to their subjects (or so the thinking went).
Today we talk about generosity, as a virtue, an ideal. Being generous is a choice. It’s not viewed as a social duty we owe to one another nor as a democratic responsibility.
Perhaps a new measure of our work should be to assess how many people are growing in empathy. We could conduct surveys of our donors to gather trend data over time.
We might play a role in helping society’s understanding of generosity continue to evolve for the betterment of everyone.