I write as someone of means, who seeks to reclaim philanthropy for the masses. I write as a philanthropist, who believes social or political change should not be the exclusive domain of a handful of billionaires.

For every Andrew Carnegie or Bill and Melinda Gates, for every public library or concert hall endowed by a departed steel baron, for the great research university that bears his name and on behalf of each civic auditorium that houses his legacy, I applaud the effort to transform the embers of his Pittsburgh furnaces into lanterns of knowledge and light throughout America.

I celebrate the technology wizard, whose vast fortune finances the delivery of clean water and sanitation for tens of millions of people across Africa and the Americas. I rejoice in the delivery of necessities – food, clothing, medicine and shelter – to save mothers from dying during childbirth, and to rescue children from dying in a conflict not of their choosing.

Still, the power to shape the long arc of the moral universe – to ensure it bends towards justice – belongs to everyone.

We need not obsess ourselves with a minority that is rich in goods, when, in fact, there are countless volunteers who are rich in spirit.

Ask me, therefore, the price to change history, at home and abroad, and I will answer with an amount less than the cost of refueling a luxury SUV: $80.

That figure, compounded by matching contributions from my fellow citizens, is the number responsible for, to borrow the words of Abraham Lincoln, the appeal to “the better angels of our nature,” so we could elect a senator from the Land of Lincoln to the White House; binding up old wounds, in celebration, on the evening of November 4, 2008, in Chicago’s Grant Park; where the President-elect, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan, could say: “Yes We Can.”

I cite this event because of then Senator Obama’s ability to raise half a billion dollars online, equal to an average single donation of $80 or less, in his 21-month campaign for the presidency.

I refer to that digital treasury not out of partisanship but awe. Politics aside, that figure proves a more important point: That we all have it in our power to be philanthropic.

Again, I write from experience where the most valuable symbol of philanthropy is time. It is during those hours when you give of yourself – it is across the veil of years, where my beloved husband forever avails himself, as a world-class surgeon, to save people’s lives – that you transcend everyday trifles, and absorb the grandness (and mystery) of life.

When I serve, for example, on the boards of the Honolulu Museum of Art or the Hawaiian Humane Society or the Hawaii Community Foundation or when a meeting comes to order at the Dr. Richard Grossman Community Foundation, I am in the presence of lives lived in full.

We do these things not for moral or monetary remuneration. We do these things because, blessed by our earnings as professionals, we have a universal yearning to do what we can, whenever and wherever we can.

Such is the legacy of my husband, a man of decency and generosity to each patient who saw the soul within his blue eyes.

That humanity survives – no, it flourishes – among each beneficiary of his call to heal the wounded and comfort the fallen. To one, his hands are those of an artist; to another, his palms are the warmth a grieving parent needs and this writer shall never forget.

Whether we give from our pockets or our hearts, we can – and should – give.

Philanthropy is the act of doing.

Let us summon the will to act, today and forevermore.

Elizabeth Rice Grossman