Giving December: The Month to Cultivate Giving Spirits in Japan
In 2015, an awareness-raising campaign called “Giving December” started in Japan, which was referred to as Giving Tuesday. This campaign aims to spread how important giving and donation are.
Since the first year, many famous people such as athletes, artists, and business executives have supported. Some of them gave messages for PR, planned activities about giving, and even Bill Gates came to give a speech at the start event of the first year.
The committee consists of executives of organizations related to giving, such as not-for-profit organizations, universities, banks, and commercial companies. From my viewpoint, this is a remarkable point that such a various stakeholder has been continuously involved in one campaign.
Activities
During the campaign, there are a lot of activities certified by Giving December such as events, charity campaigns, appreciation gatherings, etc. Those activities hosted by individuals and organizations have increased year by year although they decreased in 2022. However, it seemed that the increase of uncertified activities was the reason why it decreased last year.
In order to imagine specifically, I would like to introduce some of the distinctive activities in the past campaign.
The first case is a charitable activity that people dressed up as Santa Claus managed by the Tochigi community fund. Although this was an annual event as a charity run, it was changed to various recreations like e-sports and cleaning activities in Utsunomiya located in Tochigi prefecture due to the pandemic.
Every organization around the world had to make a difficult decision to stop regular events or not. In 2020, the organization chose different activities.
As a result, they raised 5,536,410 JPY from 296 donors including individuals and local companies. The donation was sent to 12 local nonprofit organizations to support children in need.
Another case is the following activity called “Kifuting” organized by the Japan Inclusive Football Federation. “Kifuting” is a coined word that combines “Kifu (donation in Japanese)” and “lifting (juggling in Japanese)”.
It was the rule that participants donated 10 yen per time and up to 1,000 yen. Also, one bounce and up to three attempts were okay for one participant to make beginners comfortable to try.
In the end, the total amount of donation was more than 13,000 yen for JIFF.
Partners
Individuals and organizations including voluntary groups and school clubs can participate in this movement as partners. It has reached 853 partners until 2022 and more than 1,000 would be expected this year.
There are two kinds of partners for both individuals and organizations. One is “lead partners”, which registers with a certain amount of donations. Another is just “partners”, which can register for free.
Ambassadors
The Giving December has ambassadors to spread and promote the campaign to the whole of Japan. Whoever is related to giving can be an ambassador. As a result, there were 92 ambassadors last year because not only individuals but also organizations and mascots became ambassadors.
Well… Actually, I am one of the ambassadors, continuing from last year. The following is my message as an ambassador. This year I would like to research giving activities in Japan and Australia.
Giving December 2023 start event
In September of 2023, an event to announce the start of Giving December this year was held. The recording of the event is as below. I would be happy to use the translation function for watching the recording.
Join “Giving December”
Until now many people and organizations have been doing activities about Giving December in Japan. However, I expect this movement can be an opportunity to begin collaborations if you would like to do something with people and organizations in the Japanese nonprofit and philanthropic sector.
- to become a partner
- to do activities about giving
- to post something about giving or this campaign on your social media with #givingdecember
