During the last few months of the year, I get swamped with solicitations from nonprofit organizations. Right before Rosh Hashanah I received at least two or three requests a day via postal or email from yeshivas, chesed organizations and other Jewish nonprofits asking for money, along with many phone calls from these organizations requesting funds. Then in December come the mailings from the secular charities asking for assistance before the new calendar year begins, hoping that the benefit of a tax deduction will convince me and my wife to donate. (Fortunately, the in-person, door-to-door Sunday solicitors for various yeshivas haven’t discovered the Stamford community yet, so we have been spared that enjoyment.)

Don’t get me wrong … most of the organizations are worthy charities. But there are only so many reputable charities one can give money to. And I always thought it would be nice to be able to write a check to one organization instead of writing dozens of checks to many nonprofits.

That’s part of the genius of DailyGiving.org, an organization that allows you to automatically donate $1 a day to charity—with 100% of the money going directly to more than 70 worthy Jewish organizations.

I love the fact that I can accomplish the mitzvah of giving tzedaka each day, simply by signing up with Daily Giving … just set it, and forget it!

But in reality, Daily Giving doesn’t allow you to forget it, because when you sign up to give $1 a day to tzedaka, you also receive a daily email, letting you know what organization is receiving funds that day and the amount of funds distributed. The email is often accompanied by a video about the organization, allowing you to learn more about the charity. It’s a great method to reinforce the message of giving charity each day, and it makes you realize that you are a part of a community of thousands of other Daily Givers.

The organization was started in 2019 by Dr. Jonathan Donath, a chiropractor living in White Plains, New York. He had an epiphany while dropping a dollar bill into the tzedaka box at his shul. “No matter how much money I give to charity, I still get a mitzvah every time I drop a dollar in,” he thought. “How can I guarantee that I do this mitzvah every day for a buck?”

He looked for an organization that was doing this and couldn’t find one. So, he and a couple of friends had a website built and created a nonprofit called DailyGiving.org. The rest is history.

Today, approximately 20,000 individuals are giving $1(or more) a day to tzedaka through Daily Giving, which now generates more than $7 million a year for 70-plus different organizations. (Hatzalah, Leket Israel, Migdal Ohr, Ohel, Sharsheret, Yachad, and Yad Leah are just a few of the important organizations that each receive about $100,000 a year from DailyGiving.org.)

By the end of this calendar year, Daily Giving will have distributed more than $20 million of charitable funds to its recipient partners—simply due to the compounding effect of thousands of people each giving $1 a day. Remarkable!

“What more could Hashem want than knowing that all of his children are coming together every single day to give tzedaka to our brothers and sisters who are less fortunate?” said Donath.

I first met Donath when he began the effort, while I was spending a Shabbat visiting our children and grandchildren, who live in his community. I immediately fell in love with the idea, and I offered to help him with his marketing and public relations. (At the time he was basically a one-person operation, trying to launch a brand new concept while managing his own successful medical practice.)

Thank God, Daily Giving now has several staff members who have helped the organization reach new heights. (All the overhead is paid for through separate fundraising efforts, and 100% of the monies collected through its $1-a-day tzedaka program go directly to the recipient organizations.)

I recently had a chance to catch up with Donath, and he told me about some of the new things that are happening with the organization.

When Hamas brutally attacked Israel in October 2023 and the war in Gaza began, Daily Giving immediately sprang into action, and created a special Israel Emergency Fund towards which Daily Givers could contribute. The fund has distributed more than $500,000 for emergency medical aid, equipment for IDF soldiers, and the distribution of food and other essentials to those in need, in addition to its regular distributions to recipient organizations. Daily Giving donated funds to Magen David Adom to purchase an ambulance, and they also helped Hatzalah with the purchase of an emergency popup hospital in Israel.

And while Israel charities have been successful in raising funds since the war started, many Jewish nonprofits in America have been struggling mightily. Daily Giving has been a lifeline for these organizations, and many of them have told Donath that the money they receive regularly from Daily Giving has literally kept them afloat.

In the last couple of years, Daily Giving has ramped up its social media presence by creating several very effective videos featuring famous rabbis, Jewish educators, and even some celebrities (such as Elon Gold) that offer testimonials about Daily Giving. One of the most popular videos was a humorous one that featured comedian Eli Lebowicz, complaining about the fact that tzedaka requests are getting out of control (“Hi, we’re raising money to send Teaneck families to a Pesach program in Mexico!”) and encouraging people to sign up for Daily Giving as a refreshing alternative.

One of the marketing projects Donath and I worked on is getting recipient organizations to promote Daily Giving on their websites and their emails that they send out to donors. It makes sense that if donors to a particular nonprofit see that the organization they support is also supported financially by Daily Giving, they might also be convinced to become Daily Givers. In fact, this has become an important source of new members for Daily Giving.

If you’d like to join thousands of other individuals who are giving $1 a day to tzedaka through Daily Giving, please visit the website www.DailyGiving.org. You can also sign up multiple members of your family, which allows them to also participate in the daily mitzvah of tzedaka. Signing up takes less than two minutes. You’ll be glad that you did!

Michael Feldstein, who lives in Stamford, Connecticut, is the author of “Meet Me in the Middle” (meet-me-in-the-middle-book.com), a collection of essays on contemporary Jewish life. He can be reached at [email protected].