You've decided you want to give. Good. That's the hard part.
Now comes a different kind of hard: where does it go?
Your church. The missionary your family has been supporting for years. A clean-water charity your teacher mentioned. The kid at school who never has lunch. A fundraiser your friend just texted you about. A Canadian food bank looking for donations.
With twenty dollars a month, you cannot do all of it. So how do you choose?
Most adults, if you ask them, will say "follow your heart" and leave you there. That is not a useful answer.
Here is a more useful one.
Your Church Gets First Call
If you are part of a church, your church comes first.
This is not just a tradition passed down from someone's grandparents. There is real reason behind it. Your church is the body of Christ in your neighbourhood. It pays for the building where people come when life falls apart. It funds the pastoral care, the youth group, the space where someone might hear the gospel for the first time. When a family in your congregation loses a job or faces a crisis, your church is often what catches them.
The biblical pattern is clear. The New Testament church in Acts 2 shared resources with anyone who had need. The Old Testament tithe went to the temple first, then extended outward. Christians have given to their local church as the first priority for two thousand years, not because it was easy, but because the church is the vehicle God uses to care for his people.
Practically: if you earn any income (a part-time job, babysitting, lawn care, whatever), ten percent off the top belongs to your church. That's the starting point. If you earn $300 in a month, $30 goes to your church before you figure out anything else. You can give it weekly or collect it and give monthly. The method is secondary.
The order is the thing.
Give to People You Can Actually See
After your church, look around.
There is probably someone in your life right now who needs something you could offer. A friend who consistently has no lunch. A neighbour going through a hard stretch. A kid at school who came into winter without a proper coat. A family in your congregation dealing with a medical bill they didn't see coming.
In Luke 10, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan. The man doesn't fundraise for people far away. He helps the person lying in front of him. Jesus holds that up as the model. The immediate and local counts.
This kind of giving doesn't always mean money. Sometimes it's buying someone a meal. Sometimes it's a few hours of your Saturday. Sometimes it's just showing up when someone is going through something hard.
When it does involve money, it is real giving. Don't talk yourself out of it because the amount is small.
Charities and Causes: How to Filter
Once your church is covered and you've responded to the person in front of you, some of what's left can go further out.
Here is how to filter the options down.
Give to things with clear, traceable impact. A charity that builds water infrastructure in another country, a missionary your family has personally supported for years, a Canadian organization doing refugee resettlement or disaster relief. Look for transparency: does the organization show how the money actually gets used? Charity Intelligence Canada (charityintelligence.ca) is a free resource that rates Canadian charities on exactly this. Use it.
Give because you genuinely believe in the work. When someone sends you a fundraising link, you are not obligated to give simply because they asked. Guilt is not generosity. Before you give to any cause, ask yourself honestly: do I believe in what this organization is doing? Is the work good? If yes, give. If you are not sure, it is okay to wait or to say no.
Consider missions. Jesus' final words to his disciples included the command to go into all the world and make disciples of every nation (Matthew 28:19). That costs money, and missionaries count on people to support them. If your church supports specific missionaries, giving to that work is giving to something with eternal weight behind it.
Keep It Simple
When you have limited money and more than one option, this order works:
- Ten percent to your church.
- Respond to immediate need around you.
- Give the rest to one or two causes you genuinely believe in.
That third category is where people stall. The way through it: pick one or two things and stay with them. Spreading five dollars across ten charities once a year is not as effective as giving thirty dollars consistently to one organization. Consistency matters in giving the same way it matters in saving.
Small amounts, held to over time, add up. And they build something more important than the total: the habit of giving. That habit compounds the same way money does.
The Question Underneath
You might be reading this and thinking: I barely have anything to give. Does it actually count?
Jesus had something to say about this.
He was watching people drop money into the temple treasury. Wealthy donors were giving large amounts. Then a widow dropped in two small coins, worth almost nothing by any financial measure. Jesus said she had given more than everyone else, because she gave out of her poverty rather than her surplus (Mark 12:41-44).
He was watching the posture. Not the number.
Generosity runs deeper than dollars. It lives in how tightly you hold what you have. A teen giving five dollars from twenty is developing something that the adult earning a hundred thousand and giving nothing is not developing. The amount matters less than the direction of your hands: open or closed.
That posture, practiced now, becomes the person you are later.
What to Do This Week
Figure out what you typically earn in a month. Ten percent belongs to your church. Set it aside when the money arrives, not at the end of the month when it has already drifted somewhere else.
Then, once a month, look around. Is there someone in front of you who needs something you can give? A meal, a few dollars, some of your time.
Two moves. That's enough to start.
The question of where to give gets bigger and more interesting as your income grows and your world expands. But the habit to build right now is openness. Hold what you have loosely. Give first.
God takes that seriously. You can too.