Ep. 293 – Engaged Compassion: Shelly Tygielski

Metta Hour with Sharon Salzberg - Be Here Now Network

In this episode of the Engaged Compassion series, Sharon Salzberg sits down with Dr. Shelley Tagelsky to discuss her recently earned PhD in philanthropic leadership, focusing on mutual aid. Shelley

Key takeaways

• Mutual aid is not charity—it's about solidarity, reciprocity, and collective responsibility rather than top-down giving.
• Crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe can inadvertently harm recipients by triggering IRS tax forms (e.g., K-1099), highlighting the need for policy reform.

Main topics

• Mutual aid vs. charity
• The impact of crowdfunding on vulnerable communities

Notable quotes

"When official institutions fail, people turn to each other. They share food, money, labor, and care through informal networks built on trust rather than eligibility requirements."

"No good deed goes unpunished"—especially when well-intentioned donations lead to tax burdens for recipients.

Conclusion

Dr. Shelley Tagelsky's journey from grassroots organizer to academic scholar underscores the transformative

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) A good meditation teacher isn't just someone who meditates a lot. Helping someone work with their own mind is a genuine skill, and it requires training. Join Buddhist teacher David Nickturn for a free online talk on Tuesday, August 25th at 6 p.m. Eastern Time. Drawing on more than 50 years of practice and teaching, David will explore what it takes to offer clear meditation instruction, listen deeply, guide meaningful discussion, and share the teachings in your own voice. You'll also learn about Dharma Moon's upcoming 100-hour mindfulness meditation teacher training offered in partnership with Tibet House US, the Dalai Lama's cultural center in the United States. You'll have a chance to meet the teaching team, ask questions, and find out whether the program is right for you. Visit dharmamoon.com backslash path to learn more and reserve your spot for this free online event on August 25th. Speaker 4 (1:21) Hello, and welcome to the Meta Hour podcast with Sharon Salzberg. I'm Lily Cushman. I produce this podcast. And today we are coming to you with our ninth episode in our Engaged Compassion series. We're joined today with the wonderful Shelley Tagelsky, who has just recently become Dr. Shelley Tagelsky. We're excited to have her back. This is her second appearance on the podcast. And if you don't know her work, Shelley is a philanthropist, a social activist. She's also a mindfulness and meditation teacher. She is the founder of the global grassroots mutual aid organization, Pandemic of Love. She's also the co-founder of Partners in Kind. which is a production equity fund that invests in projects that focus on social impact in entertainment. Shelley has been featured in lots of different media outlets, CNN Heroes, The Kelly Clarkson Show, New York Times, Washington Post. She's a Garrison Institute fellow. And she's also an author. She's written a couple books, so... It's an absolute delight to have Shelly with us for this series. And today she's talking to Sharon about her recent doctorate that she received, which is centered around mutual aid. So she gives us some of the history of mutual aid, kind of where that shows up in different societies and what it means. in a society for there to be an emphasis on cooperation versus competition. Also in this conversation, Sharon asks Shelley a lot of different questions about how her practice has evolved over time as a longtime activist and what her evolution has been on her understanding of how to balance our compassion, how to prioritize self-care, working with guilt as a caregiver. Speaker 4 (3:50) some of the tools that she uses to know when burnout is lurking. She gives some great advice to changemakers and how to engage with activism with our own sustainability in mind. She and Sharon also talk about joy, which has been one of the big themes in this series. And Shelley talks about how joy is not an abandonment of our responsibilities. The episode closes with Shelley leading a loving-kindness meditation. Speaker 4 (4:26) And before we get into today's episode, just one short announcement. Sharon has a new online course that is starting August 24th. It is Faith, Living with Confidence, Purpose, and Heart. And this is exploring faith not as an unthinking belief structure or following a certain doctrine, but looking at faith. through the Buddhist lens as the courage that helps us open up beyond our habit structures and how it can spark our inspiration, both to have a practice and sustain our efforts to bring mindfulness and compassion into our lives and into the world. So this is offered by Tricycle Online, and it's a six-part. course with a couple of different Q &A sessions. It's a very robust offering and a lot of new material that Sharon has not previously had in course format before. So it's offered in a flexible format too. I know a lot of you will sign up for a course and then work with it when you have time down the road. And that's how this one is built as well. So you can visit Sharon's website if you'd like to learn more. SharonSalzburg.com And we are offering a 25 % discount for her listeners there. You can use the code Sharon25, S-H-A-R-O-N-25 to receive that discount Speaker 5 (6:09) at checkout. Speaker 4 (6:12) Okay, so let's get into today's episode of the Engaged Compassion series with Dr. Shelley Tagelsky and Sharon Salzberg. Speaker 5 (6:35) Hello, Dr. Shelley, and welcome back to the podcast. Speaker 3 (6:39) Hello. How are you, Sharon? So good to always be with you. Speaker 5 (6:43) It's very good to be with you. Are you in Asheville by any chance? I am. I'm in the beautiful Speaker 2 (6:50) Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. Speaker 5 (6:53) Okay, so we're in the same zone. I'm so happy to be here with you. And you've been, of course, very busy since the last time you were on the podcast, which was 2020, which... Speaker 3 (7:03) Oh, wow. Speaker 5 (7:04) And always seems like a million years ago. You're now officially Dr. Shelley Tagilsky, having recently completed your PhD in philanthropic leadership in 2026. And we've been running this ongoing series on engaged compassion. And I so much wanted to include you so we could hear all about your recent studies and the work that you're doing. So maybe we could start with why you decided to go back to school for mutual aid. Because you're already such a hugely successful organizer, founding Pandemic of Love in 2020, which has over 5,000 volunteers worldwide and has directly exchanged nearly 200 million in donations and has connected over 5 million people. It's just amazing. Tell me what was missing for you in the work or was something missing for you in the work that motivated you to get your PhD? Speaker 2 (7:58) Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting because you would think when you, you know, when I look back and reflect, and certainly when I hear somebody reflecting it back to me, the statistics of just pandemic of love alone, you would think that in the world of philanthropy, that that would be enough, if you will, to Speaker 2 (8:25) kind of widen eyes and catch people's attention in the philanthropic industrial complex that we operate in, which, you know, is another topic for another conversation at a different time. But. What I found as I navigated through, you know, aiding different chapters and volunteers and working on raising... Speaker 2 (8:59) inordinate amounts of funding, especially for people and communities with extenuating circumstances, i.e. after the L.A. wildfires or even the hurricane here in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, that Because mutual aid exists outside of the traditional philanthropic model and because it is not formally recognized by the nonprofit tax code, it... the philanthropy world doesn't really know what to do with it. The IRS doesn't know what to do with it. The government doesn't know what to do with it. And certainly, you know, nonprofit laws really don't know how to view it. And so what ultimately happens is that oftentimes, especially now with the advent of technology and the use of crowdfunding platforms and other types of platforms, platforms like GoFundMe or... Zelle or Cash App or Venmo, for example, there's this unintended consequence that occurs when individuals transact on these platforms. And they don't realize that whether you're a recipient or a donor, that there may be harm that befalls a recipient. that you are ultimately trying to help. So it's like that old, you know, adage of like, no good deed goes unpunished. And in this case, very, very much, very true, very much the case that we have found. And I was shocked to learn actually from personal experience over the last six years of transacting through Pandemic of Love that There were instances where individuals who we had raised money for for medical procedures and surgeries, you know, help with housing security or, you know, other types of instances where people essentially were able to get help. Speaker 2 (11:24) faced a tax bill that they didn't know what to do with. They received a K-1 or a K-1099 from the IRS, from these platforms. And suddenly the funding that was intended to help them that was crowdsourced by strangers or by individuals, you know, in their neighborhood or their communities were actually causing them harm in many different ways. And so I really was incredibly frustrated when I learned about this and when I experienced it and saw the harm that it caused to the individuals that we had been helping. And I kept saying to the board of advisors for Pandemic of Love, somebody really needs to do something about this. And I would say that again and again and again. Speaker 2 (12:21) Eventually, one of the board members, a CPA and a really wonderful mentor who I think you know personally as well, Sharon, as he used to be part of the Humera Foundation, Rob Cawfold said, I have the perfect person who can do something about this. And I said, who? And he said, you, there's a new program at IU for philanthropic leadership and you should apply and you should take on this challenge of trying to change tax policy and allow for these monetary mutual aid transactions. And you should go to Congress and get your kind of pedigree, if you will. put all the data together and bring all the stakeholders together.