Just 10% of the $300 billion given to charity each year comes from major institutional funders — the Fords, the Gateses, the MacArthurs, and the Rockefellers. Yet those funders have a monopoly on the term “philanthropy.” The billionaire who spends 99% of his time building his own wealth and 1% of his time thinking about charity is elevated to the status of “philanthropist,” while the poor bastard who spends 100% of her time serving as the executive director of a homeless charity and 0% of her time amassing wealth is called, at best, “staff.”

This narrow interpretation has infected more than our language. It has infected our imaginations.

“Philanthropy” comes from the Greek for “love of humanity.” Anyone who cares deeply about others and who demonstrates it in an important way has a right to the title. The bank teller who gives 5% of her relatively small income to charity every month is a philanthropist. The child who gives his allowance and collects money from his neighbors for Haiti is taking meaningful philanthropic action. But by applying the term “philanthropist” only to the rarified few who make outsize donations, we rob the average person of an important aspiration. Worse, we rob civil society of the potential of that aspiration.

Most charities approach individuals with a two-pronged fundraising operations: a “major gifts” group to service the wealthy stratosphere and annual campaigns to capture the $25 to $50 donor. The big space in the middle gets little attention. By and large, we don’t invest in making the $25 casual donor a $2,500 philanthropist. We don’t even think about it. We’re wired to think that philanthropy is the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Instead of asking the $25 donors to aspire to a life and lifestyle of more significant giving, we demean them with cheap prizes and the chance to vote on how Pepsi will make its charitable grants. Internet fundraising is exacerbating the problem. We’ve reduced activism to clicking. “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10.” We ask people to do the least they can do, and we make it insultingly easy.

That’s not what people want.

In 1992 I had a small fundraising consulting firm, and the board chair of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center asked me if I thought young people could play a role in the organization’s $4 million building campaign. I told him I believed young people would contribute, and significantly, if we elevated them in our own minds to the status of philanthropists and encouraged them to see themselves in that light as well. I asked him to reserve a panel on the main lobby’s beautiful donor wall for $2,500 to $5,000 givers.

I conducted about 30 fundraising house parties at which we asked 20- and 30- somethings to give $5,000 to the campaign. They were floored. They’d never been asked to give anything on that scale before. And they couldn’t afford to. But we explained that they could make their donations in monthly installments over a couple of years. All of a sudden they began to imagine creating their own legacies. They embraced the idea that they could give $5,000. It sounded big. It felt big. They liked envisioning their names etched in glass on that wall for everyone to see. They especially appreciated the desegregation of regular people and the “philanthropists.” In short order, we raised a quarter of a million dollars.

This experiment in aspiration was followed by the creation of the AIDSRides and Breast Cancer 3-Days, in which 182,000 regular people raised $556 million with average fundraising of $3,039 each — an amount most of them never dreamed of raising until we challenged them to explore the full measure of their potential.

People want their lives to matter. They want to make a difference — a big difference. We must rid ourselves of the patriarchal idea that the wealthy are the only ones who can change the world, and launch a new age of citizen philanthropy.