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In July, around 70 friends, colleagues and supporters gathered in Melbourne to celebrate Peter Singer’s 80th birthday.
Some had known Peter for decades. Others had travelled considerable distances to be there. For several guests, it was their first opportunity to meet him.
The affection for Peter was unmistakable, but it wasn’t the only warmth in the room. Guests seemed genuinely delighted by one another. They had come to celebrate Peter, certainly, but also to talk, exchange ideas and meet others who had encountered his work by quite different routes.
The room brought together people from many parts of Peter’s life, particularly the two areas with which he is perhaps most closely associated: animal advocacy and effective giving. Some guests had spent decades working to improve the treatment of animals. Others were donors, philanthropists or leaders of organizations tackling global poverty. Many belonged in both worlds.
For all the seriousness of the questions Peter has spent his life asking, the evening itself was anything but solemn.
A video tribute included messages from friends and colleagues around the world, including Sir Stephen Fry, and moved easily between admiration, affection and humor. Glenys Oogjes and Philip Wollen offered personal toasts. Ellen Burbidge performed an original musical tribute to Peter’s life and work that was both funny and poignant.
The breadth of Peter’s influence was reflected in the tributes. “More than any other source, donors point to you and your work as the place that they learned about GiveWell,” said GiveWell Co-Founder and CEO Elie Hassenfeld, adding that the organization has since moved billions of dollars, which it believes has helped tens of millions of people around the world.
Ingrid Newkirk, Co-Founder and President of PETA, traced an equally direct line from Peter’s work to the animal advocacy movement: “PETA exists because of Peter.”
One of the liveliest parts of the evening was a challenge inspired by Peter’s book The Expanding Circle.
Guests were each given one-third of a quotation drawn from Peter’s writing. They then had to move around the room, find the two people holding the remaining fragments, reconstruct the quotation and identify which of Peter’s works it came from.
What followed involved a great deal of comparing scraps of text, negotiating possible matches and, in some cases, taking a little longer than anticipated to arrive at the answer.
A generous supporter had pledged A$1,516 for every quotation correctly assembled, with another A$1,516 available if the group could identify its source. There were ten quotations in total – and, by the end of the evening, guests had completed all ten, unlocking the supporter’s full A$30,321 contribution to Peter’s 80th birthday fundraising campaign.
The campaign invited people to celebrate Peter by raising A$121,286 – A$1,516 for every year of his life – for the Maximize Your Impact Fund, with 10% supporting the work of The Life You Can Save.
It was fun, slightly chaotic and surprisingly competitive. It also felt particularly fitting: people encountered Peter’s ideas in fragments, found one another through conversation and worked together to turn those ideas into something tangible.
The Life You Can Save grew from Peter’s argument that people with the means to help can make an extraordinary difference to the lives of people living in extreme poverty. It exists to help people act on that idea by directing their giving towards highly effective organizations.
The evening celebrated Peter’s contribution over eight decades, but it did not feel like a retrospective. The people in the room were still debating, questioning, donating, advocating and building organizations around the issues his work has brought into sharper focus.
Above all, they were enjoying one another’s company.
The evening worked because Peter was not the only point of connection. People who had arrived through quite different parts of his work found one another too.
