It sounded like a lot of money at the time. $800. Gathered from the members of the Young Woman's Tzedakah Collective of Ma'yan: The Jewish Women's Project, this pool of money--when given away--was supposed to fulfill our urges to feed the hungry, support political candidates, underwrite cultural institutions and generally get the world back on a humane track. It was supposed to be infinitely more satisfying than the $25 checks members of our little group had been writing out individually for years, feeling insufficient to the task of improving the world on a barely sufficient budget.

Our collective effort started nearly three years ago, when nearly a dozen Jewish women in their 20s and 30s sat down around a table to explore our own giving. Between us there were graduate students, government workers and non-profit employees; one worked for corporate America. A handful had prospects of some inherited money to give away. Most were making ends meet, but not by much. We each pledged to give $5 a month to a communal fund to be donated at the end of our year.

Though money was the point, it was also beside the point. Charitably ambitious but financially strapped, we needed to figure out how we could be both activist and satisfied when giving on a budget. In discussions guided by philanthropist and Ma'yan founder Barbara Dobkin, it became clear that our (perhaps overly conscientious?) group was approaching this decision as if millions depended on it. We haggled and fretted and grappled amongst ourselves over a number of recurring questions that, we hoped, would lead us to the answer of our philanthropic cares.

Our group, now three years old, has lost some members and gained others. We've looked for ways to share our experiences and perpetuate the process, and have created a curriculum for a brand new program, launching this fall. "No Small Change--The Young Jewish Women's Tzedakah Collective," will be a gathering place for tenth-grade girls and their 30-something allies that will meet once a month in Manhattan during the current school year. On the agenda: Philanthropy-Why Should We Do It and Who Cares? How Do I Feel About Money? What Do I Believe In? If I Could Change Anything in the World, What Would It Be?

Our new collective will be driven by the passions and concerns of the girls and women involved (only four of the original dozen remain). But we also hope it will reflect some of the satisfying process we went through that year, so I offer a thumbnail portrait of the issues we wrestled with.

How do I feel about money?

Our first group of women might easily have spent a year discussing only this. Though we barely knew each other, we were quickly recounting pivotal childhood memories: an unheated childhood home; a dressing-down over a new pair of jeans. We shared, as adults, a feeling that there was no order to the way money came into and out of our lives. It was exhausting and, as I sighed at the end of this first session, more intimate than talking about sex.

What is philanthropy?

Our leader, an experienced philanthropist by anyone's standards, wanted to know. We mused:

Bureaucracy. The UJA. Banquets. Large checks. Men. One thing we knew for sure, philanthropy had nothing to do with us. Tzedakah, on the other hand, we were more comfortable with. It meant pennies dropped into tin boxes and a sense that even doing a little was doing a lot. We also were intrigued by the notion that our skills, education, friends and--being mostly single and all childless--our free time would be helpful in making our tzedakah valuable to others and ourselves.

What do I believe?

Using Tracy Gary and Melissa Kohner's workbook, "Inspired Philanthropy," we knitted our brows trying to choose our "top three values." We sorted through the tiny values cards they provided, shuffling and reshuffling the deck. Then we voted. The most common selections: Knowledge, Community, Integrity, though the dozens of other choices--Compassion, Dignity, Responsibility, among them--seem arguably as good.

Things got even more complicated when it came time to choose our top three "issues." The big questions: Does giving Jewishly mean giving to Jewish causes? Does giving as feminists mean giving to women? And does "repairing the world" mean, literally, the world, or is it okay to just start with the homeless on my front steps?

Who wants my money?

In a rapid, first-impression sorting, we scanned all those solicitation letters collected from everyone's mail. Out went public television, abortion providers and cancer centers--we had at least determined at that stage to give to a Jewish cause. Out went places that courted the million-dollar donor. We were suckers for children, for grassroots causes, for the anti-establishment option.

Who can help us decide?

Time was the only obstacle to our enlisting the expertise of those who work and think about these issues every day. Our one learned guest was Marlene Provizer, executive director of the Jewish Fund for Justice, whose faith that activism and charitable giving were intertwined mirrored our own. As one member exclaimed when Proviser left: "I'm ready to give her my life savings!" Or at least $800.

Suddenly, after half a year of monthly meetings, we were out of time. Our last meeting--the meeting at which we were finally to write the biggest charity check perhaps any of us have ever written—loomed large. We understood that we have just recently begun to operate as a true collective, with a joint notion of giving that is different from--though related to--all our individual plans.

To my surprise, despite our hand wringing and apparent lack of direction, we in fact had developed some practical thoughts. We seemed to like the grassroots effort. We wanted to support women. We were eager to support the unrecognized cause. For weeks we circled around the idea of giving to Avodah, a one-year program in Brooklyn through which a handful of Jews in their early 20s live together, do good--grassroots--deeds, and study Jewish texts. A kind of "good deeds collective," our counterparts in action.

Others wanted to use it to create offshoots of our own group. I myself was fond of the notion of paying a modest stipend to a smart and spunky intern at a Jewish women's organization who could throw all her youthful self into a time-limited project, like creating a voter registration drive or fixing up an urban vacant lot. It was concrete, human, and it utilized a person's skills as well as our funds. And it was small. All things that registered on our collective radar screen.

Small. It's the one problem that plagued me again and again. Throughout the process I was stuck in a tug-of-war between naive enthusiasm and discouraged cynicism. Every time I settled, tentatively, on one lily pad, I looked out and saw another. My thoughts became more frenzied and escalated. What about stopping anti-abortion murders? What about saving women from the repressive Taliban regime? Maybe we could run our own candidate for president. Or we could put a woman on the moon ...

I also worried about the randomness of our choice. Did we research every group before rejecting it? Did we create charts of causes and values, good works and overhead costs, and proceed

scientifically toward our decision? Certainly we did not. When the time ran out, we decided. Avodah. We paused. We looked around. This was it. Someone else gave words to my worries: "Why Avodah? Because we opened the pages of the Chronicle of Philanthropy and thought it sounded neat?

My answer surprised even me. "Think," I told her, "of how many programs we have talked about, filtered and rejected. This is the one that stuck. If we trust the organic nature of this process, like you trust the organic nature of falling in love, then we have chosen this group because--in our collective, eight-person consciousness--it was right." My answer satisfies even me.

A postscript:

Sorting through the masses of papers that accrued in this process, I discover, in a pile of old newspapers, an article from The Jewish Week, about the launching of our group. The headline: "Giving On a Shoestring." According to a 1940s Webster's dictionary, a shoestring is a small sum of money, "shoestrings being a typical item sold by itinerant venders." It is also defined as "capital inadequate or barely adequate to the needs of a transaction."

It's true that $800 isn't adequate. It wasn't adequate for us either. The four remaining members of our group kept meeting for another year, wondering how to perpetuate ourselves, continuing to donate into the "pot." We talked about outreach. We met in each other's living rooms. We brought strawberries and bagels and seemed very small. We even doubled our donation to $10 to make up for our numbers. Without great confidence, we made up a curriculum based on the past year. We cautiously asked some members of the organized Jewish community: If we open this up to high-school girls, to be our partners in giving, do you think they will come?

It was then we knew we were onto something. Everyone we turned to seemed to want to sponsor us. The Jewish Fund for Justice is handling the finances. (No more desk drawer for our cash.) The JCC on the Upper West Side and Ma'yan: The Jewish Women's Project are helping us with books and publicity. Ansche Chesed, a synagogue in Manhattan, is hosting us. Synagogues and schools all over the city are mailing out flyers and posting notices on bulletin boards. One woman suggested that we'd soon have collective "pods" all over the city. That would be something. A lot more than a shoestring. A lot more than $800.