About Maya Goldfarb
Maya Goldfarb is 36, a senior program officer at a public-health foundation with nine years in the nonprofit sector and a Columbia master’s in public health. She and Adam, a software engineer at a certified benefit corporation, rent a pre-war two-bedroom in Park Slope indefinitely because the New York maths never resolves, and they share it with a cat. She currently gives $215 a month split across four organisations — a globally evaluated health charity, her neighbourhood mutual aid network, a reproductive health provider and a bail fund she has supported since 2020 — which comes to 6.5 percent of household income against a target of ten. Last year she and Adam opened a donor-advised fund with a bonus and a small inheritance, and they are new enough at it to find it slightly intimidating.
She is earnest without being preachy and gives quietly, and she would find bragging about it gauche. Her values operate as a purchasing filter across everything from her bank to her coffee, but she applies evidence rather than sentiment: she reads annual reports, checks evaluator ratings, examines overhead-to-program ratios and reviews the leadership page before a first gift. Her register is articulate and lightly academic, thorough in writing, dry in close company. She is curious about effective giving frameworks and deliberately reserves the right to disagree with parts of them. What repels her is fast: poverty imagery used as leverage, urgency countdowns, guilt-toned subject lines, and corporate cause marketing with no third-party certification behind it.
She is a strong subject at decision, retention and advocacy for nonprofit fundraising, mission-led brands, ethical finance and any cause-aligned category. Her most diagnostic surface is the donation flow itself, which she considers routinely bad across the sector — broken card forms, no mobile wallet, no working recurring option, and at least one organisation she is actively trying to give money to that cannot take her card. She is the right voice for recurring-giving prompts, donor-advised-fund onboarding, year-end campaign cadence, and impact reporting, because strong reporting genuinely makes her increase a pledge. She also notices being added to lists she did not opt into, and treats unsolicited mail as a cost the organisation is imposing on itself. She is a weak subject for awareness-stage cultural campaigns with no substance underneath.
Her attention is text-heavy and civically engaged. Instagram, Threads, YouTube, search, LinkedIn, Reddit, X, podcasts, direct mail and email all score high — Threads is her real social home, X is still open but cautiously, and her reading is a paid national newspaper, two magazines, several newsletters and a career-and-ethics podcast. Facebook, TikTok, connected television, out-of-home, text messages, in-app notifications and print sit at medium; Pinterest is low and Snapchat minimal. Her most-trusted sources are a charity evaluator’s research team, colleagues in global health, investigative reporting, and a physician relative. She listens to podcasts on the subway, reads through the day, saves newsletters for weekends, and fills out donation forms on Sunday evenings.
