08/20/2026
The Quietest Crisis in Fairbanks
The Baby Boomers, one of the most generous generations in American history, are passing away. It is an inevitability that could become a serious problem for Fairbanks’ unhoused population.
I work in development at the Fairbanks Rescue Mission, which means I spend my days looking at the ledgers. I can tell you who keeps the lights on when it’s forty below and the shelter is full.
Overwhelmingly, they are our elders.
They came of age in a culture that treated giving as ordinary, like shoveling a neighbor’s walk. Many have given to the Mission for ten, twenty, even thirty years. Some have never missed a year. Most have never even asked for recognition.
What nobody wants to say out loud is that generation is leaving us. Not suddenly, and not all at once, but steadily, the way daylight leaves in November.
According to the Giving USA/Dunham+Company Giving by Generation report, Boomer households gave an average of $3,256 in 2024—more than double Gen X households at $1,371 and roughly twice Millennial households at $1,616.
This isn’t a judgment. Younger families face costs their parents didn’t. But the math doesn’t care about the reasons. Every year, some of our most faithful givers pass away, and the gifts that replaced a furnace, stocked a pantry, or kept a bed open in January pass away with them.
For an organization like the Fairbanks Rescue Mission, this is not an abstraction. We shelter people through winters that would kill them. We feed people who would otherwise stand in the cold with nothing. We walk with men and women out of addiction and incarceration and into work, housing, and lives they are proud of.
None of that is funded by luck.
It is funded by neighbors, and the neighbors who have carried it the longest are growing old.
Over the next two decades, an enormous amount of wealth will pass from one generation to the next in this country—the largest such transfer in our history. Some of it will pass through Fairbanks.
The question that should be on every Fairbanksan’s mind is whether any of it will stay here, and whether any of it will be used to address the growing unhoused population in our town.
To the older donors reading this: thank you is too small a phrase. You have held the door for this town for decades.
If the Fairbanks Rescue Mission, or any local cause, has mattered to you, consider making it part of what you leave behind. A bequest, a beneficiary designation, or a gift from a retirement account are simple ways to allow your generosity to outlive you.
Talk to your family about why you gave. That conversation may be the most valuable gift of all.
And to my own Millennial generation, as well as the generations coming up behind us: the door is being held for us right now. We may not be able to write the checks our parents wrote, and no one is asking us to. But twenty dollars a month, every month, from enough of us can do a world of good.
Generosity was never really about the amount. It was about showing up in the same place, year after year, until showing up became who you were. The people who taught this town how to do that are still with us.
The best way to honor them is not with a eulogy. It is to take what they were holding, while their hands are still on it, and not let it drop.
May God Bless Fairbanks.
