Five years of FASF taught me that showing up is harder than writing a check

I have written a lot of checks in my life.

Checks for companies I believed in before anyone else did. Checks for universities and scholarship funds and causes that mattered to me. Checks for Armenia when it needed help and checks for Armenia when it didn't ask for any.

Writing checks is essential. Capital is real. Money moves things that good intentions cannot. I am not dismissing it.

But five years of running FASF has taught me something that thirty years of investing never fully did.

The check is the easy part.

When I founded FASF after the 2020 war, the immediate need was financial. Families had lost their primary earner. Veterans had come home with injuries that required care the system wasn't equipped to provide. The gap between what existed and what was needed was wide and visible and urgent.

So we raised money. We organized. We built the infrastructure of a nonprofit the way I had built companies, with a clear problem statement, a structure, and capital behind it.

What I didn't fully anticipate was what came after the infrastructure.

The families didn't need us to solve their problems from a distance. They needed us to be present for them up close. Not occasionally. Not when it was convenient. Consistently, which means on the days when nothing dramatic is happening, the headlines have moved on, donors have found the next crisis to respond to, and the families are still living inside the one that never ended for them.

Showing up consistently is a discipline I had to learn. It did not come naturally.

I grew up with a particular understanding of what helping looked like. You identify a problem. You apply resources. You measure the outcome. You move to the next problem. That model works reasonably well in business. It works less well with people who are grieving.

Grief doesn't have a timeline that respects your calendar. A mother who lost her son in October 2020 is not finished grieving because the calendar says it's been five years. A veteran who came home missing a part of himself is not recovered because a medical report says the physical wound has healed.

What these families needed, what I slowly came to understand, wasn't solutions. They had practical needs, yes, and we worked to address those. But the need to know someone remembers the loss, not as a statistic. That the people who said they would show up actually did.

That is harder than writing a check. It requires something capital cannot substitute for: time, attention, and the willingness to be present for something you cannot fix.

Something happens in diaspora philanthropy that I have watched for decades and participated in myself.

A crisis arrives. The community activates. Money flows. Organizations form. Events are held. The solidarity is genuine, and the response is real.

And then the acute phase passes. The headlines move. The events become less urgent. The donations slow. Organizations built for crisis mode struggle to find their purpose in the maintenance phase that follows.

Meanwhile, the families are still there.

This is the pattern I most wanted FASF to break. And it is the pattern I have found hardest to break, because it is not a problem of intention; everyone involved means well, but it is a problem of structure. Crisis giving is emotionally driven and therefore episodic. Sustained giving requires a different architecture, one built around commitment rather than response.

Five years in, I think we have made real progress on this. The infrastructure exists. The relationships exist. The consistency is there in ways it wasn't at the beginning.

But I would be dishonest if I said we had fully solved it. The pull toward episodic engagement is strong, and it takes constant effort to resist it.

The other thing five years taught me is about the nature of service itself.

I came into this work as a founder and investor, someone accustomed to deciding. You assess. You allocate. You direct. The agency flows from you outward.

Service inverts that. The families we work with are not recipients of a decision I made. They have already made the hardest decisions imaginable: sending someone they loved to defend a country, then continuing to live after that person didn't come back. My role is not to bring them solutions from above. It is to listen to what they actually need and then do the unglamorous work of trying to provide it.

That reorientation was not comfortable. It required me to sit with problems I couldn't solve, and with pain I couldn't accelerate anyone through. It required me to be useful in ways that didn't feel productive by any metric I had previously used to measure productivity.

In its own way, it was the most useful thing I have done.

FASF turns five this month.

I am proud of what the foundation has built. I am proud of the team, the board, the volunteers, the donors,  and everyone who has contributed time, money, and attention to this work.

After five years, I am also less certain that I know how to do this than I was when I started. Not because the work has become harder — though it has — but because I understand better now what the work actually is.

It is not a problem to be solved. It is a commitment to be honored.

Showing up is harder than writing a check.

I intend to keep showing up.

Friends of the Armenian Soldier and Family (FASF) supports the families of fallen Armenian soldiers and disabled veterans. To learn more or contribute: fasf.org