Being generous is the birthright of every person, Kerry Alys Robinson said during a panel discussion hosted by Catholic Charities May 16, and if everyone takes advantage of the opportunity to be generous with their money, time and attention, there will be more than enough to go around.

Robinson, president of Catholic Charities USA, made the remarks during “Imagining Abundance: Faith, Hope and Charity in Today’s World,” a panel discussion at St. Joseph Church in Wilmette moderated by Sally Blount, president and CEO of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago and featuring Cardinal Cupich.

The talk came at the end of Robinson’s daylong visit to Catholic Charities in Chicago, which ranks as one of the 100 largest human services providers operating in the United States.

Blount said she is impressed by the response of Catholics in the Archdiocese of Chicago to the surge of migrants who have arrived over the past two years. Catholic Charities, working with government officials, took on the leadership of connecting new arrivals with long-term housing.

While that work is funded by the government, Catholic Charities has been able to use donations for things like distributing 7,500 $50 gift cards before Christmas to allow parents to buy gifts for their children, and parishes and other Catholic groups are using donated resources to accompany migrant families over the longer term.

Overall, Blount said, Catholic Charities, parishes and other Catholic organizations have worked with or helped more than 28,000 of the roughly 40,000 migrants who have arrived in the Chicago area.

Asked to share a bit of how their parents prepared them for a life of service and generosity, Cardinal Cupich told an anecdote about his mother, a homemaker caring for nine children. When someone from the family’s Omaha parish knocked on the door on a Saturday evening, asking for donations for a family whose father had died, his mother got her purse and handed the man $5.

“This was the 1950s,” the cardinal said. “That was a lot of money.”

When the man left, his mother turned to the children and told them that was all the money they had until their father got paid on Monday.

“But it was natural to her,” Cupich said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

Robinson talked about volunteering as a teenager with Catholic organizations that were supported by a family foundation that her great-grandparents started.

“I fell in love with the church because of those women and men — ordained, religious and lay — who stood witness to human suffering,” Robinson said. “While they saw human suffering, they appeared to be interiorally free, and they had a sense of joy about them.”

Both speakers said that the suffering of poverty refers to more than a simple lack of material goods, but also to loneliness and isolation.

“It’s poverty that people feel alone,” Cardinal Cupich said. “They’ve been abandoned. They don’t have a place at the table of life.”

The antidote is to relate to them as people, as agents of generosity.

“We have to think about the poor as not the recipients of our generosity but as proactive agents with something to offer us,” he said.

In fact, in 2023 U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an advisory calling attention to “an epidemic of loneliness, isolation and lack of connection,” Robinson noted.

“We’re all in this together, and we need each other,” she said.

All people of faith are called to help, to offer a “ministry of presence,” Cardinal Cupich added.

“It’s not about throwing money at issues,” he said. “We’re going to make inroads in fighting poverty by building connections with people.”

Catholic Charities agencies around the country try to do that, Robinson said.

“Whatever the presenting challenge is, it always leads to a continuum of care, these wraparound services for the whole person,” she said.

In doing so, those providing the services and those receiving them both benefit.

“Being other-centered is the antidote to isolation and loneliness,” she said. “Every volunteer says I received more than I gave.”