Maddie & Ellery's wedding registry

A message from Maddie and Ellery

Update (May 5, 2025):

We are so grateful to our loved ones who have already given in our honor. It's so moving to see donations coming in! Before our wedding day, we've raised $9,145, which we estimate can provide life-saving nutritional supplements to over 4,500 children in need or preventative malaria medication to over 1,300 children. The Torah teaches that to save a life is to save the entire world. Each child is a world unto themselves. Thank you for helping us save untold worlds. We look forward to sharing where exactly our wedding gifts were spent and the impact they had in a few months.

At the same time, as great as the need has always been, we could never have imagined when we selected GiveWell for our registry that the need would be orders of magnitude greater. In light of global cuts to foreign aid, GiveWell is filling the gaps, ensuring that kids living in extreme poverty get the care they need. $100 provides vitamin A supplementation to over 50 children; $250 ensures over 35 children are protected from malaria during the high-risk rainy season, and $500 ensures 3 or more children who would not have otherwise received their first-year vaccines are protected. If you have not already, it would be deeply meaningful to us if you could consider our registry in your giving this year.

As we build our new family, we have an incredible opportunity to protect and save the families of others. Unto every family, unto every child, a universe.

With love,

Maddie & Ellery

In lieu of physical gifts, we would like to ask that you please honor our marriage with a gift to GiveWell’s Top Charities Fund. Please click "I would like to dedicate this donation to someone" on the last stage of the donation page to leave a message for Maddie and Ellery.

Both of us have been blessed by loving families, dear friends, the kindness of strangers, and the mix of ineffable circumstances that brought us to this beginning of our lives together. We wish this joy – the ability to live life to its fullest, free of fear, war, and disease – on everyone, and we believe it is incumbent on us to work towards this better world. As we read in Pirkei Avot:

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לְהִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה “It is not your duty to finish the work [of fixing the world], but nor are you free to desist from it.”

It is important to us to live by that value and honor it, even and especially when it comes to people who do not look like us, who do not speak our language, who do not live near us, and who we will never meet. The sage Maimonides wrote that one of the highest forms of tzedakah, or charity, is matan b’seter, an arrangement where the donor and the recipient are anonymous to each other.

GiveWell conservatively estimates that through their fund, a life is saved for approximately every $5,000 donated. GiveWell makes use of proven public health interventions to help donors maximize the impact of their giving. As medical and data-oriented professionals, this proven approach is important to us.

Jewish scripture further teaches us that “whoever saves one life, it is as if they have saved the whole world.” And indeed, every life is a whole world unto themselves. During this time of immeasurable joy in our lives, we hope to share with others this most precious gift: the ability to live.

We are very moved to consider that, in honor of our union, our community might be able to have a tremendous impact on the communities of others. For the cost of a stand mixer or a new knife set, we can be well on our way to our goal saving at least one life! We thank you for considering a gift, and we hope you will join us in this expression of our values as we begin our lives together.

With love, joy, gratitude, and generosity,

Maddie & Ellery