In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972) Peter Singer argued that if you see a child drowning in a shallow pond, you should wade in, even though it ruins your clothes. Then the hard part: it makes no moral difference whether they’re “ten yards from me” or “ten thousand miles away”. (The new shoes are from his later retellings.)
Wade in. Then measure how far away the next one is.
Distance changes how easy someone is to see, not what they’re worth. If a pair of shoes was obviously worth it at ten yards, it’s hard to say why it isn’t at ten thousand miles.
Ask yourself. Whose need matters less to you only because you can’t see it from here?
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Most people skip this. The ones who don’t are the ones it changes.
That’s the whole collection examined, every room. Now imagine doing this with your own life, for a year, with two people who come to know it well. That’s membership.