Sometimes modern life’s changes can take your breath away. Sometimes you barely notice them.

Consider two reports published the past week in the Butler Eagle. Both had to do with charitable efforts and fundraising.

- The first report, “They’re killing our community” (Page 1, Wednesday) detailed allegations by Bill Halle, director of the Grace Youth and Family Foundation on Center Avenue, that the “Housing First” philosophy being applied in Butler County-funded homeless programs is actually hurting the homeless individuals as well as the community.

While Housing First has good intentions and sounds logical, it de-emphasizes and even ignores the greater problem of rampant drug addiction. If you give an addict free housing, utilities, food and cell phone, why would the addict lift a finger to improve his or her life?

“They’re coming in one door and out the other,” Halle told Eagle staff writer Paula Grubbs. “We are building empires of government-funded, nonprofit agencies whose existence is justified by perpetuating the problem.”

- The second report, “SRU students Open (up their) Hearts for All” (Page 2, Friday), describes the most unconventional charitable organization imaginable — at least to the generations of parents and grandparents of the Slippery Rock University students who founded it.

Sophomores Haley Potter and Evan Markowitz co-founded the nonprofit Open Hearts for All in December. They very consciously decided not to designate a beneficiary or even a target for their fundraising efforts.

Instead, their objective is to share their blessings as they feel led. “We strive to help as many causes as possible,” Potter says. “Each of the board of directors has a specific focus and everyone else jumps on board and helps plan ideas for each cause.”

Sometimes the group bows to a timely issue, as they did this past week, raising nearly $800 through pizza sales at a shop in Pittsburgh. They donated $320 of it to a GoFundMe account for the families of victims of the Feb. 14 school shootings in Parkland, Fla., and banked the rest for their next cause, which they’ll name soon.

The progression reminds us of the more visible long-term trends in retail shopping — how consumers have drifted from downtown stores to suburban shopping centers, big boxes and malls, and now continue trending to online shopping. Likewise, charitable giving over the decades has drifted from church giving to United Ways and community chests, then to corporate foundations and tax-funded human services.

For older Americans, the new methods are counterintuitive and even suspect. Traditional fundraising needs a theme, a target amount and a deadline. Maybe a big thermometer graphic to dramatize our progress and engage our interest.

No more. Now it’s all about the urgency of the appeal for charity and the immediacy of the individual’s compulsion to respond.

Older folks can take a lesson from college sophomores selling pizza and sending proceeds overnight to cover funeral expenses for bereaved families in Florida.