July 18th is Nelson Mandela’s 91st birthday. It is also the first of what a new movement hopes will become an officially recognised worldwide Mandela Day – indeed, it has already been officially adopted by South Africa and ahead-of-the-curve Ireland. (We are both old enough to remember the 1980s when the naming student bars after Mr Mandela was widely denounced as the work of “lefty” radicals. How the world has changed – for the better).

The goal is to inspire people by getting them to reflect on the great man’s life and values, to remind people that, in the words of his wife, Graca Machel, that “everybody has a bit of Nelson Mandela in them – if we put our minds to it we can all do wonderful things.”

The campaign wants everyone to volunteer 67 minutes to do something good, in honour of the 67 years that Mandela has been an activist. Another theme is the number 46664, his prison identity number on Robben Island, which appears on a metal bangle being sold to raise money to support Mandela Day and the charitable Nelson Mandela Foundation.

There are actually three Mandela-related foundations. The Nelson Mandela Foundation’s mission is to promote social justice and reconciliation, including through its “Memory Programme”. The Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund tries to help children, and the Mandela Rhodes foundation supports the development of future leaders in South Africa by sending them off to be educated at Oxbridge or the Ivy League. And of course, there is The Elders, an organisation of veteran statesmen and stateswomen chosen by Mandela who work behind the scenes to solve difficult political situations.

Mandela Day itself will be marked with a rock concert in New York’s Radio City Music Hall, featuring Stevie Wonder, Alicia Keys and Aretha Franklin, among others. On July 15th, NewYork’s Grand Central Station was the venue for a gala dinner birthday celebration, which featured inspiring speeches from Bill Clinton, Graca Machel and actor Morgan Freeman, who plays Mandela in a forthcoming movie, Invictus, based on the 1995 rugby World Cup. Mandela himself was too frail to attend.

It takes a lot to spoil a celebration of Mandela’s birthday, but the organisers of the gala dinner almost achieved this with a poorly judged fund-raising auction of Mandela-related art. This only managed to highlight how beaten up, psychologically as well as financially, well-heeled Manhattanites have been in the past year or so.

The organisers were clearly nervous that the auction would be a bust. The MC for the evening, veteran disk-jockey Paul Gambacinni, reassured guests that there would be no cameras in the room when the bidding began – picking up on the nervousness that the rich have nowadays in showing that they have any spare cash, even to give away. In the current climate, conspicuous displays of wealth – even conspicuous giving – is out.

Nor was the mood lightened when slow bidding for the second item (a portrait of Mandela, bidding opening at $50,000), after the first item had attracted only one bid, prompted a lady to grab the mike and lecture her fellow guests on the deserate need of Africans for their money – a message she repeated later in the auction, with similarly minimal effect either than to make everyone shuffle their feet miserably.

The contrast with the mood at last year’s 90th birthday celebration in London’s Hyde Park, which Mandela attended, could hardly have been greater. Then, the auction raised ₤4.4m ($7m), thanks to a bidding war between Elton John and Oprah Winfrey, and a spontaneous stint as auctioneer by Will Smith. This auction raised barely one-twentieth as much, and ended with what seemed excessive strong-arm tactics being applied to Morgan Freeman, who was eventually persuaded to part with $65,000 – though the great actor at least put on a good show of being pleased he won.

In conversations at the event, the lesson for fundraisers seems to be that in the current climate – economically, politically, socially – people would prefer to give in other ways. The charity auction should be abandoned, at least until happier times return.

This should not distract us from the bigger lesson, however, of the need for each of us to get in touch with our inner Mandela, and (re)commit to building a better world.