Over the past year, philanthropy historian Benjamin Soskis has tracked how the upheaval of the pandemic and the protests for racial justice have affected how and why people and institutions give. Soskis, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Center for Nonprofits and Philanthropy and a frequent Chronicle contributor, takes stock of those changes in a new report, “Norms and Narratives That Shape U.S. Charitable and Philanthropic Giving.” He recently spoke with the Chronicle about how fundraisers and philanthropy leaders can adapt to a changed giving landscape and prepare for an uncertain future. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Business leaders like Jeff Bezos obviously made billions during the pandemic. Broadly speaking, how have their reputations as philanthropists fared during that time?
There was a lot of initial attention on philanthropy and whether the wealthy would fulfill their obligations. One of the defining features of the pandemic is that the test came back inconclusive. The wealthiest people are able to give so much money now that it generates these shocking headlines about eight- and nine-figure gifts. But the scale of their fortunes is such that those gifts represent a relatively small percentage of their total wealth. On the one hand, you have these giant figures producing headlines. On the other hand, you have this general sense that the rich have just gotten richer, that they haven’t actually sacrificed in any authentic way.
MacKenzie Scott is a perfect example. Even for all the headlines that her giving produced, and the really worthy way in which she went about doing it, she’s gotten richer and richer — and we don’t have a good way to understand what that means. What you’re left with is this sense of the pandemic as a test that just didn’t produce any type of answer that could legitimate philanthropy or delegitimize philanthropy.
You write that the federal stimulus checks helped a lot of people get comfortable with the concept of direct cash transfers. How could that alter small-dollar giving, major gifts, and foundation giving going forward?
The impact of cash transfers is one of the most important developments of the pandemic. It creates a kind of baseline. This mode of thinking has already been applied in global development with cash transfers. The idea is, if you know that giving away cash is really easy, has pretty low administrative expenses, and respects the agency and autonomy of recipients, then whatever you do that’s not giving cash has to beat that benchmark — in the same way that if you’re going to try to fiddle with the stock market, you better be able to beat that index fund.
It creates a powerful incentive for nonprofits, funders, and individuals to think about their own prerogatives and preferences and to demand a justification for imposing them when there’s an option of just giving people money. That doesn’t mean that it invalidates a technocratic approach or an approach based on particular programs. In the best-case scenario, it encourages greater commitment to making sure that the choices you make as a donor or as a practitioner are justifiable beyond personal preference or other idiosyncrasies.
You stress in the report that the changes that we saw in philanthropy over the last year — like more timely gifts, no-strings-attached grant making, a greater willingness to give to crowdfunding campaigns — might not stick around. Given that uncertainty, how should fundraisers and nonprofit leaders plan for the future?
I wish had a clear answer for that. There’s one type of timeliness, which is just thinking about time as an important dimension of giving. Then there’s another, which is the importance of giving staked to your particular moment. During the crisis, people were talking more and more about time as a component, but also they were increasingly thinking about their responsibilities as givers to the moment — whether that means giving rapidly or it just means thinking about now versus later.
I think that first category is going to endure. It is very likely that this crisis has made more and more people think about time as a central component of their giving strategy. It might make people think more about their responsibility to the future, in the same way that people think about their geographical responsibilities — their responsibility locally or nationally or internationally.
Have you seen philanthropists becoming more interested in making gifts that address the root causes of issues? Should big donors be thinking about how to use their wealth to change systems?
If you look at the major discourse surrounding philanthropy for really most of its history, but certainly over the last couple of decades, it’s been all about root causes, and there’s been a real resistance to engaging in issues that seem to be palliative. But the pandemic has really shown the links between root causes and the palliative. It’s helped a lot of funders think about how giving to address immediate causes is actually compatible with identifying root causes — especially if part of the strategy is making sure that you give those who are facing those root problems the resources and the potential to address them themselves. The pandemic has expanded how funders think about the pursuit of root causes.
The report discusses the boom in crowdfunding that we saw during the pandemic. What do you think the long-term effect of that will be?
There was always a sense that researchers and policy folks didn’t entirely know what to make of crowdfunding, and the crisis has really legitimated it. That puts a big onus on all of us to incorporate it into the landscape — from a policy perspective, a fundraising perspective, and in many other ways.
The politics of crowdfunding changed as well, and it wasn’t just in the pandemic; it was also from the protests over racial injustice. There was a critique of crowdfunding that it basically represented a kind of concession to the failed safety net provided by the government.
During the pandemic, crowdfunding emerged as a form of resistance, as opposed to a form of accommodation, to the major problems that society is confronting and that government has really failed to address. It wasn’t just a response to a sympathetic story that you heard online, but it was tied to a much broader politics about why we got to this point.
Why have more communities and donors been receptive to mutual aid over the last year?
Mutual aid represented a critique both of government assistance and nonprofit bureaucracies. It pointed to a kind of radical challenge to the status quo and solidaristic conception of helping your neighbor, helping your fellow citizens. But it was also a really hyper-local way of helping out during the pandemic.
The politics of mutual aid is not entirely clear. There is the powerful radical strain of it, but there’s also other components which are more conservative. Each of those potentially could have different impacts on the future of nonprofits and giving to nonprofits moving forward.
How does that surging engagement with mutual aid translate into giving after the pandemic subsides? Does it hinder or help traditional giving to 501(c)(3)s? I don’t think anyone has a clear sense of that right now.
Do you think that foundations should have a role in supporting mutual aid?
Part of this depends on how powerful that radical oppositional element of mutual aid is. Mutual aid is very much constructed in opposition to the foundation and nonprofit bureaucracy. I’m not sure that foundations could have a huge role even if they wanted one.
On the other hand, there are traditional nonprofits that are assisting, like Ioby, [a nonprofit, whose name comes from “in our backyards,” that administers crowdfunding campaigns to support mutual-aid projects]. There are elements of mutual aid that tap into the desire to help one’s neighbor, which are compatible with that kind of traditional nonprofit landscape. Foundations that do get involved have to be sensitive to the full range of ideological beliefs that that mutual aid is rooted in and to the resistance that their help might actually be met with.
