Local food banks with fewer volunteers. Community fundraisers falling short. Across the country, a sense that neighbors don’t help neighbors like they used to anymore.
It’s a hunch corroborated by more than a decade of declines in American giving and volunteering trends that experts warn could have consequences stretching far beyond nonprofits’ bottom lines.
The Generosity Commission, composed of 17 experts across the philanthropic sector, has spent the last three years dissecting Americans’ dwindling participation in formal charitable giving and volunteering. Their findings suggest that the decline in everyday generosity may be both a symptom of the country’s social ills, from social isolation to political polarization, and — if nonprofits can reverse the tide and embrace new forms of American generosity — a possible antidote. At stake, the commission argues, is not just the health of nonprofits, but the vitality of civil society itself.
“Not only is generosity the fuel in the tank as far as American civil society goes,” said Eboo Patel, president of Interfaith America and a commission member (and a regular contributor to the Chronicle). “But it is what I would call a deeply held and widely shared value amongst diverse people. Muslim and Jewish. Republican and Democrat. Black and white.”
Indeed, 74 percent of Americans say they aspire to be generous, according to a 2022 survey by the Generosity Commission. Yet, today there are millions fewer volunteers and tens of millions fewer everyday donors than there were in the early aughts. The share of U.S. households that donated to a charity fell from 65.4 percent in 2008 to less than half of households — 49.6 percent — in 2018, the last year for which such data exists, according to the Philanthropy Panel Study by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University.
Rates of formal volunteering have seen similar declines, falling from 30 percent in 2019 to 23 percent in 2021, according to AmeriCorps, the steepest drop since the federal agency began collecting data in 2002.
Disappearing Donors
In other words, though Americans seem eager to exercise generosity, they do so at lower rates each year.
Experts say that the current crisis began around the time of the Great Recession, when financial hardship caused many Americans to cut back on their donations. During prior downturns, Americans’ charitable impulse tended to be somewhat “recession-proof” or resilient to crisis, but this time was different, said Una Osili, director of research at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
“Even when the economy rebounded, we didn’t see giving come back,” she said, yet income and wealth can only explain about one-third of the drop in everyday donors. A laundry list of other causes share the blame, the Generosity Commission concludes, including declining religious affiliation, deteriorating trust in institutions, demographic shifts, and expired tax incentives.
What’s more, as everyday donors have continued to drop off, nonprofits have changed the way they work too, entrenching the trend by pivoting their fundraising to maximize contributions from the wealthiest donors and their private foundations.
Over the past decade, the charitable sector’s growing reliance on the most affluent has outpaced even the country’s widening wealth gap. In 1960, 9.8 percent of donors gave half of all donations, but by 2012, just 1.8 percent of donors accounted for half of all charitable giving. The number of private foundations has correspondingly grown dramatically from 32,401 in 1990 to 127,595 in 2020.
Though big givers might bring temporary relief to cash-strapped nonprofits, “there’s a trade-off because 10 or 20 years down the road, you won’t have that pipeline of younger donors,” said Osili.
New Forms of Generosity
The recent graduate who was never engaged by their alumni association during the Great Recession might today have the means to give to their alma mater — but probably won’t.
They might, however, give to a GoFundMe campaign, help a friend in need via Venmo, purchase products from a B Corp, donate to a political campaign, or volunteer for a mutual aid network. None of those hard-to-measure avenues for generosity are counted in dire statistics on the giving crisis, yet they help paint a picture of the growing number of ways that Americans opt to give back.
“I don’t think we’re experiencing a crisis of generosity — I think generosity is abundant,” said Asha Curran, CEO of GivingTuesday and a commission member, whose hashtag-driven collective campaign brings in billions for nonprofits each year — albeit from a dwindling number of donors.
When asked how they give to make the world a better place, only one-fifth of Americans cited monetary donations at all, according to a survey funded by the Generosity Commission. The rest mentioned a mishmash of altruistic activities, like being environmentally friendly, giving to a food pantry, “sharing kindness,” or buying ethical products.
“We are clearly experiencing a crisis of declining monetary donations to nonprofits in the United States, and that’s really important, but the difference in the distinction is also important,” said Curran. “We don’t want to cast aspersions on the impulse toward generosity in society at large, which we have reams of data supporting is very healthy.”
Small Charities, Big Problems
For the smallest charities, however, the so-called generosity crisis is all too real. Even as deep-pocketed donors and private foundations have largely offset declines for larger organizations, smaller groups are far more likely to rely on the charity of everyday Americans to sustain their work.
“The nonprofits most harmed by the drop in everyday giving have been small, community-based, people-serving nonprofits, often with a budget of $100,000 or below,” said Jane Wales, co-chair of the Generosity Commission and executive director of the Aspen Institute’s philanthropy program.
The disproportionate impact on small organizations is “in part because they rely so much on volunteers to augment their workforce, but also because they rely on local everyday giving to meet their budgets,” she says.
Declining generosity doesn’t harm only American nonprofits; it may also be affecting Americans. In a country suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, skyrocketing political polarization, and an undercurrent of unhappiness, experts argue that generosity may act as a sort of antidote.
“When people come together through committing to service in their community, to giving to a certain cause, to engaging each other in the work, they immediately become healthier and happier in terms of their individual and community well-being,” said Curran.
People who have donated money in a previous year are nearly 10 percent more likely to join a community group and those who volunteered are 24 percent more likely to get involved, according to a report funded by the Generosity Commission at the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. Such donors are also more likely to show up to the polls, with voter turnout increasing by 12 percent for volunteers and 10 percent for donors.
“I can volunteer with somebody who’s completely different than me, and that is building community in a way that I think we are all desperate and hungry for,” said Ivan Canada, president of the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits. He cited major challenges at nonprofits across his state in attracting small donors and volunteers — for roles ranging from soup kitchen distributor to board member.
Nine Recommendations
Building back the trust and inspiration needed to bring back everyday volunteers and donors won’t be easy, especially if the outreach comes across as transactional, said Canada.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire or if you’ve got $100 to give — no one wants to feel as though that their only real relationship to an organization is for their donation,” he said.
And, if there was once a sense that Americans could look past their differences to volunteer together at the soup kitchen or sell cookies side-by-side at a charity bake sale, that doesn’t ring true anymore, said Patel of Interfaith America.
“Instead of Americans bringing the goodness of our Little Leagues and our PTAs into our political divisions,” Patel said, “what’s happened in the last 15 years is the toxicity of our political divisions has intensified and it has rolled downhill into our civic life.”
The Generosity Commission published nine recommendations for bringing back everyday donors, in a list that is as wide-ranging as the reasons for the exodus.
Among them are calls for better data to understand Americans’ shifting giving habits and policy changes like expanding tax incentives for charitable giving. The recommendations also emphasize the roles that businesses, community foundations, and young people may have to play in bringing everyday generosity back.
Around the country, nonprofits like City Harvest — New York City’s largest food bank — have tried tactics to attract givers. The nonprofit has found ways to retain and connect with donors and volunteers inspired by the organization’s work during the pandemic.
Still, in recent years, even City Harvest has seen a drop in mid-level donors — who give between $50 and $100 per year. Like other larger nonprofits, most of the organization’s funding now comes from larger donors, but Ryan VanMeter, senior director of individual and major giving at City Harvest, said “it’s short-sighted to give up on these low-dollar donors because these are your future major donors.”
When a donor drops off, “we honor their wishes and we try not to solicit them, but we continue to keep them updated on our work,” he added. “When times are better, or when a bonus comes in January, we’re still hoping to be their top charity of choice.”
