A blue-ribbon commission’s most important contribution sometimes has less to do with its findings or recommendations than with how it defines what it is studying.
The State of Giving
This was the case with the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs, better known as the Filer Commission, which was convened in the mid-1970s to address concerns that hostile policymakers and a weak economy were turning the nation’s charities into what was widely referred to at the time as an endangered sector.
While its report and the research it sponsored were useful, the panel’s real legacy was what historian Peter Dobkin Hall called “inventing the nonprofit sector.” Instead of conceiving of the nonprofit world as a collection of disparate organizations providing a wide variety of services, the commission focused on what they had in common, laying the groundwork for sectorwide interest groups such as the Independent Sector, university research and teaching programs, and publications, including the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
The report released in September by the Generosity Commission could have a similar impact. Sponsored by organizations representing the fundraising industry — the Giving Institute and Giving USA Foundation — and composed of foundation and nonprofit leaders, the commission came together in 2021 to examine why the share of Americans giving and volunteering has declined during the past 20 years.
Its explanations are generally unsurprising and its recommendations largely predictable. But similar to the Filer Commission, it redefines what constitutes the philanthropic sector in both important and potentially troubling ways.
Disturbing Trends
To make its case, the commission first lays out the current state of American giving. It notes that despite “large-scale increases in aggregate dollars and hours donated,” the steady decline during this century in the share of the population that makes charitable donations and volunteers “represents one of the most significant trends reshaping civil society in the United States.”
Among the consequences, according to the report: a decrease in the number of people participating in charitable work, reduced “social connectedness,” and less engagement in civic and political life. Those who no longer give and volunteer may even suffer mental and physical health problems, the authors find, since research suggests these activities are “associated with living longer, greater subjective well-being and happiness, healthier relationships, and fewer psychological problems.”
The commission agrees with others that the Great Recession of 2008-9 and economic stress more generally are largely to blame. Financial pressures, the report says, restrict how much money and time Americans can give to charities.
The report also points to demographic changes, such as the declining number of people belonging to religious congregations, which have traditionally fostered giving and volunteering by their members. As charities came to rely more on larger gifts from fewer donors, they have become less inclined to reach out to small-dollar givers as well.
Changes in tax policy, especially the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, had an effect, but it was modest, according to the commission, and “unlikely to have had a particularly significant impact on the giving practices of lower-income households, where the donor participation decline has been concentrated.”
Even so, the commission recommends making tax deductions for charitable contributions more widely available, although it doesn’t offer details on what that might entail. It also urges public figures, businesses, and philanthropy itself to do more to promote giving and volunteering, especially among young people. But worried about seemingly high levels of public distrust, it confusingly calls for ramping up IRS and state-level regulation of nonprofits.
Generosity Flourishing?
Yet, for all its concern about falling rates of giving and volunteering, the commission concludes that “everyday generosity” in America is alive and well. Increasing numbers of Americans, it contends, engage in crowdfunding campaigns, giving circles, mutual-aid networks, person-to-person assistance, informal volunteering, political action, and additional ways of helping others.
Moreover, the commission found no “clear evidence” that these kinds of activities reduce more traditional forms of giving and volunteering. To the contrary, “the little evidence we do have points in the opposite direction,” it notes. Driving this shift, the report adds, are younger people, who see no reason for preferring one method of expressing generosity over another.
The commission acknowledges that there is a lot we don’t know about this “ecosystem of generosity.” Consequently, it recommends expanding the scope of philanthropic research to find out more about the “whole spectrum of giving behaviors.” However, it never addresses how far that “spectrum” extends.
For example, does it include tipping? If generosity involves “giving and doing more than is expected,” as commission member Heather Templeton Dill, president of the John Templeton Foundation, maintains in the report, rewarding good service with an extra payment to the provider might qualify. And if so, should eliminating taxes on tips, as both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have proposed, be viewed as an incentive for increased giving?
The report also doesn’t really consider whether such giving has a positive effect on civil society. Although the commission sees social media as an important component of the “ecosystem of generosity,” others, including Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, have sounded alarms about its larger impact on social connections and personal well-being.
To consider these and other issues, the commission is planning a series of community-based conversations after the election. But in emphasizing the importance of giving and volunteering outside the nonprofit sector, it is challenging the understanding reached by the Filer Commission 50 years ago. To fundraisers, nonprofit professionals, and philanthropy researchers, this is of no small consequence, since much of what they do is built on longstanding organizational structures and practices that may now come in for reassessment.
For American society more broadly, whether the sort of “loose connections” the commission extols will also help improve civic engagement, social connectedness, or personal health remains an open question.
The commission’s embrace of an “ecosystem of generosity” is actually a return to an earlier understanding of philanthropy. In Middlemarch, a great 19th-century novel about philanthropy, George Eliot writes of her protagonists: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” And when Alexis de Tocqueville sang the praises of civic associations in Democracy in America, he did not have formal organizations in mind.
The Generosity Commission’s report recalls this older meaning of philanthropy, while showing its continuing relevance. The question now is what it will mean for the future of the formal organizations that have powered the sector for decades.