For 20 years, experts have sounded the alarm on the decline of charitable giving in the US. Then came the pandemic, which led to a wave of new donations and volunteers to nonprofits. For some leaders, this was a sign that perhaps the retreat from philanthropy was reversing course. But it’s clear now, according to a substantial new report released today by a group of nearly 200 philanthropic leaders, that Covid-19 did not bring about any lasting reversal of declining charitable giving — and many of the trends identified in the 2010s have only since accelerated. Today, the number of donors to and volunteers with nonprofit organizations continues to decline, even though the total amount of money flowing to the nonprofit sector has gone up. In other words, more money is being given, but by fewer people. These are some of the key takeaways from the report, authored by a group called the Generosity Commission. Over the past three years, this commission funded more than $2 million in research to better understand the state of giving and volunteering in America. The report is among the most comprehensive surveys of the field. The last time such a broad assessment of philanthropy was published was in 1975, with the release of the Filer Commission, which fueled lasting reforms in nonprofit governance and tax policy.
From the Generosity Commission Report Executive Summary:
The Generosity Commission was officially launched in 2021 in response to one of the most significant trends reshaping civil society in the United States over the last several decades: the decline, observable across multiple surveys, in the proportion of Americans who give to and volunteer with nonprofit organizations.
According to the Philanthropy Panel Study, the philanthropy module of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, “the only existing longitudinal dataset on philanthropy based on a nationally representative sample of U.S. households,” the share of U.S. households reporting donating to nonprofit organizations fell from 65.4% in 2008 to 53% in 2016. Then, in 2018, the latest year for which we have figures, the proportion dropped below 50% for the first time, to 49.6%.
Over the last several decades, existing data suggests that the share of Americans who report volunteering with nonprofit organizations has also declined, although that decline is less precipitous. The rate of volunteerism, as measured by the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, reached a 15-year low of 24.9% in 2015. At first, it seemed that the COVID-19 pandemic would halt these trendlines, but by the first quarter of 2021, it had become clear that that would not be the case. In fact, according to the GivingTuesday Data Commons, there were fewer donors in 2021 than there were in 2019. Similarly, according to AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, “the formal volunteering rate dropped seven percentage points—from 30 percent in 2019 to 23 percent in 2021,” the steepest drop since the agency began collecting such data in 2002. The decline in giving and volunteering rates over the last decade has sometimes been overshadowed by an increase in aggregate dollars and hours donated—termed the “dollars up, donors down” dynamic—yet it has attracted increased attention in recent years.
The Generosity Commission’s focus on that decline is tied to the belief that a broad base of participation in giving and volunteering is an intrinsic social good that should be pursued and promoted. Why should that be the case? First, giving and volunteering are crucial means by which Americans create and participate in a pluralistic civil society, the associational space between the government and the marketplace. Additionally, giving and volunteering help solidify civic engagement more generally, affirming a commitment to work together with others toward some larger purpose. Beyond this connection to the practices of civic engagement, giving and volunteering can both reflect and foster elements of social connectedness.
This is an urgently needed contribution, given what Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has recently termed the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” that the nation faces. Increasing rates of giving and volunteering can be a means of deepening social connectedness—binding individuals together in common purpose. This is most obviously the case with volunteering, and in particular with the provision of mutual aid. But giving too can deepen social connection. In fact, in research commissioned by the Generosity Commission, Nathan Dietz of the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute determined that giving in the previous year increases a person’s likelihood of joining one or more community groups or organizations by nearly 10 percentage points; volunteering in the previous year increases the likelihood even more—by 24.4 percentage points.
darryll k. jones
