By Paul Clolery

Making a donation to charity or volunteering time would seem to be relatively simple acts. According to The Generosity Commission, they instead are complex actions that go straight to the core of civil society and democracy, which includes declining trust of institutions and neighbors and social isolation. 

The Commission today released its three years in the making report “Everyday Actions, Extraordinary Potential: The Power of Giving and Volunteering.” The report examines why the rates of both the number of donors and volunteering have plummeted for the past decade or more.

The report presents analysis of generosity as expressed in everyday volunteering and giving. There are also nine recommendations that call leaders across the nonprofit, funder, business and policy sectors to take action to protect and promote the future of generosity. 

The research is intended to better understand the nature and causes of the shifts in generosity that have occurred in the recent past (with a particular emphasis on the COVID-19 pandemic era), specifically the decline in donors, although revenue has increased, and volunteers.

The intention is to support the expansion of research and data collection efforts on generosity beyond monetary giving to and volunteering with nonprofit organizations, and support research on giving and volunteering practices that reflects the full diversity of the American public. The hope is to also learn more about the civic impacts of giving and volunteering, specifically their relationship to civic engagement and social connection.  

The report is targeted at a wide swath of America. “It really is meant to be an attention grabber to a very large part of our country” that doesn’t necessarily get a lot of headlines about philanthropy, Mike Gianoni, president, CEO and vice chairman of the board of directors at tech firm Blackbaud and who co-chaired the also Generosity Commission with Jane Wales, vice president of the Aspen Institute. 

Gianoni sees individuals within the philanthropic sector, businesses and government officials as benefitting from reading the report. “Even [within] our presidential race this year, nobody talks about it,” he said.

Leaders from across the charitable sector were part of the commission for insights into the landscape. Task forces made up of a diverse set of experts working in research, policy, faith and communications brought additional insight and guidance to areas were also employed.

While everyday givers describe generosity as boundless, they perceive giving and volunteering to be resource dependent, according to the report’s authors. “While those interviewed celebrated that anyone can choose to be generous at any time, they appreciated that people might make financial contributions or volunteer only when they have the resources to do so. These sentiments were echoed in the focus groups the Commission conducted: People wanted to give and thought it should be a priority, but they felt hindered by time, money, and a general feeling of helplessness,” according to the authors. 

The report’s editor was Benjamin Soskis, senior research associate at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Aspen Institute. He explained the findings were not styled “for unearthing any hidden trends,” but to “put meat on” information about motivations on giving, volunteering and civic engagement.

Existing data suggests during the past several decades the share of Americans who report volunteering with nonprofits has declined, although that decline is less precipitous than the decline in the number of donors. 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. 

According to data from AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism, the formal volunteering rate dropped seven percentage points – from 30% in 2019 to 23% in 2021, the steepest drop since the agency began collecting such data in 2002. 

An example of that is the Salvation Army. “Five years ago, we had 5.8 million volunteers to support the Army’s work,” National Commander Kenneth G. Hodder told The NonProfit Times. “At the end of fiscal ’23, that had declined to 1.4 million, a 50% drop in that five-year period.”

He said that volunteering “will increase at the margin the willingness of people to give.”

The organization is working to bring back as many of those volunteers as possible going into the Christmas season. The Salvation Army also launched a television and digital spot called “Silent Night,” that does not include an ask and highlights services provided and how to get involved, Hodder said. 

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has spoken of an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” in the United States. According to the researchers and report authors, “increasing rates of giving and volunteering can be a means of deepening social connectedness – binding individuals together in common purpose. Results of research by Nathan Dietz of the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute and commissioned by the Generosity Commission estimated 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.  

The report examines all forms of giving, from the old direct mail to the modern online platforms and giving by individuals to individual via platforms such as GoFundMe. It also might put distance between a charity and donor because online giving is a very quick transaction with little or no external human interaction.

“This trend is not new for me or for Blackbaud,” said Gianoni “It actually is a bit of a reminder that you need good technology. You can’t afford to apply nonprofit employees to small gifts, but you can apply technology and apply nonprofit major gift officers to large gifts because of the return. It really is a wake-up call for making sure you can cover gifts of all sizes.” Even automated donor management systems need a human element to create a connection between the donor and the organization’s mission, Gianoni added. 

The nine recommendations in the report are divided into four categories — research, culture, practice, and policy. The recommendations are:

1. Increase the depth and breadth of data on giving and volunteering; 
2. Close the generosity evidence-to-practice gap; 
3. Encourage public figures and leaders in a broad range of fields to speak openly about how they give and volunteer, and how they have benefited from others’ giving and volunteering;
4. Take youth seriously as givers and volunteers; 
5. Utilize all of philanthropy’s resources, tangible and intangible, in support of everyday giving and volunteering; 
6. Support community foundations to take a leading role in encouraging giving and volunteering;
7. Reinforce the leadership role of businesses, as conveners of employees, to encourage their volunteerism and giving;
8. Increase the availability of the charitable contribution tax deduction; and, 
9. Sufficiently fund the IRS Exempt Organizations division and state charity regulators and simplify regulatory compliance. 

The Generosity Commission was launched in 2021 and in similar to the The Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs, also known as the Filer Commission. It was formed in 1973 to study philanthropy, the role of the private sector in American society, and then to recommend measures to increase voluntary giving. The Filer group also issued a report.  

The difference this time is that organizers are developing plans to keep research and action moving. “We are looking to establish a 501(c)(3) and an infrastructure to carry this forward is in planning right now,” said Gianoni. He referred to the report’s release as “the end of the beginning.”

Said Hodder: “It will be down to me and other commissioners to say that all of this research and all this information has one message: get involved.”

The post Generosity Commission: Giving, Volunteering And Civil Society Complexities appeared first on The NonProfit Times.

Source From Non Profit Times