Lots of data and analysis about giving and volunteering.
Last month, The Generosity Commission released what it calls its “capstone report,” Everyday Actions, Extraordinary Potential: The Power of Giving and Volunteering.

The one question: what should we make of the new Generosity Commission report’s findings and recommendations?
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Jeffrey J. Cain: The cover of The Generosity Commission’s report, Everyday Actions, Extraordinary Potential: The Power of Giving and Volunteering, is a series of colored windowpanes offering glimpses of everyday Americans engaged in a sunny variety of civic activities. The report’s windows frame everyday givers as pixilated outsiders, physically removed from the blue-ribbon Generosity Commission and its millionaire and billionaire donors, but neatly boxed within their surveilling gaze.
From its panopticon of commissioned studies, the report’s authors can’t help but betray their own self-aggrandizing efforts and how little they know about the actual lives, much less the generosity, of ordinary Americans: “Our hope is that everyday givers and volunteers will treat the report as a living document to be continuously challenged, updated, and improved upon over time.”
In the unlikely event that “everyday givers and volunteers” ever look into the windowpanes of the 120-page report, as the commissioners fantasize, they would find throughout a litany of condescending bromides about their “selfless” generosity and how it “gives them a sense of connectedness, purpose, and even joy.” Of the relationship between everyday giving and extreme wealth inequality, economic privation, inflation, employment insecurity, two decades of war, declining civil liberties, crumbling trust in American institutions, the report punts: more research and better data are needed, of course.
Looking through the rose-colored aperture that philanthropic elites use to frame the “giving ecosystem,” everyday Americans would find a cartoon of themselves. They’d see that The Generosity Commission is not about understanding or, as it often says, “celebrating” giving and volunteering habits in a diverse and pluralist society. It is rather about framing the terms of acceptable discourse for propping up a tax-exempt charitable regime that serves the interests of their millionaire and billionaire patrons first and best.
The Commission, they would further see, cleaves to a body of reductive quantitative assumptions and careworn scholarship that makes post-WWII America the culmination and normative expression of civil association from which everything else is a sad departure. If only the “quotidian givers,” as the report calls everyday donors, would go back to church and get some social capital, preferably before wedlock, then would the “persistent nagging anxieties” that come with disappointing giving totals subside. By design, everyday givers will always be cast as outsiders in the Commission’s wistful vision of American charitable exceptionalism, even as they are “celebrated.”
Michael E. Hartmann: The Generosity Commission’s Everyday Actions, Extraordinary Potential report is voluminous and wide-ranging. By its own terms, it’s more trying to start a conversation than present an argument.
I was struck by its reference to this being “a time of growing division” and generosity being “one of the strongest values we share across ideologies and identities, and a consistent way we can see the best in each other.” Taking that as an important aim or aspiration, weren’t and aren’t there other values shared across ideologies and identities, and other avenues through which to see the best in each other? Oh, I don’t know: patriotism, religion, human dignity? If, might they abstractions be worth touting, maybe even researching, too?
To a skeptic, The Generosity Commission funded by establishment philanthropy sure might seem to placing philanthropy—in other words, itself—on the same plane as these high abstractions. Or, maybe more harshly, unfairly claiming the generosity and actions of “everyday’ers” to place itself there.
The “dollars-up, donors-down” phenomenon described in the report—the rise in overall financial support of nonprofits is occurring along with a decline in the number of actual givers to them—might be evidence that the “everyday” givers of money or time don’t place themselves on the same plane as the big, elite ones who take measurable advantage of the sector’s well-designed and -understood policy structure and tax-incentivizations. They probably don’t even really see it as a sector, and they wouldn’t think it necessary or even really helpful to keep track of their giving for a tax form, much less a research task force.
The Generosity Commission’s findings allow for an interpretation, an argument, like this. Any conversation that Everyday Actions, Extraordinary Potential starts should consider it and skeptical ones like it.
Craig Kennedy: The recent report of The Generosity Commission is predictable in many ways and misguided in, at least, two instances. The mundane bits are too numerous to mention. However, the notions that “everyday giving and volunteering” can be encouraged by showcasing the philanthropy and good works of the rich, famous, and powerful or that institutional philanthropy should “embrace its responsibility to support everyday generosity” are questionable at best. Knowing that a celebrity or a foundation or a corporation wants you to give and do more even as they use their wealth to shape the actual policies and priorities of many nonprofits does not seem a recipe for getting regular folks to shell out more money or given more time. Even though most of the Commission members would surely condemn “top down” approaches to philanthropy, this report is rife with arguments for elite leadership.
The misguided parts mirror this bias. On the controversial topic of whether or not donor-advised funds (DAFs) should have minimum-payout requirements, the Commission fudges its recommendation by acknowledging there may be a problem, but maybe no clear solution. Really? Stockpiling billions of dollars in commercial and nonprofit DAF platforms should be ignored because the sponsors of these platforms may be negatively impacted?
Similarly, in trying make the case for giving more taxpayers the ability to use charitable tax deductions, the authors bemoan the fact that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 reduced the percentage of filers claiming charitable deductions from 25% in 2017 to 10% in 2018. The drop reflected an increase in the standard deduction, which allowed millions of middle-class families to have more money for everyday expenses. The assumption is that these former itemizers simply stopped giving to charity, with limited evidence to support this claim. My guess is that most of them continued to give to their church and other local organizations and were relieved that they no longer had to document their generosity for the IRS.
The Generosity Commission was certainly a well-intentioned effort. However, it failed to grapple with the real challenge to the charitable sector: the overriding power that foundations, corporations, and wealthy individuals exert over all but the smallest and more local of nonprofits. If you want to bring the people back to charity, you will also have to give them a voice in how these organizations are run.
Leslie Lenkowsky: Most of the findings and recommendations of The Generosity Commission are not new. But its most-notable accomplishment is differentiating “generosity” from “philanthropy.”
The report was co-sponsored by The Giving Institute and Giving USA Foundation, organizations with close ties to fundraising companies. So, it is no surprise that it recites familiar statistics about the decline in the share of Americans who give to charity or volunteer and singles out the usual suspects—starting with the Great Recession of 2008-09—as responsible for it. The report also calls for often-proposed efforts—including expanding the tax deduction for donations—to reverse it. (Curiously, it recommends increasing funding for IRS and state regulators of philanthropy; is there a problem?) Despite commissioning several research projects, The Generosity Commission adds little to what we already know or offers any reason for thinking its recommendations would be useful.
However, it does argue that even while Americans are giving and volunteering less, they are being generous in lots of other ways: crowdfunding, person-to-person giving, community care, and political activism (among others). The Commission’s report even ends on a somewhat optimistic note. The “landscape of generosity” is not waning, it observes, but “shifting,” with features that are both familiar (“millennia-old traditions of person-to-person giving”) and new (“the latest giving platform to sprout online.”)
Does that matter? To the fundraisers and philanthropy researchers, probably so, since much of what they do revolves around the activities, fees, and statistics of formal organizations. But for the health of American society and government, the jury, the Commission notes, is still out. After all, when Alexis de Tocqueville sang the praises of civic associations, he had the “millennia-old” kind in mind.
Julia Nelson: As The Generosity Commission’s report notes, declines in philanthropic giving and volunteering disproportionately affect smaller, less-established nonprofits, and the grassroots organizations the Woodson Center serves are no exception. Bob Woodson has often observed that the qualities that make neighborhood leaders so effective at addressing social problems also make them invisible. They are too busy getting the work done to run the kind of communications and development operations needed to compete for shrinking pools of funding.
There is no question that the increasingly polarized media environment—noted in the report—offering hate- and fear-oriented clickbait hinders organizations that operate on hope and courage. Casting each national election as a choice between Utopia and the end of the country dismisses the essential role that small, localized, solution-oriented associations play in making life better for people in the most-distressed communities. And while the instant dopamine rush of a three-second video is a poor substitute for the longer-lasting satisfaction of serving a truly effective organization, the former asks little to nothing of the user, so its widespread uptake is not surprising.
The report’s third recommendation about public figures modeling philanthropy and volunteerism is certainly preferable to the current widespread displays of self-expression that lionize personal freedom over any kind of commitment to a group or institution. Sacrificial group commitments remain essential to survival in low-income communities, but among the middle and upper classes, they must be reaffirmed as part of the well-lived life.
Daniel P. Schmidt: We should appreciate the significant time and talent of those who contributed to and wrote The Generosity Commission report—a useful statistical snapshot of current practices in civic engagement, giving, and volunteering. We should also note that the Commission and its report humbly recognize that much remains to be discovered and analyzed with respect to current trends in the way Americans give and volunteer.
The report refers in passing to the “major role” that changes in religious affiliation and practice have played in shaping the way Americans give and volunteer or, more recently, have not chosen to do so. The project properly has a Faith and Giving Task Force.
As a point of reference for the Task Force, I would suggest reflection upon first principles before immersing itself in data point upon data point on organizations, their structures, numbers of employees, membership, public and private connections, financial leverage, and the like. More particularly, I’d humbly recommend a June 2009 social encyclical penned by Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate.
“I am aware of the ways in which charity has been and continues to be misconstrued and emptied of meaning, with the consequent risk of being misinterpreted, detached from ethical living and, in any event, undervalued,” according to Benedict in the encyclical. He continues:
In the social, juridical, cultural, political and economic fields—the contexts, in other words, that are most exposed to this danger—it is easily dismissed as irrelevant for interpreting and giving direction to moral responsibility. Hence the need to link charity with truth not only in the sequence, pointed out by Saint Paul, of veritas in caritate (Eph 4:15), but also in the inverse and complementary sequence of caritas in veritate. Truth needs to be sought, found and expressed within the “economy” of charity, but charity in its turn needs to be understood, confirmed and practised in the light of truth. In this way, not only do we do a service to charity enlightened by truth, but we also help give credibility to truth, demonstrating its persuasive and authenticating power in the practical setting of social living. This is a matter of no small account today, in a social and cultural context which relativizes truth, often paying little heed to it and showing increasing reluctance to acknowledge its existence.