did not return after nonprofits re-opened their doors. As the Washington Post recently reported, “Even as the need for help has increased, the number of Americans who formally volunteer has continued to decline.”

But that modifier “formally” is worth attending to. It delineates the limits of the narrative of flagging generosity during the pandemic. Outside of nonprofit organizations, a different story took shape, as many turned to informal means of helping neighbors, friends, and even strangers. The pandemic brought increased attention to modes of generosity with deep roots within indigenous and immigrant communities and communities of color, such as mutual aid networks. Some new mutual aid networks formed, and existing ones expanded, to help the housebound by offering child care, picking up groceries and medicines, providing rides to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and undertaking minor household chores and repairs when tradespeople suspended house calls. The surge of less formal modes of giving and volunteering during the pandemic fed into and was in turn fueled by a wave of activism against police violence that crested after the killing of George Floyd. Individuals contributed to (unincorporated) bail funds, sent money via cash apps to activists, contributed to and participated in mutual aid networks, marched and protested. Many of these responses would not have been registered by the most commonly cited metrics of giving and volunteering, which focus on nonprofit organizations, and so amplified questions about which actions, and which communities, get counted—and which get left out.

Those questions of “what counts” in giving and volunteering are of real civic import, and the Generosity Commission has grappled with them. Doing so has required taking full account of the broader landscape of American generosity, but that has not entailed minimizing the troubling trendlines within the nonprofit sector.

There are reasons why the decline in donors to and volunteers with nonprofit organizations over the last two decades has not, until recently, generated as much attention as the trend warrants. Its import has been obscured by the fact that, for much of the period, aggregate giving totals increased year over year, a trend sometimes referred to as “dollars up, donors down.” (Similar trends held with respect to more volunteering hours coming from a smaller pool of volunteers.)

Dollars being up is a good thing, and one that we should not take for granted, especially considering it was not the case in 2022 (in real dollars) or in 2023 (in inflation adjusted dollars). According to the authoritative tally from Giving USA 2024: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2023, total dollars given to charitable and nonprofit organizations declined by 1.1 percent from 2021 to 2022 (and 8.4 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars), and only increased by 1.9 percent (and declined by 2.1 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars) in 2023. 2022 marked just the fourth time that there has been a decline in real dollars since 1983 (while 2023 was the eleventh time that total charitable giving declined, adjusted for inflation).

But even if the decline in dollars turns out to be a momentary trend, we should still be troubled by the decline in the proportion of Americans giving and volunteering. That concern stems from one key consideration in assessments of the state of charitable giving and volunteering. There are, of course, several criteria that are often emphasized in public discourse. The most prominent involves the “how much” question, as in total aggregate dollars or hours. Another relates to directionality and purpose—what causes are being donated to or served (and which are being neglected)? There is the related issue of impact—the “so what” question of the ultimate good that is achieved by those donations or service.

These are all worthy considerations, although they are not the Commission’s focus. Instead, it has trained its attention on a set of different but related questions: who gives and who volunteers, and, more precisely, how many give and how many volunteer? That focus is staked to the belief that a broad base of participation in giving and volunteering is itself a social good that should be pursued and promoted.

Why is this 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. As much as voting or protesting, giving and volunteering are expressive acts of civic significance, ensuring that individuals’ views about what matters are reflected in the world. The more individuals who give and volunteer and the wider and more diverse the base of giving and volunteering, the greater and deeper will be that pluralism, so that American civil society will reflect a broad range of organizations, viewpoints, interests, and perspectives. Our communities are stronger, our cities, states, and country are stronger, when individuals harness their divergent interests, commitments, and beliefs, in all their particularity, toward their understanding of the public good. Giving and volunteering are vital instruments in doing so.

Another reason to encourage a broad base of giving and volunteering is that those actions also help to solidify civic engagement more generally. Some giving, of course, is purely transactional, completed with a click and a moment’s thought. But going back as far as the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations in the 1830s, there has long been a belief that voluntary associations can serve as schools of democracy in which we learn how to work together toward a common mission and purpose (although there are also forms of associational activity that can be threats to democratic norms and institutions). Giving to and certainly volunteering with an organization can be important steps in participating in its workings. They can also affirm the commitment to civic responsibility more generally, to working together toward some larger purpose. Indeed, in research commissioned by the Generosity Commission, Nathan Dietz of the University of Maryland’s Do Good Institute has found that volunteering and giving in the recent past appear to increase the likelihood that adults will vote in national elections.

The pandemic also led many Americans to turn to local networks of community care and mutual aid. Much like direct cash transfers, these have been in place in the United States for centuries, created by immigrant communities and communities of color who were excluded or alienated from mainstream charitable organizations or public systems of social welfare provision. During the early period of the pandemic, when the federal government was still developing a response, some measure of the precarity long endured by those communities was experienced more generally, which led to a “discovery” of mutual aid networks by broader swaths of the public. New mutual aid organizations were founded, and older ones swelled with new participants. In the fall of 2020, a survey by GivingTuesday reported that 11% of respondents said they had participated in some form of mutual aid in the previous year (they tended to be younger than those who had not participated, and a greater proportion of them were people of color).¹²⁰

Here again, the notional landscape of generosity was transformed by some combination of increased attention to long-standing practices of generosity and actual changes in such practices.¹²¹ A similar dynamic has been at play in the growth of giving circles over the last decade, another collective form of giving with deep historical roots.¹²² Giving circles and especially mutual aid groups played important roles in addressing the immense human needs brought on by the pandemic, as well as in challenging the dominance of individuals’ monetary giving to nonprofit organizations as the paradigmatic expression of generosity.

Shifts In The Generosity Ecosystem

So how does the growth of these forms of giving relate to the declining participation rate of giving to or volunteering with charitable and nonprofit organizations? The answer to this question hinges in part on whether that growth is occurring largely in terms of practice or in terms of attention. On the one hand, it is now increasingly common for person-to-person giving or giving to informal and unincorporated groups to be justified through an explicit contrast to giving to nonprofits. A 2020 survey from GivingTuesday, for instance, reported that 62% agreed with the statement “I prefer to give directly to individuals-in-need, and not via nonprofit organizations, platforms, or websites” (the proportion went up to 76% for respondents ages 18–34). And according to a more recent survey by Independent Sector/Edelman, more than half of respondents believe that donating directly to the people or causes they support makes a greater impact than giving to a nonprofit.¹²³

The pandemic and the various anti-institutional sentiments it provoked (as well as the various experiments in direct cash transfers it prompted) seemed to heighten this contrast, stoking a sense of rivalry between giving to nonprofits and giving directly to individuals and to and through informal entities. As one donor told The Chronicle of Philanthropy in September 2021, explaining her decision to use Cash App and Venmo to channel funds “to people she believed might not otherwise receive help in an immediate or direct way … ‘Giving to a nonprofit during the pandemic is less interesting to me right now.’” An author of a December 2020 article on the rise of direct giving during the pandemic noted that for many donors, such giving had become “a commentary on the role and efficacy of conventional nonprofits.”¹²⁴

The contrast was developed most starkly in the attention directed to mutual aid organizations, many of which explicitly positioned themselves as operating outside a “nonprofit industrial complex” viewed by some as ensnared in systems of racist and capitalist exploitation. As Dean Spade, a leading theorist of mutual aid, writes, “Mutual aid projects, in many ways, are defined in opposition to the charity model and its current iteration in the nonprofit sector.”¹²⁵ But the contrast was also invoked by early promoters of crowdfunding platforms, who purposefully differentiated them from “outmoded telemarketing and mail-based campaigns and ‘shaking tins outside the church hall.’”¹²⁶

Yet, as the attitudes of younger age cohorts discussed above indicates, there is also evidence that the increased attention directed to community care reflects not a zero-sum contest between categories of generosity but a reduction of the salience of those categories as meaningful demarcations of generosity. Survey research from GivingTuesday, for instance, suggests that individuals who participate in mutual aid are “less likely to see distinctions between various forms of giving or between giving to organizations and other recipients.” They are also more likely to understand political giving and crowdfunding as forms of charitable giving, “even if these acts are not directed to formally registered charities.”¹²⁷ Those blurred boundaries can also be detected within the organizational landscape of generosity. As the COVID-19 pandemic subsided, some newly formed mutual aid groups have adopted nonprofit status as a means of securing a more permanent organizational presence. And many nonprofit organizations have begun to partner with crowdfunding platforms, promoting and raising funds on them, and in the process, dampening competition between these two modes of giving.¹²⁸

Indeed, for all the rhetoric of contestation between categories of generosity, we do not yet have clear evidence of active displacement that would explain the declining charitable participation rate in terms of an increase in other expressions of generosity. In fact, the little evidence we do have points in the opposite direction, suggesting that different forms of generosity are not “cannibalistic,” in the phrasing of GivingTuesday, but “catalytic” and “accretive.” Recent research has underscored this dynamic with respect to volunteering and giving—those who do one are more likely to do the other.¹²⁹ Research from the GivingTuesday Data Commons suggests that this is also true with informal modes of generosity. So even as they have reported that respondents to their surveys expressed a preference for direct giving over giving to nonprofits, GivingTuesday found that those who engage in direct person-to-person giving were actually more likely to give to nonprofits than those who did not. Indeed, their research concludes that “giving is highly correlated” among the three recipient groups that GivingTuesday identified: legally registered nonprofits, organized and structured community groups that are not legally registered entities, and unstructured community groups and individuals. “When a person gives to one recipient group it is likely they also give to one or more of the others.”¹³⁰ Similarly, a Lilly Family School of Philanthropy report on charitable crowdfunding found that only 6.4% of respondents reported giving through crowdfunding platforms but not to nonprofit organizations. “This data suggests,” the report concluded, “that crowdfunding does not replace typical charitable giving but complements it.”¹³¹

There is other research which seems to support this view, if only by highlighting the lack of evidence for displacement between one form of giving and another. Survey research from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, for instance, tracked both formal and informal giving before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The researchers assumed that, as rates of formal giving declined, there would be a commensurate increase in rates of informal volunteering or donation behavior. They found instead that “the percentage of respondents who reported informal volunteering and/or donating was hardly affected by the pandemic.” In other words, informal volunteering did not “fill the gaps” produced by a decline in formal volunteering.¹³²

This finding was echoed by an AmeriCorps analysis of Census survey data, which showed that, even as formal giving to nonprofits declined during the first year of the pandemic, “the rate of Americans informally helping others remained stable” between 2019 and 2021.¹³³ Similarly, in their examination of giving before and after the Great Recession, Osili, Clark, and Han found that reductions in giving to nonprofits during the economic crisis did not lead to a compensating increase “in private transfers to non-household family members and friends who had difficulty meeting basic needs.” Instead, households also reduced this form of giving as well, although not as significantly.¹³⁴

These findings are themselves incomplete and do not fully address the question of the relation between declines in donor and volunteer participation to nonprofits and shifts in other modes of generosity, in part because they do not provide a sufficient longitudinal perspective. Because it is only recently that quantitative researchers have expanded their aperture to take in the full generosity landscape, we do not yet know enough about how giving and volunteering practices have changed over the last decade and are continuing to change. We likely will gain more insights on those questions in the years to come. The current moment, then, is a peculiar one, in which we find ourselves freshly surveying a landscape that is both as familiar as millennia-old traditions of person-to-person giving and as novel as the latest giving platform to sprout online.

Launched in 2021, the Generosity Commission took as its charge addressing the decline in giving and volunteering rates brought to light by major surveys over the last several decades.

The Generosity Commission established three task forces, consisting of leaders from nonprofits, philanthropy, and academia, to develop recommendations for increasing the number of donors and volunteers: Faith and Giving, Research, and Policy. (The Policy Task Force was in turn broken down into four working groups: one on the legal environment and regulations that incentivize giving and volunteering, a second on organized philanthropy and its role in bolstering giving and volunteering, a third on the role of culture in reinforcing the understanding and appreciation of generosity across society, and a fourth on the role of the business sector in promoting workplace giving and volunteering by employees).

The recommendations are broken down into four sections.

Research

In order to determine how best to increase the number of givers and volunteers, we first need to know more about the current state of giving and volunteering, and how those practices have changed in recent years. This includes more research into diverse expressions of generosity beyond charitable nonprofits and across a diverse range of communities.

Culture

The Commission appreciates that some of the most potent levers to encourage generosity are cultural—whether in the realms of religion, art, music, sports, literature, social media, education, or some combination of the above. The ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and norms that individuals hold about what constitutes generous behavior, the responsibility to act generously, and the benefits and consequences of that behavior obviously reflect the current practice of generosity, but also help to shape it. Cultural spaces are where these ideas, attitudes, beliefs, and norms can be forged—or undermined.

Practice

Based on the understanding of the norms and narratives that can promote increased giving and volunteering, the Commission offers specific recommendations for fundraisers, philanthropic funders, and nonprofit and business leaders.

Policy

Although the Generosity Commission will not endorse specific legislation, it does seek to promote policies at the local, state, and federal levels that will incentivize giving and volunteering.

Recommendations

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
9. Sufficiently fund the IRS Exempt Organizations division and state charity regulators and simplify regulatory compliance

As the preceding landscape analysis makes clear, the last few decades have been a time of enormous change in the patterns and norms that govern giving and volunteering. Data collection and analysis related to giving and volunteering—and to generosity more broadly conceived—have not kept pace with these changes, although in recent years they have begun to adapt in some important ways. Many of us still experience a gap between our experience of a transformed landscape of generosity and our ability to understand, measure, and track those changes.

Researchers have sought to assess and analyze the scope of American giving for more than a century, and of volunteering for decades, but these efforts have been limited in their scope. Much of the focus has been on giving and volunteering to and through nonprofit organizations; the tracking of large monetary gifts has received an especially large proportion of attention, energy, and resources (reflecting the increasing share of such giving as a proportion of total charitable dollars in recent years).

The Generosity Commission recognizes and applauds recent advances in extending the focus of research beyond monetary gifts to nonprofit organizations to incorporate a broader range of expressions of generosity, and advances in utilizing data science and behavioral economics to go beyond survey research to deepen our understanding of how and why people are giving and volunteering—or, as the case may be, not giving and not volunteering.

This research needs financial support to further develop, and the Commission urges funders to support it. But, as the Commission’s recommendations make clear, it is not enough for the research on giving and volunteering to be produced. It must be widely and strategically disseminated to ensure it reaches those who can best make use of it.

The Generosity Commission believes there is a need for more timely, comprehensive data on all forms of giving and volunteering in the United States. As noted, there have been significant advances in data collection and analysis over the last few decades, facilitated by the widespread use of econometric analysis and the digitization of nonprofit 990-series tax forms. But these advances were largely focused on data about giving and volunteering to and through nonprofit organizations.

For researchers
In recent years, research has slowly expanded to include a wider range of prosocial behaviors, including giving and volunteering to informal organizations, person-to-person giving, and crowdfunding. This wider lens is in part a response to perceived shifts in behaviors in the United States over the last decade. Though mutual aid, for instance, has deep roots in this country, especially within immigrant communities and communities of color, the practice experienced significant growth and increased attention during the pandemic, which in turn has sparked a surge in researchers’ scrutiny. Similarly, giving circles—another form of collective giving in which a group of individuals pools their money and then decides collectively how and where to distribute it—are also experiencing increased popularity. We need to know more about the contributions of mutual aid networks and giving circles, as well as the whole spectrum of giving behaviors outside monetary donations to nonprofit organizations embraced by “everyday” givers and volunteers, to gain a fuller understanding of the broad ecosystem of generosity. This includes certain giving platforms and channels on which we have relatively little solid data, such as those associated with crowdfunding, point-of-sale giving (such as giving when checking out of stores or when completing purchases online), and workplace giving.

We also need to learn more about the intersection of faith and giving, within and across different communities, contexts, and traditions. To help cultivate a shared field of inquiry into the connections between faith and giving, we recommend researchers pursue (and funders support) more

collaborations to review and synthesize the current research and literature, both to identify salient points for public communication and to identify knowledge gaps for future research. Researchers should also develop more expansive ways of thinking about the connection between faith and giving, extending beyond religious affiliation and attendance to address other modes of spiritual belief and practice. Researchers and funders should also pursue more research about the role of faith in the giving traditions of non-majority Christian and non-Abrahamic religious communities.

For funders
Commission recognizes that improving research and data capacity on giving and volunteering will require significantly increased investment from philanthropy, from both institutional funders and individual donors. The Commission believes there should be continued and expanded support for the major longitudinal studies on charitable giving as well as for continued research and data analysis that adopt an equity lens.

The last decade has seen significant advances in research on donor and volunteer behavior, many involving experimental studies. The Commission urges funders to continue to support this type of research, so that researchers can incorporate new modes and instrumentalities of giving into their work. There is also important work that requires increased funding to examine the relationship between giving, volunteering, social connection, and mental health.

For policymakers
The Commission also calls for improving the quality and accessibility of public data related to giving and volunteering. The limited data that the government collects and releases on the nonprofit sector is not commensurate with its size and importance relative to other sectors—given that the nonprofit sector ranks behind only the for-profit sector as the second largest employer in the U.S. Whenever possible, federal agencies that collect data on the charitable and nonprofit sectors should include disaggregated statistics about the sector in published reports and publicly available tables and datasets; these should include information on nonprofit organizations’ types of revenue, expenses, and operating reserves, and on the volunteer hours contributed to nonprofit organizations by individuals. The Commission also urges more efforts to consolidate the data currently

collected by various federal agencies. To this end, the Commission encourages The Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis to create a yearly or biennial satellite account—that is, a supplementary set of statistics that allows analysis of a particular aspect of the economy—within its national accounts program, focused on nonprofit and related institutions and volunteer work, as it does with other parts of the economy, such as travel and tourism or outdoor recreation.

As the above recommendation makes clear, there have been important advances in the production of research and data related to giving and volunteering in recent years. But for those advances to reach their full potential, that research and data need to be broadly accessible, intelligible, and easily searchable. For instance, the fields of behavioral economics and psychology have provided important insights into giving behavior in recent years, which have in turn sparked a number of evidence-based fundraising innovations—such as sending a year-end email with simple tracking of past giving—that have been shown to increase generosity. These and other valuable insights are not widely known throughout the nonprofit sector, so it is essential that they be more accessible and usable to practitioners, especially at smaller and under-resourced nonprofits.

For funders
Philanthropy should provide more flexible funding for smaller nonprofits so that they have the time and capacity to learn from the most recent evidence on fundraising effectiveness. Closing the generosity evidence-to-practice gap also requires philanthropy to provide more support for services that can help translate and disseminate research to a wide audience, including mechanisms that help to share information and insights across the entire sector.

For researchers, nonprofits, and funders
More generally, the Commission calls for better communication between the domains of academic research and nonprofit practice. It is important to stress that the exchange of expertise and insight between these two communities must be reciprocal. Not only should more nonprofit organizations be assisted to learn from emerging research and data analysis on giving, volunteering, and fundraising, but also nonprofits should be encouraged to help shape research agendas. Practitioners must be consulted more frequently by researchers and should receive support to stay abreast of research and data trends. The provision and cultivation of forums where practitioners and researchers can meet and share experiences and insights are key in this regard.

How might we fortify a culture of generosity in the United States? First, we should recognize that there is such a thing—or, more precisely, that there are many overlapping cultures of generosity. Although patterns of behavior related to giving and volunteering are no doubt shaped by material and political realities, they are also shaped by ideas, attitudes, beliefs, norms, and narratives. This cultural context both helps shape and is shaped by individuals’ relationship to their communities. It is the space in which generosity is forged.

Below, the Commission offers a number of suggestions about how to use culture as a means to encourage giving and volunteering. More than any particular approach, the most important issue is that of salience. The Commission stresses the need to make sure that generosity has a visible place within popular culture and public discourse commensurate with its importance to our nation’s civic health. Questions around what it means to be generous, generosity’s relationship to civic life, and the diverse ways that people give and volunteer should be prominently situated within movies, TV shows, books, journalism, music, social media, and every other cultural domain. While it is undeniably important for media to take a critical lens toward certain abuses of charitable and philanthropic giving, it is equally important for journalists and cultural creators to tell the story of everyday generosity in all its vitality and diversity.

One of the most important narratives related to the promotion of giving and volunteering in the United States involves the public’s faith in nonprofits. Yet, according to surveys by Edelman Data & Intelligence, public trust in nonprofits has recently shown signs of erosion, joining a broader trend of surging distrust in institutions more generally (although the most recent survey shows a rebound in trust in nonprofits). It is not clear the extent to which the decline in trust was in turn responsible for declines in donor or volunteering rates. What is clear is that those who have high trust in nonprofits are more likely to give to them, and that trust in the nonprofit sector is generated by familiarity. According to a 2023 report from Independent Sector in partnership with Edelman, those familiar with nonprofits were 30 points more likely to trust nonprofits than those who are not. Yet there is some evidence that many Americans lack that familiarity. A 2023 survey from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy revealed that, when asked whether the respondents or anyone in

their immediate family had received services from a charitable organization or nonprofit in the past year, only 5.4% indicated that they had. That is a troubling figure, given how often nonprofits touch all our lives in profound if sometimes invisible ways. If that figure does indeed reflect the state of public awareness of the daily work of nonprofits in the United States (and not confusion about which institutions are in fact nonprofits and what it means to be served by them), it is essential that nonprofit leaders produce and promote more narratives that uphold the contributions of nonprofits in the lives of Americans, especially smaller and more local institutions, which surveys show Americans tend to trust much more than large or national nonprofits.

Celebrities and public figures in the cultural realm—writers, performers, musicians, athletes, spiritual leaders, and others—can serve as models and exemplars, promoting norms around giving and volunteering by speaking openly and proudly about how they seek to “give back.” They should be encouraged to integrate those narratives of generosity into their work—whether movies, pop songs, sermons, or novels—and to share opportunities to practice generosity with those who admire, root for, or take cultural cues from them. They can also publicly express the ways that they have benefited from others’ giving and volunteering in their own lives, including through nonprofits and charitable organizations.

One particularly striking example of how public figures can help promote norms around generosity relates to the intersection of faith and giving. Despite evidence that the majority of most people in American society see a relationship between their faith and their giving and choose to give the majority of their gifts to organizations with faith-related purposes, there is little public storytelling about the connection between faith and giving. The Commission believes that these stories—narratives that highlight how faith inspires generosity, and how generosity inspires faith—should be uplifted and celebrated.

For this reason, in developing national or local conversations about generosity, it is vital to include leaders of religious networks and institutions. Religious leaders have access to deep traditions, communal practices, ready platforms, and “captive audiences” for teaching about generosity; they are an untapped resource for developing a meaningful conversation about generosity. Nonprofit and philanthropic leaders should actively invite religious leaders into local and national conversations about the future of generosity in American society, to engage their constituents, to gain their insights, and to help them see that they are part of a larger story about changes in generosity. These religious leaders can serve as models for how leaders in other domains can bring their giving beliefs and practices into the public sphere.

Encouraging generosity requires a specific focus on youth. As the preceding landscape analysis makes clear, many of the changes in prevailing attitudes toward the practice of giving and volunteering are concentrated in younger age cohorts, whether this involves a greater propensity to regard peer-to-peer giving as equivalent to monetary donations to nonprofits, or a more general distrust of formal nonprofit organizations. It is important that these attitudes are fully reflected in any broad public discussion of shifts in expressions of generosity. After all, youth culture can have a powerful effect on more general norms and narratives, but it is often relegated to a sequestered sphere of public discourse—i.e., trend pieces on what “the kids” are up to. Ultimately, encouraging habits of generosity in young people is not just a way to increase giving and volunteering in the present moment; it is a way to invest in the future of generosity.

How should young people be involved in the encouragement of generosity?
Youth must be centered in narratives of, conversations about, and research on giving and volunteering. This includes telling more stories about intergenerational giving, to spark interest in how generosity is taught and transformed between the generations. It also requires encouraging youth to tell their own stories of how they understand and practice generosity, and what the obstacles to those practices might be.

Young adults should be welcomed within nonprofit leadership, including on nonprofit boards, advisory councils, and collectives. Many organizations have already begun to do this; see, for instance, the important work done by the United Nations youth councils. More particularly, so have grantmaking organizations. The Washington Area Women’s Foundation, to cite just one example, has developed a participatory council, the Rock Star Fund, that empowers young women and girls as givers.

For schools
Finally, those who wish to encourage youth generosity need to take full advantage of in-school programs, whether they are volunteering or fundraising initiatives or broader civic education programs. Administrators, with assistance from parents and teachers, must ensure that the programs and initiatives include sufficient information for students to understand why the knowledge and experience are relevant and important for them. It is important to communicate to students both the intrinsic value and the instrumental value of volunteering—for instance, by demonstrating how it is related to professional and academic development, with volunteer experiences translating to workforce readiness experiences, AP or college credit, and skill certification.

Students can learn much about the value of giving from an early age. Research suggests that, while most elementary school students participate in some form of school-based fundraising, few students “are aware of the cause area that they are being asked to support, and most have little decision‐making in their giving.” This represents a major missed opportunity. Students should be actively involved in choices regarding the forms their school-based giving or volunteering will take. These discussions should make clear that everyone—whatever their age or economic or professional status—has the capacity to act generously and to make a difference in their communities.

Among the handful of generosity pressure points—where changes and adaptations to existing practice can make a significant difference in increasing the number of givers and volunteers—is the domain of fundraising. Coming out of the pandemic, fundraisers face a significant set of challenges related to the transformative potential of AI, an uncertain economy, the pressures to bring in major donations, and flagging morale. In facing these challenges, fundraising—both as a profession and as a more informal practice—must remain committed to the task of increasing not just the aggregate amount of dollars raised but also the total number of donors.

For funders, nonprofits
Along these lines, there are several themes that run through the Commission’s recommendations related to fundraising. The first is simple: the need for greater investment. This means significantly more funding from organized philanthropy for the fundraising capacity of their grantees, including online fundraising capacity, which for many charities remains woefully inadequate. It also means greater attention to the resourcing of fundraising within nonprofit organizations themselves, which in turn will require nonprofits to make a habit of building the full costs of such investments into their budgets and proposals to funders. This will allow more nonprofits to pursue evidence-based training in fundraising for a broader contingent of staff, as well as to address the burnout that is endemic within the fundraising profession. It will also allow fundraisers to engage in more forward-looking inquiries, including those related to AI in the field.

The second theme is the need to ensure that this support for fundraising is directed across a broad range of diverse communities, so that it can magnify the multifaceted generosity of all Americans. This means investing in the fundraising capacity of smaller organizations; of organizations that serve communities of color or are led by people of color, which research has shown receive less funding and capacity support than other organizations; and more generally of fundraising professionals who better reflect our nation’s racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Such support would help address the concentration of credentialed fundraising professionals in certain sections of the nonprofit sector, namely large hospitals and universities. Addressing this disparity in credentialization will require both increasing the pipeline of certified fundraisers across the nonprofit sector and supporting more training of nonprofit executives in responsible fundraising outside the bounds of certification. Even more broadly, it calls for recognizing that in many communities, fundraising is most often performed by nonprofessionals, by friends and neighbors who care. Their capacity as fundraisers must be acknowledged and strengthened as well.

The third related theme involves the need to ensure that fundraisers are encouraging generosity across all income and wealth levels. The mushrooming concentration of wealth in the hands of a small cohort of donors over the last few decades has increased the pressure to place nearly all an organization’s fundraising chips on large-donor stewardship. The pursuit of major gifts has absorbed an overwhelming proportion of institutional fundraising’s resources, staff, and attention. For some organizations, outreach to everyday donors has atrophied. But it’s essential that fundraisers refrain from neglecting everyday givers; after all, in what can become a vicious circle, one of the main reasons non-donors provide for why they have not given to nonprofit organizations is that they were not asked—and this is especially the case with younger individuals and people of color. More than this, fundraisers must do even more to convince everyday givers that their giving still matters, even in light of the steady parade of headlines on eight- and nine-figure donations. Everyday givers closest to the communities served by the organizations soliciting funds, who are best positioned to know what the problems and solutions are, should be a special priority.

Fundraisers, then, should lean into the task of encouraging and tapping all of a community’s generosity: individuals of all ages and from all races, ethnicities, religions, and geographies. This commitment in turn requires culturally and linguistically appropriate solicitations tailored to different audiences—developed only with substantial investments of time, resources, and personnel.

The fourth theme relates to the growth of alternative, informal modes of giving alongside monetary gifts. Nonprofit fundraisers must let go of a scarcity mindset in which monetary contributions to nonprofits actively compete with other forms of generosity, and in which the decline of giving to nonprofits is communicated as a failing of generosity. The proliferation of different modes of giving, and the ways in which individuals often move fluidly between them, will likely be a permanent feature of generosity in the United States in the years to come. Instead of resisting the multifaceted dimension of generosity, nonprofit fundraisers should embrace it as an opportunity. They should strive to become partners in that multiplicity, helping individuals do good in multiple ways and through multiple channels. This means the fundraising community must continue to explore the ways in which different expressions of generosity are mutually reinforcing. We’ve seen how crowdfunding platforms, for instance, have already begun to partner with nonprofit organizations; similar forms of mutuality are possible and should be encouraged across the entire generosity landscape.

Philanthropy Should Embrace Its Responsibility to Support Everyday Generosity

For funders
Philanthropy, at both the institutional and individual levels, has an important role to play in encouraging everyday generosity and in fostering the enabling environment for giving and volunteering. Of course, organized philanthropy can itself inspire generosity in others. Yet the attention large-scale philanthropy receives also has the potential to sap enthusiasm for certain forms of everyday giving and volunteering; a recent survey, for instance, showed that 59% of households with an annual income over $70,000 that reported stopping giving over the past five years agreed with the statement “there are people out there with significantly more money who should give to charity instead of me.” To counterbalance the high levels of attention directed toward mega-donors, philanthropy should affirmatively embrace the call to encourage everyday giving.

Such a responsibility begins with the capacity of philanthropy to support a strong, vibrant social sector that can attract charitable donations and volunteers from a broad range of the public. To the extent that increasing donors and volunteers depends on deepening their trust and confidence in nonprofits—and the data does suggest that those who trust nonprofits are more likely to donate to them—philanthropy can help through their own support of nonprofit institutions. (Of course, nonprofits themselves can do much to bolster donor trust by embracing good governance, accountability mechanisms, staff and leadership diversity, and public communications on operations and impact). Grants can provide important signals of legitimacy; they also obviously allow nonprofits to do the vital work to which they are dedicated and on which trust and confidence are staked. But more than this, funders can support fundraising capacity indirectly by providing unrestricted general operating support and by covering the actual full costs of operations. Nonprofits can use this support in a range of ways, as they see fit: to increase fundraising staffing, to measure and communicate impact, to support communications, or to pursue greater collaboration. As discussed above, funders can also support the infrastructure for research, learning, and data that can bolster public confidence in nonprofits as well as nonprofits’ ability to fundraise effectively.

Funders have other important resources that they can bring to bear besides their dollars. These include their voice and their relationships. Funders should embrace the opportunity to articulate publicly why generosity matters to our civic health, and why expanding the base of donors and volunteers matters. Funders can be vocal champions of the need for a robust, pluralistic civil society. They can also use their voice to push for policies—such as the more efficient execution of grant and contracting processes by the government—that would increase nonprofit capacity. They can offer their expertise, and access to their networks, to help grantees and others facilitate opportunities to collaborate, build coalitions, and leverage respective resources.

Of course, philanthropy can also promote generosity directly by making grants to encourage giving and volunteering. Beyond funding specific programmatic activities, foundations of all types can fund their grantees’ efforts to build or expand their marketing, fund development, database and contact management, and public relations capacities. They can provide funding for grant writers who are able to work for individual nonprofits or coalitions to apply for federal, state, and local grants. A foundation or aggregation of funders can match donations that new donors or volunteers make to their grant recipients, or incentivize funding based on a specified, agreed increase in the number of donors or volunteers. Acquiring and retaining donors are labor-intensive efforts that yield results only when done in a deliberate and sustained fashion, and funders could offer subsidies to nonprofits to support such work. Similarly, they could offer direct support to nonprofits for volunteer support staff, which can help lead to more meaningful engagement programs.

There is an obvious tension in these last recommendations of targeted support, especially in light of calls for funders to provide more unrestricted flexible funding. Broadening its base of donors and volunteers might not be a grantee’s top priority, so grantors should only offer this funding in conversation and cooperation with grantees—not as a condition of support. Otherwise, there is a risk of the funder directing the grantee’s activities and resources in ways that the grantee might believe are not best for it and those it serves.

Philanthropy should consider extending its support for the enabling environment of giving and volunteering beyond the realm of nonprofit organizations, to encompass, for instance, mutual aid networks and giving circles. In doing so, philanthropy must exhibit a similar degree of respect for the grantee autonomy as they should with nonprofits. It is important to offer support without undermining the kinship and community on which such networks are sustained. Working closely with those within the community, who know their community’s needs, and how their generosity is expressed, is key.

Among funding institutions, community foundations are some of the most deeply rooted in their communities, and most knowledgeable about the impact, needs, opportunities, and priorities of the nonprofit and civic organizations that serve those communities. They are often seen as trusted philanthropic advisors, providing a “seal of approval” that donors look to for reassurance about their contributions to charitable organizations.

Many community foundations serve as an entry point for donors into the sector of organized philanthropy and are therefore well positioned to expand investment in cultivating donor behaviors that help increase the number of givers and volunteers. Giving circles, nonprofit capacity building, and youth philanthropy initiatives are examples of effective approaches that many community foundations can adopt or amplify.

Community foundations are known as expert conveners and could engage their donors and communities at large around the recommendations in this report and potential next steps, advancing the co-creation of local solutions to address growth in giving and volunteering at the local level. Community foundations should also consider dedicating some part of their discretionary grant resources to fund this work, regarding it as investments that can lead to greater giving and volunteering in the future.

Community foundations can also support infrastructure building for the sector, especially enhancing knowledge and data within their specific areas, to spur giving. As they engage with professional advisors, donors, professional athletes, celebrities, and others, community foundations can expand these individuals’ awareness of opportunities to seed support for new donors and volunteers, including by supporting the work of the community foundation itself.

During what many historians believe were the peak years of “mass giving,” the mid-20th century, much of that giving occurred at or through the workplace. This is no longer the case; although the data on contemporary workplace giving is incomplete, it is clear that over the last several decades, the proportion of employees who participate in official workplace giving campaigns has fallen significantly. And yet it is equally clear that many workers still view the workplace as a locus for the expression of generosity (according to one recent survey, 7 in 10 employees expect opportunities for social impact at work); that the workplace holds out important opportunities for increasing giving and volunteering rates; and that promising experiments are under way attempting to do so.

The Commission stresses that businesses of all workforce types can play an important role in encouraging the generosity of their employees. It is critically important, for instance, that businesses with frontline workers—in particular, hourly wage workers—include and support these workers in their civic engagement and giving programs. Businesses of all sizes, not just larger firms with more resources for subsidizing employee generosity, should embrace this role.

For funders, employers
One challenge in doing so is that larger firms have attracted most of the investments in workplace giving platforms and infrastructure. To ensure that such platforms are available to a broader range of employees, philanthropic funders should consider supporting or subsidizing investments in giving infrastructure at smaller firms. Businesses should help educate their employees on the key issues facing their communities and the work that nonprofit organizations and other networks of generosity are doing to make their communities stronger. This education can take many forms, for instance by inviting organizations to present at a lunch and learn.

Business leaders should also speak publicly about their own giving and volunteering. Having such leaders demonstrate their engagement within their respective communities sends a message to the businesses’ employees that their engagement is encouraged and supported.

Workplace Volunteering Opportunities

Whether a business’s work environment is remote, in-person, or hybrid, offering virtual volunteering opportunities can enhance a business’s volunteer programs. Even as more employees return to offices, such virtual opportunities can be maintained or channeled into in-person opportunities.

Businesses can also provide flexible or micro-volunteering opportunities—short-term, low-commitment volunteer opportunities ranging from 15 minutes to an hour. These smaller opportunities enable employees to volunteer on their own time and can serve as a gateway to longer-term commitment to volunteerism. They can be particularly impactful for businesses with frontline employees, as they can occur during shift changes or at other times during working hours. Examples of micro-volunteering opportunities range from collecting supplies for a local school to writing a note to a service member stationed overseas. Similarly, businesses should make sure to provide friend and family volunteer opportunities. The ability to volunteer with a friend or family member can be a good inducement to an employee and can help build a sense of community.

Business can also encourage volunteering by offering financial or other incentives. These could involve paid time off to volunteer, such as in a company-wide service day or month, or additional vacation time for employees who volunteer on their own time. Businesses can also initiate a volunteer grant program, which would provide grants for a certain number of hours volunteered by employees to their favorite organizations.

Finally, employers can encourage generosity through the creation of affinity or employee resource groups. These groups help to create an inclusive environment for employees and can foster grassroots employee giving and volunteering. By supporting the service of these groups, businesses embrace cultural differences among their employees, recognizing that many volunteer opportunities are inspired by their employees’ most deeply rooted or keenly felt identities.

Workplace Giving Opportunities

Employers can offer a payroll deduction for charitable giving. This enables employees to have donations taken directly from their paychecks and given to a nonprofit organization. Employers can also offer and design a matching gift program to encourage all employees, especially younger employees, to give. Matching gifts generate an estimated $2–$3 billion to nonprofits every year. Employers should design such programs to lower barriers to participation; research suggests that between $4 billion and $7 billion is left on the table every year by employees not taking advantage of their employers’ matching gift offers, and that more than three-quarters of donors do not know whether their workplace has a matching gift program. Employers must do more to publicize their matching gift programs, and nonprofits must also make sure to remind donors about the possibility of securing a matching gift through their employers. It is important that employers set up an open matching gift program—that is, one that enables employees to match gifts to their preferred organizations, not just to organizations that fall within a business’s prescribed philanthropic focus areas. Employers should also set a low minimum donation for gifts to be matched, which can potentially bring in more new donors.

Employers can also set up an employee assistance fund to which employees can donate to assist their colleagues during times of need. In all these ways, and others, the workplace can become a locus and incubator of generosity.

While our recommendations touch on several policies advanced by recent legislative proposals, we have refrained from issuing specific legislative endorsements to remain true to the nonpartisan nature of the Commission. Instead, the Commission seeks to elevate the commitment to increase the number of givers and volunteers as a key priority in policymaking, a consideration that would take its place alongside others, such as increasing total dollars donated or hours volunteered, or directing giving to particularly urgent causes.

Below we highlight a few approaches to policy change and reform that reflect this commitment. The emphasis is on giving and volunteering through and to nonprofit organizations, not because the Commission is expressing a preference for this sort of generosity, but because that is where the decline of participation has been most discernible and where regulations, especially those related to tax policy, are most tractable.

Donor-advised Funds Reform And Donor Participation

The goal of expanding the base of donors and volunteers should help guide the approach to policies related to donor-advised funds (DAFs). DAFs, often compared to charitable checking accounts, enable donors to contribute funds for charitable purposes at the time they have the resources (and potentially to receive a tax deduction), while waiting to determine when and how to advise the disbursement of those funds to most effectively support their charitable goals. This flexibility has made it possible for individuals to plan their giving over time at costs that are far below those associated with a private foundation. The rise of DAF accounts over the last few decades has been astonishing, from a little over 200,000 in 2012 to nearly 2 million in 2022. Many organizations that host and sponsor DAFs have done away with minimum deposit requirements, making DAFs more accessible to a wider base of donors, though the average DAF account size in 2022 was over $117,000. DAFs also make possible donations of assets that smaller organizations do not have the expertise and resources to accept, such as artwork or cryptocurrencies, and are the platform on which much workplace giving is facilitated.

Unlike foundations, DAFs do not have minimum payout requirements, and critics have raised concerns and advanced legislative proposals that would require or incentivize those payouts. The Generosity Commission appreciates that DAFs can only realize their value when funds are ultimately disbursed out of sponsoring organizations. However, when considering policy reforms for DAFs, it is also important to assess their impact on giving participation by prospective and current donors and their compliance costs, particularly for community-based sponsoring organizations like community foundations.

Tax policy should be utilized as another instrument to encourage a wider base of participation in giving and volunteering. The Commission urges Congress to adopt legislation that increases the number of taxpayers who can receive tax benefits from charitable contributions and that increases the total amount that can be donated. This can take various forms, such as a universal “above the line” deduction that would apply to all taxpayers and not just those who itemize, or deductions for contributions above a certain percentage of income. Recent tax law, on the other hand, has moved in the opposite direction, resulting in fewer and fewer Americans benefiting from tax incentives for charitable contributions. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) of 2017 contained provisions, such as a substantial increase in the standard deduction and higher gift and estate tax thresholds, that had the effect of reducing the number of taxpayers who itemize their charitable giving and thus who claim a tax deduction for it. Following the passage of the TCJA, the proportion of taxpaying households that claimed a charitable deduction on their income tax returns fell to just 10% in 2018 from 25% the year before, and continued falling to 9% in 2019.

Some recent policy initiatives did seek to incentivize everyday giving. Most notably, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress authorized non-itemizers to deduct up to $300 ($600 for married couples filing jointly) of charitable cash contributions on their income taxes for 2020 and 2021, but let this deduction expire in 2022.

With the TCJA itself set to expire at the end of 2025, we are entering a critical period for the adjudication of these issues. It is important to stress that charitable tax incentives should be widely extended and should not be dependent on whether the donor itemizes their tax returns. A universal charitable tax deduction will provide a powerful signal to the public, as it did during the pandemic, that charitable giving is an important societal value, and could help spark more Americans to give (to and through tax-deductible nonprofits, where the tax benefit will accrue, but the signal would not apply only to them). Such a shift would serve as more than a signal. It would ensure that a more varied and diverse range of Americans have their giving recognized by the government, and that a more varied and diverse range of organizations and institutions will benefit from government support.

Other potential tax policy changes are also worth considering, in large part because of their potential to encourage a broader base of giving. Many states have adopted tax credits for contributions to specific types of organizations that help support governmental programs, such as foster care, homeless relief, and education. These programs allow individuals who may not have the ability to take tax deductions to still receive a tax benefit, which could help increase the number of individuals who give to charity. National and universal tax credit programs could supplement the charitable contribution deduction and further the expansion of charitable participation.

Another possible way to boost giving participation is Charitable Savings Accounts (CSAs). These would allow employees to create accounts like Health Savings Accounts, which provide an opportunity for employees to set aside pre-tax dollars for medical expenses. CSAs would offer a similar opportunity for charitable giving, enabling employees to deposit pre-tax dollars into a savings account to be exclusively used for charitable gifts. Increasing the mileage reimbursement rate for volunteers to be closer to that of the business mileage reimbursement rate (it is now currently less than one-quarter as large) could potentially increase volunteering rates, as could increasing the minimum living allowance for volunteers, used by national service organizations such as AmeriCorps. In determining whether these and similar policies should be enacted, their effects on everyday giving and volunteering should remain at the center of the deliberation.

One final way that policy can promote everyday giving and volunteering is by bolstering trust in the nonprofit sector. Although trust in nonprofits is still high relative to other institutions, it has begun to decline in recent years. And although there is no one factor clearly responsible for this decline, establishing a climate in which donors and volunteers feel confident that their money and time are going to organizations that are focused on their charitable missions, and not used for improper purposes, is certainly key. This leads to a final set of recommendations.

One important way to bolster trust in nonprofits is securing effective regulation and enforcement. Noncompliance affects not only the donors to those organizations but also the trust that donors have in other organizations.

The nonprofit sector is primarily regulated through the IRS on the federal level and by attorneys general and charity regulators on the state level. On both the federal and state levels, funding for charity regulation and enforcement is insufficient to ensure that regulators are focused on the sector and have the training and education necessary to be effective, and that organizations are complying with the relevant laws. The IRS workforce on exempt organization matters, for instance, fell by nearly 40 percent from 2010 to 2019 and has not come close to recovering, even as the number of nonprofits that the division must oversee has skyrocketed. Inadequate funding harms all organizations that need the support and assistance of IRS and state officials. Many organizations have had to expend significant time, money, and energy to get answers to questions, address errors in records, and resolve problems with filings or registrations.

Fully funding both the IRS Exempt Organizations Division and state charity offices would provide sufficient staff and money for nonpartisan investigations and for the technological innovations that can simplify both compliance and enforcement.

At the same time, it is important that the regulatory environment for fundraising not be onerous for nonprofits, especially new and small organizations. One recommendation that could lighten the load placed on nonprofits involves the simplification of the charitable solicitation registration process. Different state requirements and filing fees place burdens on organizations’ time and resources. A uniform registration system or a single portal for all states, though requiring some diminution in individual states’ autonomy, would result in enhanced compliance and preserve resources for the charitable missions of the organizations, leaving them with greater resources and capacity for both their programs and their fundraising.

The importance of trust to boosting giving and volunteering is not restricted to charitable nonprofits. For instance, policymakers should consider the extent to which the increased regulation of crowdfunding platforms might also increase trust and spur greater giving. We need new laws to provide such guardrails against actual or perceived abuse. However, the technical requirements to implement any such laws need to be commensurate with the level of actual abuse experienced, the practical compliance limitations of these laws, the need to educate organizations on how these laws may impact them, and the need to provide reasonable time for their implementation.

More generally, the Commission also encourages policymakers and stakeholders to think creatively about revising the tax categories that have governed policy toward charitable organizations for three-quarters of a century and that subtly shape the way the public views charitable giving and volunteering. For instance, consider ways that organizations outside the realm of charitable nonprofit organizations could “opt in” to a process of formalization in which they would receive certain tax benefits in exchange for the assumption of certain responsibilities (such as those related to transparency), similar to charities designated 501(c)(3) in the tax code.

A strengthened regulatory system would increase public trust through the regulation itself as would the message sent by charitable organizations collectively advocating for their own regulation in the name of the public good. Nonprofit leaders should make clear to policymakers, and to the public, that addressing inadequate funding for nonprofit regulation and enforcement will be good for nonprofits, good for the public more generally, and good for the promotion of giving and volunteering.

To better understand the nature and causes of the shifts in generosity that have occurred in the recent past, specifically the decline in the donating and volunteering rates to nonprofit organizations; to support the expansion of research and data collection efforts on generosity beyond monetary giving to and volunteering with nonprofit organizations, and to support research on giving and volunteering practices that reflects the full diversity of the American public; and to learn more about the civic impacts of giving and volunteering, the Generosity Commission supported research efforts and commissioned a number of reports, from five institutions and organizations. The findings of each of these research initiatives and publications are discussed in greater detail below.

This isolated approach has led to an overall understanding of how we participate in our civic and community lives that can be robust within domains (charitable, political, or volunteering). But the approach lacks understanding of how individuals mix and match these behaviors and what the sum of these independent actions might be. Drawing a richer, more complicated picture of the ways people take action in their communities was a key goal of this research project. The research team’s initial hypothesis was that individuals give their time, money, material resources, support, and information in many ways, only some of which are counted either by official measures or by individuals themselves. Before we can understand the dynamics, preferences, motivations, or interactions between these behaviors we need to know what the range of behaviors includes. Mapping these different behaviors—the ‘how’ of people’s giving—is an important precursor to research on the dynamics between how people give or on the changes within any of the ways people give.

In order to shed more light on this “how” question, the Generosity Commission supported the work of a team of researchers at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, led by philanthropy scholar Lucy Bernholz, who conducted 33 “How We Give Now” conversations with 338 participants in the months between June and November 2019. These conversations generated 2,277 responses detailing how people give to make the world a better place. These conversations became the basis for a 2020 report, How We Give Now: Conversations Across the United States, commissioned by the Generosity Commission, as well as Bernholz’s 2021 book, How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide For the Rest of Us.

Across these conversations, participants mentioned how unusual it was to talk about their giving. There’s a paradox here. People are generous with their time and money. They give to charities, politics, friends, families, and strangers. They help when asked. They buy products that are branded to support a certain cause or nonprofit. Yet, even while there is active participation, including in ways that signal generosity, it’s unusual for people to talk about their giving. Given these silences, the “How We Give Now” project sought to improve our understanding of the different ways that people in the U.S. give their time, money, and other resources. The primary source of data are the findings from the 33 facilitated group discussions, held in 15 states and the District of Columbia. The researchers’ hypothesis was that individuals give in more ways than even they understand. They hoped to identify the range of individual ways of giving, as well as how people mix those mechanisms, to inform future research focused on understanding people’s motivations or aspirations for their actions. Anticipating the novelty of these conversations, the researchers strove for anonymity in participation as a means of building trust among participants and among participants and the research team. The researchers worked with local host organizations and individuals and did not collect participants’ names or contact information. Participants could opt in to share demographic data (age, gender identity, racial identity). These methodological decisions limit the conclusions that can be drawn from this data. The research team made the decision to trade detailed demographic data for trusted participation.

The data confirm the researchers’ initial hypothesis—people in the United States give time, money, material goods, comfort, and knowledge in many ways. Their behaviors reach far beyond the kinds of activities that are officially counted or incentivized in the US, like tax-exempt donations to charitable organizations, contributions to political candidates or groups, or volunteering time to faith or community organizations. In a country where giving is normatively associated with donating to charity, fewer than 20% of participant responses about how they take action to make the world a better place mentioned giving money. Participants seldom mentioned tax codes in reference to their giving, but instead discussed giving locally, civic engagement, and myriad informal giving acts, including sharing kindness and connecting others—and they spoke of these acts often and with excitement.

The research brought forward a robust discussion of the interactions between giving domains and the informal, often overlooked ways participants put their resources (time, money, talent) to use. From the conversations, researchers created a series of “giving maps,” which identify differing language communities used to discuss their giving, and which are documented most prominently in the categories participants used to label their domains of giving.

The authors of this report developed a code for 22 distinct giving categories, derived from analyzing the participants’ responses. Researchers collected a total of 2,277 responses from participants. Frequency is calculated by the share of responses attributed to the categories; a greater share of the total responses means the giving mechanism is ranked higher. Donating money received the highest share of responses (16%), followed closely by volunteering time (16%) and sharing kindness (10%).

The second consistent finding was that people in every community discussed—sometimes at length—the novelty of this conversation. Talking about giving was an unusual practice for people in every group. The novelty extended beyond the workshop itself and people noted how infrequently they talk about their giving with anyone, including family and friends. Participants mentioned learning to give by watching their parents or members in the community, which they noted were cases of learning by example, not by being told.

The research picks up on a number of potentially important divides—starting with disagreements on the definition of giving itself. Participants engaged in lengthy discussions on what constitutes giving versus what constitutes obligation or survival.

The research also identifies broader challenges Americans face that might diminish giving in the future. Participants often voiced concerns about the increasingly insecure economic futures of people in their networks. They mentioned children with high student loan payments, housing and health care costs, and the difficulty of finding stable jobs. With these economic considerations, they projected an increasing inability to make consistent monetary contributions to nonprofits. They described older models of giving, where a certain percentage of one’s paycheck was sent monthly to two or three nonprofits, including to United Way or churches, as becoming out of reach for more people. Participants observed seeing “patchwork” approaches, with time and expertise increasingly valued.

Report Authors: Lucy Bernholz and Brigitte Pawliw-Fry

Research Team: Lucy Bernholz, Matilda Nickell, Brigitte Pawliw-Fry, Jeffrey Rodriguez, and Heather Noelle Robinson

An important new resource, the Nonprofit Panel Data Platform Project, provides stakeholders with much improved current information about the state of the charitable nonprofit sector and will document trends over time. It helps to answer such vital questions as: How healthy is the nonprofit sector? What are the trends in giving and in other revenue sources? How was giving affected by the Covid pandemic and what is the current trajectory in numbers and types of givers and donation levels? What is the status of the nonprofit workforce? How well are nonprofit boards functioning? Who is served by different nonprofits? Which communities and populations are underserved? Overserved? What outcomes are achieved? How engaged are nonprofits in advocacy activity to advance their missions?

Leading nonprofit researchers from American University, George Mason University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Urban Institute are collaborating on the Nonprofit Panel Data Platform project. To establish the data platform and support initial research efforts, the project received significant start-up funding from the Generosity Commission (as well as from the National Science Foundation, Independent Sector, and other organizations). This initiative is designed to conduct high-quality, representative surveys of nonprofit organizations that have agreed to participate over a period of years, thereby providing information on trends affecting the sector in a cost-effective and timely manner.

The first survey report, “Nonprofit Trends and Impacts 2021,” produced with support from the Generosity Commission, provides critical information on the impact of the Covid pandemic on donation levels by sizes and types of organizations, geographic areas, and populations served. This survey revealed that in 2020 three quarters of nonprofits viewed individual donations as essential or important to their missions and that overall donations decreased for 42 percent of small organizations and for 29 percent of large organizations across all types of nonprofits. Revenue overall declined for 40 percent of nonprofits in 2020, leading in many cases to loss of staff and program cutbacks. This information informed nonprofit leaders and policy makers about the severity of the impact and the areas and types of nonprofits and communities that were hardest hit and most in need of assistance.

The important advance that the Nonprofit Panel Data Project provides is that it surveys a representative sample of nonprofits by size, issue area, and geographic location and is designed so that the researchers can confidently generalize the findings to the nonprofit sector as a whole and drill down on results to specific types of organizations in various areas of the country.

This work helps to address pain points in the current research environment. Currently, many surveys are one-time initiatives that use “convenience” samples that are not representative of the sector, although the results are often interpreted as applying to all nonprofits. These one-off surveys are adding to survey fatigue and sometimes result in questionable findings. Finally, while financial data from IRS Forms 990 is vital, the lag in processing time may take two or more years. Additionally, there is a lack of information on who benefits from nonprofit activities, as well as the outcomes of those activities, on the forms, nor is there information about how well the demographics of nonprofit boards and staff reflect the communities they serve, which can be an indicator of their responsiveness to these communities.

Building on this initial work, in order to improve the quality of nonprofit surveys and to fill gaps in knowledge about important nonprofit features and issues, the Nonprofit Panel Data Platform will feature an accessible website and other components with the following key features:

• Tools to design surveys and contribute data from these surveys to the platform;
• Tools to analyze and download free, publicly available data from surveys conducted through the platform;
• Tools to draw representative samples of nonprofits that have consented to be part of a “panel,” which, in survey terminology, means they will be long-term survey participants that can be followed over time;
• A repository of tested, previously used survey questions that can be used in new surveys; and,
• The capability to match survey data collected through the platform to data from Forms 990, Census, and other databases that can provide useful organizational and contextual information (e.g., local poverty rates) about the nonprofits surveyed.

Among other benefits, the Platform will enable nonprofits to benchmark themselves against similar organizations and develop data-informed organizational strategies and will allow funders to better understand the sector’s needs and the impact of their grantees.

Nonprofit Panel Data Platform Research Team: Alan Abramson (George Mason University); Elizabeth Boris (Urban Institute); Lewis Faulk (American University); Mirae Kim (George Mason University); Jesse Lecy (Urban Institute); Calton Pu (Georgia Institute of Technology)

The Nonprofit Trends and Impact 2021 report was written by Lewis Faulk, Mirae Kim, Teresa Derrick-Mills, Elizabeth T. Boris, Laura Tomasko, Nora Hakizimana, Tianyu Chen, Minjung Kim, and Layla Nath

The research team at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on volunteering, donating, and prosocial behaviors by looking at data before and during the pandemic. Their research project captured an extensive and comprehensive scope of generosity and civic participation in the U.S., including many formal and informal behaviors, and focused on the impact of the pandemic on the generous behaviors in US society. As a result of this research and the rich and extensive data it generated, other research projects have emerged, and will continue to develop, thus making a significant contribution to the field of nonprofit studies and philanthropy.

Survey Data and Results This project enabled in-depth research on the impact of COVID-19 on people’s volunteering, donating, and helping behavior. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected from:

• In-depth focus groups conducted with volunteer coordinators and fundraisers
• A nationally representative survey on prosocial behaviors before and during the pandemic.

These data serve as one of the most robust views of Americans’ generous behaviors practiced between 2021 and 2022.

Findings from the national survey are compiled in “Generosity Trends and Impacts: Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the USA.” The report includes the following findings for the period of the study:

• The total number of donors decreased, but the average donation amount increased by over 200%.
• Informal volunteering and donating remained stable with about two-thirds of respondents engaging in this behavior.
• Showing gratitude to frontline workers and buying ethical products intensified.

While the long-term effects of the pandemic are still unknown, this report contributes to our understanding of the impact of the pandemic on the long-term trends of volunteering and donating.

Report Authors and Researchers: Ram Cnaan; Femida Handy; Tiana Marrese; Daniel Choi; Anna Ferris

University of Maryland, Do Good Institute, Understanding Generosity: A Look at What Influences Volunteering and Giving in the United States (2023) & Social Connectedness and Generosity: A Look at How Associational Life and Social Connections Influence Volunteering and Giving (and Vice Versa) (2024)

The two reports that the Do Good Institute (DGI) produced for the Generosity Commission explore the multiple determinants of formal volunteering and donations of money. In the first report, Nathan Dietz and Robert T. Grimm, Jr. develop and estimate multilevel models of contributing volunteer work and monetary donations to charitable organizations. These models include a wide variety of both micro-level variables (characteristics of the individual, family and household) and macro-level variables, which reflect the characteristics of the state where the households are located. The second report focuses on the relationship between giving and volunteering and other measures of social connectedness, including involvement with community groups or associations. These variables could be considered meso-level influences on volunteering and giving: characteristics of the social networks within which people live and work.

Although volunteering and giving are not synonymous with generosity, donations of time (volunteering) and donations of money (giving) to charitable organizations are two of the most common forms that generosity traditionally takes. The reports from the Do Good Institute do not attribute differences in participation rates to differences in intrinsic human characteristics like generosity or altruism, but rather to differences in the circumstances of the person, family or household. DGI’s study of volunteering, giving, and other charitable behaviors concentrates primarily on the factors that determine how many opportunities people get to participate.

To determine how significantly the different types of influences – personal circumstances, social connections and community characteristics – affect giving and volunteering decisions, it is necessary to have access to high-quality data that provides the statistical power to estimate the effects of all these influences, controlling for everything else. The Current Population Survey (CPS) Supplement on Volunteering is one of the few American datasets that has large samples, full geographical coverage of all the states (plus the District of Columbia), and the ability to measure change over time. One major purpose of this research project was to make the best use of the data on giving and volunteering found in the CPS’s annual Supplements on Volunteering (which was conducted every September from 2002 to 2015), Civic Engagement (which was conducted off and on between 2008 and 2013) and Voting and Registration (which is conducted every two years, during presidential and midterm Congressional election years).

The micro-level results are the backbone of the analysis. They represent certain social contexts (like parenthood or marital status) that help to define the social ties that people have with others, but they also represent socioeconomic characteristics that influence the likelihood of being asked to volunteer or to give. Most of the variables in the models used in these reports are also used in other studies, but the expected results – which were used to form the researchers’ own expectations – do not always receive support from the empirical analysis. To form expectations about the effects of the micro-level variables on volunteering, the researchers relied heavily on a series of annual briefs, called “Volunteering in the United States,” which were published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) between 2002 and 2015. The “BLS briefs” present demographic differences in volunteer rates that are calculated from the September CPS Volunteer Supplement, which at that time were produced annually. Wherever possible, the researchers use the coding strategy found in the BLS briefs for their models, so that their new analysis builds directly on previous research.

Unlike the micro-level variables, which are almost always statistically significant in both models, several of the researchers’ macro-level variables appear to influence giving or volunteering, but not both activities. Examples include the state-level social capital index, originally created by Robert Putnam for his landmark work Bowling Alone, which influences volunteering and not giving; median income, which influences giving and not volunteering; and the percentage of state residents who are college graduates, which influences volunteering and not giving. Two major variables - the state-level poverty rate and the prevalence of “large” nonprofit organizations per 1000 state residents - are significant in both the giving and volunteering models, and both results are surprising because of what they imply. The poverty rate is positive in both models, indicating that people are more inclined to be generous in states where a larger percentage of residents have pressing economic needs, controlling for other factors, including their own circumstances. And giving and volunteering both appear to be less common in states where there are more nonprofits with gross receipts of $50,000 or more. A recent study suggests that many non-donors do not contribute money because they feel that wealthy donors should contribute more, and because they suspect that nonprofits misuse donations. The results of these studies were consistent with these conclusions, and most surprisingly, applied to volunteering as well as giving.

Finally, the first report contains breakout analysis for groups defined by race, ethnicity, and educational attainment. These results show that many of the factors that we see in the population-wide results are due to the results for adults who identify as White (only) and who do not identify as Latino – in other words, by the so-called “majority” groups, who are most likely to volunteer, according to David Horton Smith’s “dominant status theory.” The population-wide results show that Schattschneider’s epigrammatic comment about participation in political life – “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent” – apply also to participation in civic life. However, the breakout analysis shows that the so-called “majority groups,” as defined by race and ethnicity, are primarily responsible for recent population-wide declines in giving and volunteering rates.

The second report also features multilevel modeling, with the same micro-level and macro-level variables included in the specification, but it focuses on the relationship between volunteering, giving, and other civic activities and prosocial attitudes and opinions. To start with, Dietz and Grimm created a model that estimates the mutual influence of giving on volunteering and of volunteering on giving. Social psychologists who study behavioral changes use the terms “trait” to refer to long-term, or permanent, influences and “state” for the short-term, or time-specific, influences on attitudes or actions. Adding lagged values of the dependent variables to the equations for giving and volunteering helps the researchers control for the “trait” characteristics associated with generosity: the factors that have had long-lasting influences on the choices people make. The correlation between the disturbances in the two equations captures the characteristics of the “state” – the circumstances in which people make their decisions about giving and volunteering – that influence both decisions. And adding the lagged value of giving to the volunteering equation (and lagged volunteering to the giving equation) allows the researchers to simulate the real-life situation that community leaders must confront: they need to decide which potential volunteers and donors to approach, based on their recent past behavior as well as other relevant micro- and macro-level variables.

The researchers use the same type of modeling strategy to determine how influential group membership, social connectedness, and trust in neighbors are for giving and volunteering. Their models do not allow them to determine causality with a great deal of confidence, but the results show that volunteering does influence giving, and giving does influence volunteering, controlling for all other micro-level and macro-level factors, as well as the immediate history of giving and volunteering for each respondent.

Their results suggest the following:

• People who volunteer in the previous year are more likely to give in the current year, by 14.5 percentage points, and people who give in the previous year are more likely to volunteer in the current year, by 9.3 percentage points.
• People who belong to, or participate in, one or more community groups or organizations in the previous year are significantly more likely to volunteer (14.3 percentage points) and significantly more likely to donate money (by 8.6 percentage points). The strongest group influences on giving and volunteering are associated with belonging to a congregation.
• Social connectedness can be measured by calculating the frequency of one common type of household activity (eating dinner with others in the household) and two types of neighborhood activities (talking with one’s neighbors or doing favors for one’s neighbors). A scale that is formed from these three activities has a small, but significant, influence on volunteering (1.1 percentage points) but no independent effect on giving, after group membership is controlled for, along with all other factors. This suggests that these types of social interactions promote giving mainly by encouraging people to participate in groups.
• Finally, trust in neighbors – measured by a survey question that asks about the number of one’s neighbors that people feel they can trust – has a small but significant influence on volunteering and giving that also disappears after group membership is controlled for. Like the previous results about social connectedness, this finding suggests that trust in others (one’s neighbors, in particular) has only an indirect influence on giving and volunteering by encouraging people to participate in associational life.

The CPS dataset also allows the researchers to see whether giving and volunteering have an impact on the ways in which individuals engage with each other, either through community associations or through more informal social networks. The results of these analyses suggest that:

• Volunteering in the previous year increases the likelihood of joining one or more community groups or organizations by 24.4 percentage points, and giving in the previous year increases this likelihood by 9.9 percentage points, controlling for all other factors – including group membership in the previous year.
• Volunteering and giving do appear to increase the likelihood that adults vote in national elections, controlling for all other factors. Volunteering increases the turnout probability by 12.0 percentage points, while giving increases the turnout probability by 10.1 percentage points.

Altogether, the lesson in this analysis is that group involvement is the main way in which social connections encourage generosity, and by which generosity can strengthen civil society. This is very similar to the story originally told by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, even though the Internet age has prompted dramatic changes in the importance of community organizations and informal groups in people’s lives – and the pandemic has caused even more profound changes to the way people engage with groups.

Research Team and Authors: Nathan Dietz and Robert T. Grimm, Jr.

Hattaway Communications, How and Why We Give: Research Insights on the Aspirations and Motivations that Inspire People to Give and Volunteer (2023) and Audience Engagement Research: Mindsets and Motivations Toward Generosity (2023) Hattaway Communications led qualitative and quantitative market research to map Americans’ mindsets around giving and volunteering and to explore what motivates people to engage. The first phase of the research project explored Americans’ behaviors towards, motivations for, and barriers to giving and volunteering. The purpose of this phase was to provide an in-depth understanding of how and why people give and volunteer today, and to identify opportunities to engage and build on the current conversations on these topics. Research methodology consisted of:

• A national opinion survey among 2,569 U.S. adults (conducted June 28–July 8, 2022)
• A national media landscape analysis of the contemporary news and social media conversation about generosity (conducted July 2022–September 2022)
• Three focus groups with different segments of everyday givers (conducted August 22–23, 2022)

The Generosity Commission released a comprehensive insights report detailing these findings: How and Why We Give: Research Insights on the Aspirations and Motivations that Inspire People to Give and Volunteer. In the second phase of research, Hattaway Communications conducted three focus groups with people who are not currently giving and volunteering as much as they would like to. The main objectives for these conversations (conducted May 30–31, 2023) were to:

• Identify key challenges with increasing volunteerism;
• Gauge how different audiences want to engage in generosity; and
• Investigate what kind of actions they want to see from nonprofits, employers, and other civic organizations.

In the final phase, Hattaway Communications conducted three additional focus groups (October 10–11, 2023) with highly engaged givers and volunteers to:

• Explore how generosity connects to other parts of their civic lives; and
• Gather additional real-world perspectives from everyday givers and volunteers, including attitudes and motivations about why generous people give.

The following outlines key findings from the research.

Most people identify as generous. Three in four survey respondents (74%) said they aspire to be a generous person. Focus group respondents described how important it was to live a life of generosity, and how they looked for ways to be generous when they could. They believed there is no right or wrong way for people to practice generosity and felt that individuals should be generous in the ways that are most accessible to them—many of which are difficult to measure and define. Their understanding of generosity ranged from taking in a stray dog to helping a loved one with housework to buying water for teachers on strike to giving to a nonprofit.

Everyday givers describe generosity as boundless but giving and volunteering as resource-dependent. While people celebrated that anyone could choose to be generous at any time, they appreciated that people might give or volunteer only when they had the resources to do so. The top barrier to giving in the survey and focus groups was not having enough money—57% of survey respondents said they’d chosen not to give due to money constraints. Around two-thirds (69%) agreed that they cannot give as much as they’d like after taking care of themselves and their families. Yet, 69% also thought it was important to give, even if it required sacrifice. Focus group respondents wanted to give and volunteer and thought it should be a priority, but many felt hindered by time, money, and—in some cases—a general feeling of helplessness. Audiences generally believed that those who can give back should do so, but also recognized that not everyone has the capacity to give or volunteer because of personal circumstances.

People see generosity as part of the fabric of our society—and they give because they hope things can get better. Acting generously is deeply ingrained in the way people in the U.S. interact with our communities and world. It is a core value: Nine in 10 (91%) of those surveyed said giving and volunteering was a priority for them. Focus group participants described a world without generosity as chaotic and sad—and stated it would not be a world they would want to live in.

However, people do not believe that giving and volunteering are civic duties or that they are uniquely American. While nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said they feel a strong sense of duty to help others, focus group respondents did not define generosity as a civic obligation or duty. Additionally, engaged givers didn’t connect generosity with civic engagement.

Everyday givers already know their own generosity matters: they are not primarily motivated by or looking for external validation or incentives. Audiences wanted to give and volunteer because it’s the right thing to do. Most respondents were motivated to give and volunteer by the deep desire to help people in need (73%), not personal incentives like tax breaks (6%) or impressing others (3%). For the most part, proposed policies and external influences, like charitable savings account offerings by an employer or bigger tax breaks, did not move the needle when it came to giving and volunteering: 51% said they were neither more nor less likely to give if offered each. Focus group participants felt more motivated to give and volunteer to help a cause that was meaningful to them rather than to help themselves personally.

People choose where to give based on their own personal experiences and what matters most to them. Both survey and focus group respondents had a clear and specific understanding of the causes that are important to them and how they want to support those causes. Almost half (47%) of respondents were most motivated to give or volunteer to contribute to something they cared deeply about and 61% agreed that giving and volunteering is how they expressed their values. Over two thirds (69%) agreed that every donation counts as long as it is personally meaningful to the individual.

People are motivated to give and volunteer when they can incorporate their own personal interests and share their skills. Across the board, focus group respondents expressed a desire for their experiences to be personally enriching and fulfilling, similar to having a hobby. They wanted to use their skills to make an observable difference, enjoy what they are doing, and feel the impacts their efforts have on the cause.

People want complete control over when and how to fit volunteering into their lives, which often isn’t possible with the volunteer opportunities they find. Focus group respondents were most interested in opportunities that gave them the freedom and flexibility to give to and volunteer with the causes that are most meaningful to them and fit easily into their busy schedules. However, many volunteer opportunities ask volunteers to commit to consistent, inconvenient times and contribute to a range of tasks based on the organization needs, some of which are less fun, fulfilling, or relevant to their skills. Respondents wanted more control over their volunteer work and sometimes felt frustrated when those opportunities didn’t fit into their schedule or exactly match their passions or skills.

Audiences want to see the immediate impact of their direct action and can get frustrated when they get stuck with tasks that don’t feel immediately impactful. The survey and focus groups revealed that a great deal of giving and volunteering happens on the local and interpersonal level. The most common giving actions included easy, personal, and local actions like donating clothes, food, or other resources (78%), giving money to strangers in need (57%), and giving money to or helping people the donor knows personally (64%). Focus group respondents described how local projects provide givers a window into how their actions directly affect another human or a cause, leaving them with a sense of fulfillment. However, as mentioned above, many ultimately chose easy, flexible, and convenient volunteering opportunities that sometimes felt menial or like a waste of their time or skills. It was hard for people to recognize how menial tasks, such administrative work, could be impactful. They wanted to see their impacts immediately (like seeing a family fed) and had trouble appreciating that less exciting work could add up to something transformative.

People don’t need to be told what to do or how to give, but they do seek information about how to give well. Survey respondents had strong aspirations to be generous (74%); however, they often felt overwhelmed in determining how to help (44%). Focus group respondents also struggled to find specific volunteer opportunities. Over half (53%) of respondents said they would be more likely to volunteer if they had resources to help find opportunities. This sentiment was echoed in focus groups—participants wanted organizations to make it easier to find opportunities for both giving and volunteering, especially on social media.

People want to feel confident about how their contribution will be used and value high levels of transparency from nonprofits. They wanted to make sure their money was going to the “right things.” Sixty-seven percent of survey respondents wanted to know all the details of how their money would be spent to be sure it wouldn’t go to waste. Focus group respondents across the board also wanted to see organizations model transparency. Across focus group audiences, givers expressed a lack of trust in nonprofits because of high administrative costs and perceived lack of transparency. Participants reported that it helped them feel more confident in their giving when they understood how their donations were used and the direct outcomes they helped achieve.

Research Team: Paige Rice and Caitlin Fitzpatrick

The Generosity Commission owes a debt of gratitude to all the individuals who contributed to its work over a period of several years, starting with its inception as an idea and until the release of this report. They have been driven by the belief that everyday giving and volunteering matter to each one of us, to the organizations we support, the communities we shape, and the country we build.

The Generosity Commission benefitted from the testimony of many experts and sought input through listening sessions with groups of professionals from the following groups: Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals (ACCP), Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), Charitable Giving Coalition, Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose (CECP), The Giving Institute, National Council of Nonprofits, Salvation Army, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. In addition, the Generosity Commission heard from fundraisers and leaders of community-serving organizations representing a diverse cross-section of our society.

The Generosity Commission is grateful for the support and guidance it received from its funders. Their trust and engagement have made this work possible.

Experts who provided testimony to the Generosity Commission

• Soraya Alexander, COO, GoFundMe and President, Classy
• Lucy Bernholz, Senior Research Scholar, Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and Director, Digital Civil Society Lab
• David Biemesderfer, Former President and CEO, United Philanthropy Forum
• Elizabeth T. Boris, Institute Fellow, Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, Urban Institute
• Phil Buchanan, President, Center for Effective Philanthropy
• Dan Cardinali, Former CEO, Independent Sector
• Asha Curran, CEO, GivingTuesday
• Tim Delaney, Former President & CEO, National Council of Nonprofits
• Nathan Dietz, Associate Research Professor; Research Director, Do Good Institute; Director, Do Good Lab, University of Maryland
• Phyllis Harris, General Counsel and Chief Government Relations Officer, American Red Cross
• Eileen R. Heisman, Former CEO, National Philanthropic Trust
• David Kass, Executive Director, Americans for Tax Fairness, Former Vice President, Government Affairs and Legal Resources, Council on Foundations
• Ben Kershaw, Director, Public Policy and Government Relations, Independent Sector
• Douglas F. Kridler, President and CEO, The Columbus Foundation
• Leslie Lenkowsky, Professor Emeritus of Public Affairs and Philanthropic Studies, Indiana University
• Sara Lomelin, CEO, Philanthropy Together
• Ray Madoff, Professor, Boston College Law School; Director and Co-founder, Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good
• Tyesha Maddox, Associate Professor, Fordham University
• Jeffrey Moore, Chief Strategy Officer, Independent Sector
• Jude O’Reilley, Former CEO, VolunteerMatch
• Una Osili, Associate Dean for Research, and International Programs; Dean’s Fellow, Mays Family Institute on Diverse Philanthropy, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University
• Josh Packard, Co-Founder, Future of Faith
• Alex L. Reid, Partner, BakerHostetler
• Woodrow Rosenbaum, Chief Data Officer, GivingTuesday
• Michael D. Smith, CEO, AmeriCorps
• Benjamin Soskis, Senior Research Associate, Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, Urban Institute
• C. Eugene Steuerle, Co-founder, Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy
• Sandra Swirski, Founder, Integer, LLC
• Piyush Tantia, Chief Innovation Officer, ideas42
• Mary Thomas, President and CEO CFLeads
• Christina McWilson Thomas, Director, Government Relations, American Red Cross
• Akilah Watkins, CEO, Independent Sector
• Jennifer Weinstock, Executive Vice President, Philanthropy, Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston
• Elise Westhoff, Former President and CEO, The Philanthropy Roundtable
• Robert Wexler, Senior Counsel, Adler & Colvin

Working Group (2018–2021)

Initially incubated as an idea by the Giving Institute, a cross-sector Working Group prepared the Generosity Commission for launch by raising seed capital, funding early research, developing partnerships and hiring a support team. They were responsible for the ideation, creation, development and launch of the Generosity Commission. The Working Group ceased operations following the launch of the Generosity Commission in 2021.

• Bill Antholis, Director and CEO, Miller Center, University of Virginia
• Jon Biedermann, President and CEO, Biedermann Group
• Jeffrey Byrne, Co-Founder and CEO, Byrne Pelofsky + Associates, LLC
• Sonya Campion, President, Campion Advocacy Fund
• Sue Cunningham, President and CEO, Council for Advancement and Support of Education
• Asha Curran, CEO, GivingTuesday
• Rick Dunham, Founder and Chairman, Dunham + Company
• Derrick Feldmann, Managing Director, Ad Council Research Institute
• Peter Fissinger, Principal, Fissinger Fundraising LLC; former President & CEO, Campbell & Company
• Stephanie Fuerstner Gillis, Director, Impact Driven Philanthropy Initiative, Raikes Foundation
• John Glier, CEO, Grenzebach Glier & Associates
• Allison Grayson, Consultant at AloDay Consulting; Former Director, Policy Development and Analysis, Independent Sector
• Ted Grossnickle (Chair), Senior Consultant and Founder, Johnson Grossnickle + Associates
• Eileen R. Heisman, Former CEO, National Philanthropic Trust
• Rachel Hutchisson, Former VP, Global Social Responsibility, Blackbaud
• Clyde B. Jones III, Former Senior VP, Institutional Advancement, Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Robert Kissane, Former Chairman, CCS Fundraising
• Ann Limberg, Head of Philanthropic and Family Office Solutions, Bank of America
• Robert Lindgren, President, Randolph-Macon College
• Michael Lomax, President and CEO, United Negro College Fund
• Kim Meredith, CEO, San Francisco General Hospital Foundation
• Tony Mestres, CEO, The Sobrato Organization; Former CEO, Seattle Foundation
• Jeffrey Moore, Chief Strategy Officer, Independent Sector
• Matt Nash, Executive Director, The Blackbaud Giving Fund
• Natalye Paquin, COO, The Rockefeller Foundation
• Amir Pasic, Dean, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University
• Amy Pirozzolo, Head of Marketing, Fidelity Charitable
• Jerre Stead, Chair Emeritus, Former Executive Chairman and CEO, Clarivate
• Jane Wales, Vice President, Philanthropy and Society, Aspen Institute and Executive Director of its
• Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation
• Anne Wallestad, Executive Leadership Coach and Principal, Anne Wallestad Coaching LLC; Former CEO, BoardSource

Generosity Commission Team

• Kelli Gabbert, Senior Programs and Partnerships Lead (2021-2024)
• Ted Grossnickle, Counselor (2021-2024)
• Kinga Horvath, Intern (2018)
• Matt Nash, Executive Director, Working Committee (2018-2020)
• Benjamin Soskis, Editor, The Generosity Commission Report (2022-2024)
• Yvonne Thomas, Executive Director (2020-2021)

Steering Committee (2021–2024)

Composed of the leadership of the Giving Institute and Giving USA Foundation™, the Steering Committee provided administrative, financial, and legal oversight to the Generosity Commission, an independent project of both organizations. The committee included the following over the course of four years:

• Suzy Antounian, Director, The Generosity Commission
• Brenda B. Asare, President and CEO, Alford Group; Chair, The Giving Institute
• Erin Berggren, Executive Director, The Giving Institute & Giving USA Foundation™
• Jon Biedermann, President and CEO, Biedermann Group
• Joshua Birkholz, CEO, BWF
• Rick Dunham, Founder and Chairman, Dunham + Company
• Peter Fissinger, Principal, Fissinger Fundraising LLC; former President & CEO, Campbell & Company Ted Grossnickle, Senior Consultant and Founder, Johnson, Grossnickle + Associates
• Paul Koreen, Partner, Chief Operating Officer, KCI
• Christopher Looney, Founder and CEO, Fulcrum Nonprofit Leadership; Former Principal and Managing Director, CCS Fundraising
• Laura MacDonald, Principal and Founder, Benefactor Group
• Wendy McGrady, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, The Curtis Group; Chair, Giving USA Foundation™
• Lauren Steiner, Founder, Grants Plus
• Jane Wales, Co-Chair, The Generosity Commission; Vice President, Philanthropy and Society, Aspen Institute and Executive Director, Program on Philanthropy and Social Innovation