Local food banks with fewer volunteers. Community fundraisers falling short. Across the country, a sense that neighbors don’t help neighbors like they used to anymore and a resulting giving crisis.

It’s a hunch corroborated by more than a decade of declines in American giving and volunteering trends that experts warn could have consequences stretching far beyond nonprofits’ bottom lines.

The Generosity Commission, composed of 17 experts across the philanthropic sector, has spent the last three years dissecting Americans’ dwindling participation in formal charitable giving and volunteering. Their findings about the giving crisis suggest that the decline in everyday generosity may be both a symptom of the country’s social ills, from social isolation to political polarization, and — if nonprofits can reverse the tide and embrace new forms of American generosity — a possible antidote to the giving crisis. At stake, the commission argues, is not just the health of nonprofits, but the vitality of civil society itself.

“Not only is generosity the fuel in the tank as far as American civil society goes,” said Eboo Patel, president of Interfaith America and a commission member (and a regular contributor to the Chronicle). “But it is what I would call a deeply held and widely shared value amongst diverse people. Muslim and Jewish. Republican and Democrat. Black and white.”

Indeed, 74 percent of Americans say they aspire to be generous, according to a 2022 survey by the Generosity Commission. Yet, today there are millions fewer volunteers and tens of millions fewer everyday donors than there were in the early aughts, exemplifying America's giving crisis. The share of U.S. households that donated to a charity fell from 65.4 percent in 2008 to less than half of households — 49.6 percent — in 2018, the last year for which such data exists, according to the Philanthropy Panel Study by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University.

Further in line with this giving crisis, rates of formal volunteering have seen similar declines, falling from 30 percent in 2019 to 23 percent in 2021, according to AmeriCorps, the steepest drop since the federal agency began collecting data in 2002.

Read the full article about America's giving crisis by Sara Herschander at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.