Giving Compass' Take:

• Nathan Dietz shares insights about giving in times of crisis based on charitable responses to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina that illuminate the COVID-19 charitable response. 

• What role can you play in addressing the short- and long-term needs created and exacerbated by the pandemic? 

• Learn about the individual donor's edge in addressing COVID-19. 

How has the charitable sector in the U.S. responded to the societal upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic? Now that so much of daily life is conducted online from our homes, what does civic engagement and associational life look like? What lasting effects might the crisis have on philanthropy and civic engagement in the U.S.? It’s important to understand the capacity for people and organizations to help with the crisis and recovery in order to gain a better sense of what to expect in the days, months, and years to come.

At the moment, what is known about philanthropy’s response to the crisis comes largely from anecdotal news items about specific events. In early April, when New York’s governor issued a call for health care workers, more than 90,000 people responded, only to encounter a balky, frustrating placement process that several weeks later had deployed only 900 workers. More recent reports indicate that giving and volunteering have increased in the New York area, and that many donors have shifted their focus to local rather than national causes and organizations. On a larger scale, GivingTuesday.org, which sponsors the annual Giving Tuesday event after Thanksgiving, held a special event in early May called GivingTuesdayNow that harnessed the generosity of people from 145 countries worldwide.

The nationwide response to the crisis is harder to describe because the problems are so pervasive: the pandemic and subsequent economic downturn have led to more joblessness and social dislocation since the Great Depression. Studies of previous economic downturns suggest that positive responses may be limited in scope and duration, even when the effects are felt nationally. One analysis, using data that covers a twenty-year time span, shows that, although political participation did tend to be higher in states with higher unemployment, national civic participation rates did not increase significantly during the recessionary periods of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Another study found that during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the overall positive response was limited in metropolitan areas with high foreclosure rates. In cities like Boston and Baltimore, residents organized community projects to help victims of foreclosure. Nationally, the volunteer rates were higher in metropolitan areas more affected by the foreclosure crisis, all else being equal – but only homeowners, not renters, volunteered at higher rates.

In general, most research on how the charitable sector responds to crises is limited to the hardest-hit geographical areas and focuses on the immediate response and short-term recovery efforts. For instance, in New York, the surge in interest in volunteer opportunities on the VolunteerMatch website following the September 11 attacks lasted for only three weeks; when President Bush issued his Call to Service early 2002, the needle barely moved. In New Orleans, the response to Hurricane Katrina included more than 166,000 long-distance volunteers from other states who traveled to Louisiana to volunteer in 2007. These long-distance volunteers appreciably increased the size of Louisiana’s volunteer workforce during the recovery: they comprised about 19 percent of the “total” number of volunteers in the state in 2007.

Read the full article about giving in the post-COVID era by Nathan Dietz at HistPhil.