An Ambitious New Commission Sets Out to Diagnose Civil Society’s Ills. But Will It Make a Difference

If I told you that charitable giving from middle- and lower-income Americans was down right now, you’d probably say something like, yeah, no kidding. There’s a pandemic going on, one that has wreaked massive disruption on Main Street and thrown millions out of work. While it’s true that reduced spending and federal stimulus has put more money in some Americans’ pockets, that doesn’t necessarily translate into more traditional nonprofit giving—though it may be contributing to rising prices.

And well before COVID, the 2008 recession and its aftermath proved in no uncertain terms that today’s economy is an economy of the rich, structured to channel wealth upward.

Those are only some of the reasons why news of a commission intended, in part, to galvanize giving from “everyday” Americans seems a bit tone-deaf right now. Set in motion by the Giving Institute and the Giving USA Foundation, the Generosity Commission is an expansive, multi-year effort that aims “not only to understand trends around generosity, but to also point to the future of philanthropy and other forms of civic engagement in America.”

Reenergizing middle and lower-class giving is not the commission’s only aim, but it is a key element of the agenda. The initial press release highlighted data showing that over the last decade, charitable giving and volunteer rates among middle and lower-income households have taken a nosedive, making the nonprofit donor base increasingly top-heavy. And even though the rich are no more generous in relative terms than their less amply resourced peers, the sheer magnitude of their rising wealth is exacerbating that trend.

Part of the commission’s work—supported by $2 million and counting from a cadre of foundations and other funders—will be to examine why and in what ways civil society in the U.S. is ailing, and what can be done to reinvigorate it.

The actual commission is made up of 17 people, described as “a group of diverse, nonpartisan, ideologically balanced leaders across social, public and private sectors.” Over the next two years or so, they will oversee a variety of research and engagement to develop “relevant recommendations, actionable policies and specific steps” before a final report goes out in 2023.

Beyond the question of declining small-donor giving, the commission also wants to tackle the broader ways in which generosity and civil association are changing. “Today, we face new questions about the nature of our democracy, our social contract and civic identity; the roles of the government, private and nonprofit sectors in our society; and how to ensure that all Americans are included,” said the commission’s Chair Jane Wales, vice president at the Aspen Institute. “The Generosity Commission will work to answer these immensely important questions.”

While it’s good that the commission recognizes it’s walking on shifting ground, you have to wonder whether this blue-ribbon initiative can have any real effect. The factors underlying this drop in “everyday giving” are deep-rooted and hard to reverse. And the commission’s efforts to pitch a broad tent may limit its ability to proceed with the intrepidness the moment demands, especially in such a polarized climate.

In the footsteps of the Filer Commission

The Generosity Commission takes many of its cues from a similar effort back in the 1970s—the Commission on Private Philanthropy and Public Needs, often referred to as the “Filer Commission” after its chair, John H. Filer. That commission was spearheaded by John D. Rockefeller III and several others, and took on the task of studying philanthropy and the charitable sector with an eye toward influencing its regulation. In a parallel to the present day, legislative reform of the civil sector was very much on the table at the time—indeed, the Tax Reform Act of 1969 had been passed not long prior.

In a good overview of the new Generosity Commission in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Alex Daniels discussed how the Filer Commission “spurred the creation of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) and was instrumental in the creation of Independent Sector,” and helped give rise to the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

What the Chronicle didn’t explore deeply was the fact that NCRP was actually created in opposition to the commission’s initial positioning. Pablo Eisenberg, one of NCRP’s founders, gave a firsthand account of those events in HistPhil back in 2016, recalling how NCRP originated from a “donee group” representing grant recipients who had to fight ingrained patrician attitudes among the original commission, mostly comprised of funders and other high-status individuals.

A half-century later, today’s Generosity Commission looks quite different from the Filer Commission, not least in its inclusion of many more women and a greater proportion of people of color. However, the majority of the current commission’s members are in the business of giving, not getting, and nearly all of them represent large national organizations.

Much of the Generosity Commission’s work will be informed by COVID-driven paradigm shifts, but the idea for some kind of successor to the Filer Commission goes back to the years following the 2008 recession, when it became clear that traditional measures of civil society participation were on the decline. In 2018, the commission (then overseen by a now-disbanded working committee) embarked on a literature review to understand the trends behind the trends, before the official commission convened. The results of that review are summarized here—more on all that in a bit.

A mostly conventional group

Wales and other figures in the new commission have acknowledged that much of its work has yet to take shape, and that more research is needed to understand the role and scope of forms of giving that are either newer (like social media giving and digital crowdfunding) or not traditionally considered a part of the nonprofit establishment in the U.S.

Yet the composition of the Generosity Commission does give us some initial insight into its potential for bold critique. It’s hard to know exactly how things will play out, and the commission may deliver some surprises, but right off the bat, it’s hard to imagine anything too radical. As noted above, there isn’t any representation from smaller community-based entities, and few members from particularly hard-hitting advocacy organizations (or their funders) on either side of the aisle. A few exceptions might be Michael McAfee of PolicyLink and possibly Valerie Rockefeller—hardly of revolutionary lineage herself, but chair of the progressive Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

In what Daniels called “an effort to broker agreement between conservative and progressive groups,” the panel also includes Heather Templeton Dill of the John Templeton Foundation and Wendy Guillies of the Kauffman Foundation; both organizations have funded work to advance free-market principles and practices. But there aren’t any representatives of diehard movement conservative organizations on the panel, nor their main funders. For the most part, the commission is made up of people from the nonprofit mainstream rather than anyone too far to either side politically, nor anyone who might easily lay claim to the term “grassroots.”

The same goes for the commission’s actual funders. Several are organizations represented on the commission—the Gates Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Other big names include the Lilly Endowment, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Fidelity Charitable and Blackbaud. Again, not the most avant-garde group, nor the most committed to radical change in the sector.

This is a potential weakness, despite Wales’ insistence in the Chronicle that “knowing who is on the commission, I expect that we won’t shy away from hard questions.”

Tough trends

If that’s true, and the commission is eager to dig into hard questions, one of the hardest is what to do about inequality, a root cause of many troubling philanthropic trends. The researchers who conducted the pre-commission literature review acknowledged that slow post-recession recovery for everyday households prefigured a decline in their giving. Economic privation and the need to work low-quality jobs may also be eating into the time regular Americans previously spent volunteering.

We work more and make less money, so it only stands to reason we would be engaging less with civil society. How is a commission that is framing this as a problem of generosity going to counter that hard reality?

Then there’s the problem of perceived futility. An environment of worsening inequality, the growing importance of major donors, and deference to them among nonprofits may reduce public faith that small donations even matter. Why send your hard-earned $50 to an organization that could really use $500,000 and spends most of its development budget catering to donors with that kind of money, anyway?

The literature review also mentioned secularization, another major factor in declining everyday giving and a weakened traditional civil sector. As American society grows less religious, the average citizen’s notion of charity is becoming less faith-based and embracing other markers of cultural and political identity. Note that both examples of currently flourishing giving that Wales cited for the Chronicle relate to political hot buttons: providing aid to migrants at the southern border and protecting elderly Asian Americans from harassment.

The Generosity Commission will also have to reckon with a longstanding decline in the traditional forms of social capital that have propped up civil society as it’s long been conceived. It’s been several decades since Robert Putnam penned “Bowling Alone,” and even back then, he wasn’t writing about trends that had only just begun. Since then, the early Silicon Valley dream of a freely connected world has faltered amid corporate dominion and a pandemic has normalized the otherwise absurd concept of social distancing. These are not encouraging developments for the social sector.

Why all the American exceptionalism?

Still, it’s too easy to look at a dip in small-donor giving and foretell the end of civil society. The reality is that in the U.S. and around the world, a vast universe of giving practices and new forms of civil association are alive and well. That includes practices of community support and mutual aid that go back centuries or even millennia—including Indigenous traditions—as well as much newer examples.

Last year, I wrote about an online fundraising group called One In An ARMY, composed of fans of the Korean pop group BTS living all over the world. Following a $1 million donation from BTS to support the Black Lives Matter movement last summer, One In An Army rallied the fandom to match and exceed that number, raising well over $1 million for BLM-affiliated groups from over 40,000 donors.

Civil association today can look radically different than anything Robert Putnam was thinking about back in the 1990s, in part because digital technology can bring together like-minded people who may never meet in person. There’s also a real conversation to be had about how the old model of American civil society, for all its virtues, is too restrictive or even oppressive an ideal to be workable today.

However, as Cathy Garcia of Philanthropy Con Cafe pointed out on Twitter, the Generosity Commission has leaned into language positioning the practice of philanthropy as “uniquely (white) American.”

I got the same sense of American exceptionalism from much of the commission’s messaging. It’s possible to study the culture and practice of giving in the U.S. without waxing poetic about how uniquely generous Americans are, especially when we actually aren’t.

Despite all that, at least the Generosity Commission appears willing to examine a wide set of questions and take less for granted than the men in charge of its predecessor back in the 1970s. Whether it’ll actually do so, or if anything concrete comes of this, remains to be seen.

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