(Illustration by iStock/Ekaterina Pushina)
A few weeks ago, a close friend approached me to join in a giving circle supporting families facing financial hardship in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. I accepted the invitation without a second thought. And I was not the only one: In less than 24 hours, a circle of 25 donors from my friend’s personal networks was formed, with monthly giving orders placed to regularly meet the needs of a group of vulnerable families identified by volunteers. No questions were asked, nor concerns raised about how the money would be spent. The first family received assistance the following day.
If I had been solicited to donate directly to individual victims before the pandemic, I would not only have declined, but I would have tried to convince my friend to give to a charity working for the eradication of poverty, in a systematic manner, advocating for policy change or holding government to account for its responsibility to take care of those who are in need of social assistance. And as someone who has studied and promoted strategic giving and development of organized civil society for more than 15 years, I still strongly believe in the importance of supporting systems change work that attacks root causes of problems rather than treating symptoms of the problems through the acts of benevolence.
However, I am not the only person who has gone far outside of their usual donation path during the pandemic. The pandemic and related lock-down not only gave rise to charitable giving but triggered a different type of generosity compared to other disasters and difficult times in history.
Here are some highlights about how COVID-19 is shifting household giving:
Pressing Needs Lifted Up Causes Linked to the Crisis … While Leaving Others Behind
The amount donated to charities in the UK on Giving Tuesday was up by almost half this year despite the restrictions on in-person fundraising activities. But this doesn’t mean that households increased their giving to the same causes they used to support: Support grew for causes linked to the crisis, while causes like animal shelters, disability support groups, and homeless shelters saw a big hit to donations (even while facing extraordinary new financial pressures). Similarly, 21 percent of US households indicated that their giving to charitable organizations focused on purposes besides basic needs/health and religion (e.g., education, arts, the environment) decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. US households prioritized giving to meet the pressing needs of those in their area.
While all nonprofits face new challenges, the financial impact of the crisis has been uneven: Environmental, education, arts and culture organizations are least likely to get gifts while charitable giving for social services remains steady. Since donations make up an important part of small to mid-size nonprofit revenues, nonprofits that see a serious drop in donations may have to shift focus and approach following the current changes in the nature of charitable giving. While some of them resort to layoffs, reduce operations, or merge with other organizations in order to survive, for others it will be almost impossible to recover, and they will be forced to shut their doors. This requires those that are not providing direct COVID-19 relief to communicate effectively with donors regarding the interconnectedness between their causes and the challenges we are all experiencing during the pandemic.
Mutual Aid Is Rising
So many mutual aid groups have been flourishing over the pandemic. Mutual aid, far from being a new concept, means voluntary and reciprocal exchanges of resources and services, often among members of struggling communities for meeting their own needs and addressing underlying social causes behind hardship based on principles of cooperation, solidarity, care, and direct action. Most recently, in the context of pandemic, we see more and more ordinary people come together in the spirit of solidarity and engage in mutual support to protect the most vulnerable in their community and beyond. Inspiring stories have been emerging about neighbors helping neighbors with hardship. Mutual aid groups took on various tasks such as collecting groceries, supplying masks, sanitizers, and medicine, sharing information, offering emotional support, tutoring children.
This highly localized approach to supporting communities seems to be working because smaller mutual aid groups are able to act quickly and provide locally specific support. Mutual aid is also distinguished from top-down resource distribution by its focus on reciprocity, horizontality, and equality. Mutual aid groups remove the divide between helper and helped and dismiss means test to assess whether the person effectively lacks sufficient resources. In this way, they not only reach out to people left behind by other relief programs but also go beyond crisis relief and offer community empowerment.
The question is whether mutual aid groups will be dissolved after the end of the crisis, if the sense of urgency disappears and people go back to their routine, or whether the rediscovery of mutual aid in the northern hemisphere signals the start of a long-term phenomenon. If mutual aid is here to stay, nonprofit practitioners will need to figure out whether mutual aid expands the civic space or crowds out the support for top-down, professionally-organized civil society by applying more participatory, inclusive, and hands-on methods and engaging ordinary people in community affairs.
Solidarity Is Coming Together With Social Justice Activism
Some commentators argue that these self-organized, spontaneous community efforts serve to compensate for states’ failure or unwillingness to provide welfare functions. While some of the mutual aid groups are less ideological and view their activities in terms of short-term crisis response, others see COVID-19 aid as an opportunity to work towards transformative change. Although I am cautious about the risk of instrumentalization of mutual aid by governments to pursue their own political agendas, I firmly believe in the potential of mutual aid for creating new commons and building bottom-up structures of cooperation. Even the very simple act of building social relations among neighbors from diverse backgrounds in our polarized societies can be considered a form of everyday activism.
This renewed sense of community and alternative social relationships based on solidarity, reciprocity, and inclusion can change prevailing ideas about how society works and sow the seeds of long term social and political change. In addition to prefiguring a radically different society, mutual aid shifts our understanding of inequalities in access to basic services and rights away from abstract societal issues toward local realities affecting real people living in our geographic proximity. This kind of awareness and personal connection with social justice causes is likely to increase people’s civic and political engagement.
More Expansive Forms of Generosity Are Emerging
Just as the pandemic is unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes, the responses to it are different, more creative and resourceful. According to a recent report from Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Women’s Philanthropy Institute, nearly half of households in the USA gave indirectly in response to the pandemic during the early months of the crisis (for example, by ordering takeout to support restaurants and their employees or continuing to pay individuals and businesses for services they could not render). The share of households participating in these unique forms of philanthropy far surpassed the share of those giving directly to charitable organizations, individuals, or businesses in response to the crisis during this time. This is an important finding to show that declines in measured household giving do not mean less generosity, care for one’s fellow citizens, or support for communities. We need to start recognizing and celebrating different kinds of informal giving and develop adequate measures.
Likewise, another study with young Americans (ages 18-30) in April 2020, found that these individuals engaged in a variety of activities to help others during the crisis, including starting to purchase or increasing their purchase of local products or services (26 percent), donating goods or services (24 percent), and posting or sharing content on social media about COVID-19 prevention (21 percent). Taking all these acts of kindness into consideration, our understanding of generosity behavior becomes much richer, inclusive, and complete than formal measures of household giving.
Insights From the Social and Behavioral Sciences
The conditions created by the pandemic influence how much people give, whom to give, what to give, and how to give. Of course, several factors, such as age, gender, economic stability, and exposure to COVID-19 have an influence on our pro-social behavior, so do neural, biological, and emotional mechanisms. Insights from the social and behavioral sciences can be useful for understanding why charitable giving is changing and becoming more localized and expansive.
1. Social distancing urges us to reconnect with others to cope with psychological distress. While social distancing has been effective at flattening the curve of infection, it has had significant negative effects on mental health (leading to psychological distress like depression, anxiety, and stress) as found in recent research. Humans are by their nature social animals and have a fundamental need for connection with one another: As neuroscientist and social psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains, evolution made us more social, more connected to and dependent on the social world to ensure that humans thrive as a species; hence our brains suffer from threat to social bonds in much the same way we experience physical pain.
The neural link between social and physical pain urges us to reach out to and interact with others. Caring for others, especially informal helping, increases the sense of social connectedness and becomes the best way to combat social pain and loneliness. By engaging in acts of kindness we are not contributing to the common good but responding to our survival need.
2. Reawakening to our collective vulnerability creates a sense of collaboration. Not everyone reacts to stress in the same way, whether fight-or-flight or tend-and-befriend mode. But the tend-and-befriend response to COVID-19 involves caring for ourselves and those close to us, as well as building collective self-help networks to reduce vulnerability and exchange resources and responsibilities. Alex Evans of Collective Psychology Project suggests that the pandemic incites our “tend-and-befriend” nature to the extent that we consider ourselves part of a larger us, feel like we can shape our lives and have mental space to deliberatively reflect on and choose how to react to events instead of being driven by fear and anxiety.
3. The problem of numbers. Some argue that the surge of generosity during the COVID-19 pandemic is due to the sheer magnitude of the crisis, but the brain’s inability to make sense of big numbers makes it difficult to process tragedy of this scale, and concern for those in distress does not tend to rise in parallel to the increase in cases. On the contrary, the more our attention is divided by multiple victims, the less emotion we feel and action we take to support them. Individual stories of pain and small groups of victims trigger more empathy and compassion than statistics.
In addition to numeracy bias, a false feeling of inefficacy has an enormous impact on how and whether people provide aid. Thinking about one’s inability to remedy all sufferings triggers feelings of hopelessness and diminishes the warm glow from helping an individual victim. As a result, individuals tend to give toward identifiable victims rather than statistical victims. This may be one reason why households prefer helping people in their surrounding environment.
4. Feeling collective. The notion that “we’re all in this together” and the virus threatens everyone (although not equally) creates a collective emotional experience. Research shows sharing adverse experiences may increase cooperative behavior within groups, leading individuals to mutually seek and provide support to one another. While these negative experiences enhance ingroup cooperation, they also fuel polarization, and intergroup bias toward outgroup members, thus contribute to conflict, discrimination, and exclusion.
We Need Critical Reflection About the Localization of Charitable Giving
COVID-19 has driven a surge in “localism” around the world, bringing increased attention to pressing needs within our communities and the responsibility to take care of one another as well as fears about the end of globalization. As The Economist wrote, “Wave goodbye to the greatest era of globalization—and worry about what is going to take its place.” Similar concerns have been echoed in the philanthropic community.
However, we don’t need to feel threatened by the localization of philanthropy or the rise of new forms of giving; we simply need to recognize various ways in which individuals express their charitable impulses. These are important developments for nonprofits to watch and understand not only to remain relevant and resonate with citizens but also to build on these recent practices to empower communities. Much attention has been placed on responses of institutional philanthropy and how philanthropic foundations do/can support the resilience of nonprofits. How charitable giving by households—as we know it—has been changing amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been overshadowed by these discussions.
In the face of growing critiques of big-money philanthropy, there have been calls to extend our definition and understanding of philanthropy beyond formalized actions and recognize the value of everyday giving by ordinary people. Making philanthropy more democratic, accessible, and inclusive is necessary not to tackle philanthropy’s “image problem,” rather to bring back the classic notion of civil society response to local problem solving, which will be more needed than ever for regenerating trust and collective sense of caring in the post-COVID era.
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Read more stories by Sevda Kilicalp.