Report Finds Significant Charitable Activity Outside of Nonprofits GivingTuesday
go to original April 9, 2022

A holistic approach to measuring generosity requires looking beyond financial transactions. If we continue to look at “giving” as being defined as monetary transactions between donors, institutional foundations and registered charities, we’re looking at only a small piece of the full picture. The world of giving is interconnected and interdependent, involving human behavior, cultural traditions, giving efforts both structured and unstructured, and grassroots leadership, all of which have enormous daily, local, and global impact.

In our latest brief, the GivingTuesday Data Commons investigated community care, mutual aid, and other types of informal giving within the United States, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and Kenya. The brief provides our first broad view of patterns of nonmonetary generosity around the world.

In the brief, we present some examples of informal giving from around the world, stories from people who participate in informal giving, and country-level data on how people are giving both formally and informally.

Key Takeaways:

  • In many countries giving tends to happen through unincorporated networks rather than registered organizations. Indeed, in places that exhibited strong cultures of giving, the mechanisms are often not dominated by nonprofit organizations or registered charities.

  • The survey results cast a different light on giving data in the United States. We tend to view the U.S. as the most generous country, but that’s incorrect as that view is only looking at one structure of giving that doesn’t exist everywhere else.

  • Participants in mutual aid networks tend to be more philanthropically inclined in general. They are also less likely to see distinctions between various forms of giving or between giving to organizations and other recipients.

  • In most places around the world, generosity is the default behavior, not considered as something extra, it’s ingrained in their cultures and societies.

  • People around the world express their generosity in many ways. No matter where, it is rare that people only give in one way.

  • 12% of respondents indicated they had participated in a mutual aid network in the past 12 months

  • 76% of younger respondents (18-34) agreed with the statement “I prefer to give directly to individuals-in-need, and not via nonprofit organizations, platforms, or websites,” while 46% of those 50+ agreed with the same statement.

This is not to say that one form of giving is preferable over others. On the contrary, understanding the diverse landscape of generosity shows us that encouraging more types of giving begets more giving of all types.

It’s important to note that this is a snapshot of generous behavior and isn’t an exhaustive view of the myriad ways people step up beyond formally recorded actions. This brief is an initial look that helps us understand baseline aspects of mutual care and presents us with additional questions that we are eager to explore with our collaborators across sectors.

GivingTuesday is dedicated to leading further exploration of the topic. The GivingTuesday Data Commons will deploy and release weekly survey data in 2022 that will illuminate a wider range of giving behaviors and provide useful data and insights for nonprofits, funders, researchers, and community organizers.

Find the full report here.

Join GivingTuesday Thursday, April 14th at 1pm ET / 5pm GMT for a discussion on the history and traditions of giving in communities, how people organize around their giving – and how they think about the impact of mutual aid and direct community care, and problems with being prescriptive with how we measure impact. Register here.

Read the rest at GivingTuesday

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