The messages of today’s most prominent philanthropic leaders may be rubbing people the wrong way.
Maybe Americans are more likely to believe that nonprofits can accomplish feeding the hungry than abolishing poverty and oppression. They’re not wrong.
A lmost half of Americans believe that nonprofits are on the “wrong track,” and only a third believe that they contribute a lot to society. That’s according to a new poll commissioned by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. The poll of 1,300 people conducted in the summer of 2022 may only confirm what statistics have been showing: a general decline in giving over the past few years. But falling confidence in charities may also be the result of messages from the so-called Independent Sector that have made people less confident in nonprofits.
First, it is important to note that there is a lot of confusion about exactly what a nonprofit is. The category includes everything from a church soup kitchen to a large hospital chain to organizations of political activists to art museums and symphony orchestras. When a poll asks the public about nonprofit organizations, it’s not clear what they are referring to. So while only 5 percent thought that someone in their immediate family had been helped by a nonprofit, more than 10 percent of Americans actually work for one. Would someone who had been treated for a broken bone at a Catholic hospital report that they had been helped by a nonprofit? Probably not, but these are the categories we have.
Americans do have more confidence in nonprofits than they do in Congress or the business sector to solve global or societal problems, but that’s not saying much. It’s still less than 15 percent. The study found “that younger individuals, those with more education, and donors were significantly more confident in the ability of nonprofit organizations to problem-solve compared to older individuals, those with less education, and nondonors.”
It makes sense that donors are more likely to have confidence in nonprofits or they wouldn’t be donating to them, but this may also be an instance of confirmation bias. And maybe some nondonors and older individuals have a different idea about what nonprofits are supposed to be doing anyway. Perhaps they are not supposed to solve global or societal problems in the ways activists explain. While it is not uncommon to hear leading philanthropists and nonprofit heads talk about the need to end racism or solve global warming, few ordinary Americans may believe those goals are within the purview of nonprofits, or are perhaps solvable at all.
In his recently updated book, From Generosity to Justice, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker explains that the role of philanthropy, like the famous description of muckraking journalism, is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” While most Americans would probably agree with the former, the latter claim would seem bizarre. What does it even mean? Walker maintains that “afflicting the comfortable compels us to recognize the inequalities that make relief both necessary and possible; caste, as Isabel Wilkerson perfectly phrases it; decades of Ayn-Rand, Milton-Friedman, greed-is-good excess; the conscious choices that aggregate into a conscienceless capitalism.” Ending the free-market system as we know it is probably not the aim that most Americans would ascribe to nonprofits.
While Walker claims that philanthropy cannot “entirely” fix our economic and political systems, he believes it is the job of this sector to try. For instance, philanthropy should be engaged in reforming democratic institutions. But whether he has broader support from the American public for these efforts is another story.
When asked whether organizations with tax-exempt status should be able to pursue a variety of goals, disaster relief received overwhelming support (94.6 percent) while improving racial equity got 73.1 percent. The closer nonprofits got to politics, the less support their activities seemed to garner from the public. Voter registration — something that nonprofit and philanthropic leaders often cite as part of a nonpartisan “promotion of democracy” — only got support from a little more than half of respondents, while promotion of political candidates or political campaigns only received 14.2 percent support.
Indeed, Walker manages to turn what Americans traditionally think of as the role of philanthropy on its head: “If bringing canned goods to a food bank to help feed people in the community is a kind of charity — and if advocating for food stamps, free school lunches and a living wage reflects a deeper kind of social obligation — then dismantling the systems of poverty and oppression that prevent people from being able to afford healthy food in the first place is delivering justice.”
In this formulation, the highest level of charity is political activism. Americans are less likely to give than they have been in the past, down from 85 percent 20 years ago to about half today. Why? Some of it is secularization — religious people tend to give more. But the messages of today’s most prominent philanthropic leaders may simply be rubbing people the wrong way. Maybe Americans are more likely to believe that nonprofits can accomplish feeding the hungry than abolishing poverty and oppression. They’re not wrong.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.