Hoosier Hills Food Bank is just one of many agencies relying on donor generosity to meet increased need from the pandemic. (Courtesy photo)
Generous donors set a record for U.S. charitable giving in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite an economic downturn. In 2020, charitable giving in the U.S. swelled to more than $471 billion, according to the report Giving USA, surpassing 2019 giving by $23 billion. About $65 billion more went to human services support organizations in 2020 over 2019, according to researchers at IUPUI’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, who put out the report. Foundations stepped up, increasing their giving by more than 15 percent. Individual donors stepped up too, researchers said. Even the number of smaller gifts – those under $250 – rose substantially.
Sherri Shuler, resource development director for the United Way of Monroe County, has noticed the national trends are being borne out locally. There are fewer individual donors, but they’re giving more generously. And she’s seen an upsurge in both new and younger donors.
“We saw a number of people call us and email us wanting to say how can I help,” Shuler said. “I’ve got money in savings, I’m getting this money from the government that I don’t need, I’m going to turn this over to you guys to help as many people as you can.”
With this support, the United Way raised $1.6 million for a newly created COVID Relief fund. That’s in addition to the $1.2 million raised for its annual fund.
“What we were expecting and what we were seeing from other organizations and other United Ways across the county was the potential for a huge drop in our funding,” Shuler said.
But the drop didn’t happen. Shuler said annual fund giving remained on par with the previous year. Those dollars went not just to Monroe County programs, but also to programs in Brown, Owen and Greene counties.
The need to help people was not new. United Way’s 2020-2021 Report to the Community states: “We didn’t need a pandemic to know people in the community were hurting.” One in five people in the community are in full-blown poverty, it states, and another third live just above the poverty line.
“We touch one in three people in our community, which is pretty staggering when you think about it,” Shuler said.
The increased need created by the pandemic and the surge of donor support caused the United Way to rethink its efforts and expand its footprint to support more community programs.
Julio Alonso is the executive director of the Hoosier Hills Food Bank, a United Way partner agency that collects and distributes over 5 million pounds of food to nearly 100 non-profit agencies in Brown, Lawrence, Martin, Monroe, Orange, and Owen counties each year.
Alonso said he’s seen both need and giving increase because of the pandemic. Need, he says, went “through the roof” in 2020. The food bank budgeted $90,000 to buy food to supplement donations in 2020 based on its 2019 spending. But it ended up spending a little over $1.1 million that year on food. He said the amount of food Hoosier Hills Food Bank distributed in 2020 and 2021 is more food than in any year prior to the pandemic.
“2020 was our largest year ever in history,” he said. “2021 is already our second largest year in our history.”
Alonso said the pandemic brought food insecurity into sharper focus. People who may not have been previously food insecure suddenly didn’t have enough money to buy food – whether because their hours were cut, they lost their jobs, or other factors. The food bank’s institutional giving increased in 2020, which allowed it to increase the amount of food it purchased. But those types of grants dropped off significantly in 2021, Alonso said. Fortunately, the food bank’s donors stepped up consistently. Individual giving increased significantly during 2020, Alonso said, and was higher than normal in 2021. Even new donors have shown consistent dedication.
“An upside of the pandemic was that a lot of people who had not been donors to us before became aware of our work and the need and started supporting us,” Alonso said. “And we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to retain them as ongoing supporters.”
Alonso also said that during the latter part of 2020, when both giving and food purchasing was at a record high, 100 percent of the agencies his organization serves reported Hoosier Hills Food Bank was meeting their needs for food.
“That had never happened before – it has always been significantly lower than that - and we were able to sustain that for a little while into 2021,” he said.
But when those agencies were surveyed again in November 2021, one fifth said they were not getting as much food as they needed. Alonso said he would love to get back to meeting all their food needs.
Brad Pontius, the local and global engagement director at Sherwood Oaks Christian Church, said with the COVID pandemic taking so much from so many, he too has noticed a surge in giving.
“It seems to me that there’s been an interesting awareness of urgency and need around us, and opportunities to give,” he said. “So, people have been actually more generous during these times.”
In the past two years, the church has sponsored multiple local and global initiatives – what he calls a smorgasbord of giving options -- for which it’s raised thousands of dollars and collected truckloads of goods. That included more than $200,000 for under-resourced families and four large trailers full of clothing and supplies for Afghan evacuees housed at Camp Atterbury. From Pontius’ perspective, new needs such as refugee support don’t detract from old ones.
“It’s like generosity really does breed generosity,” he said.
Pontius, Alonso and Shuler all say they’ve noticed another national trend: more younger donors. Shuler describes it as almost an awakening to the realities of pandemic-related economic shocks being visible right in their own communities.
“They saw the reality that the community was really going to be in trouble if people didn’t step up. I think younger people just realized that in spades,” she said.
Pontius said he’s seeing faith-based millennials putting their money behind their social values.
“We’ve got a lot of hope for our younger folks who are really connected in – they’re willing to sacrifice, and they want to see institutions that are willing to do that, too,” he said. “For the church to just kind of hold on to their own and kind of make their, you know, sanctuaries more posh or whatever, isn’t really of interest to the younger set. They want to see it going out and want to see faith making a difference.”
But what about donor fatigue? Pontius, Shuler and Alonso say they aren’t currently seeing any signs of it.
“I believe that people’s desire to give is pretty strong. So, it sounds like blue sky, but actually we’re living it,” Pontius said.
Both Alonso and Shuler say the recovery from pandemic-related shocks could take several years.
“It’s hard enough to just live a regular life, much less have to put your life back together once it’s been fragmented,” Shuler said.
The six-county region Hoosier Hills Food Bank serves had a high level of food insecurity to begin with – something Alonso said people tend forget. So “normal” is not his goal.
“We want to do better than we were doing prior to the pandemic,” he said. “We’d like to help bring people up to a higher level so that they’re not quite so vulnerable.”
A report from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project indicates that in the first half of 2021 giving “remained roughly the same or even a little higher.” Social service agencies hope donors will continue to be generous so they can, too.
