Something interesting is happening in the way Americans talk about giving. It is not only about which causes matter most, or which organisations feel most credible. Increasingly, generosity itself is being judged by how it feels to take part.
In our recent US donor research, we set out to understand how a volatile political moment is reshaping nonprofit engagement. What emerged was not one neat national story, but a more personal, immediate and participatory culture of giving. Donors were not simply switching from one type of cause to another. They were rethinking what it means to help.
One of the strongest shifts was towards closer, more direct support: local food pantries, homeless shelters, school supply drives, Amazon wish lists, neighbours organising for neighbours. In the research, local charities carried a clear trust advantage: more likely than national or international charities to be seen as very trustworthy. But the bigger point is not just localism as a geography. It is localism as a feeling. Giving close to home offers something that can be harder for larger institutions to provide: the sense that your action is visible, useful and morally accountable. You buy the nappies. You drop off the food. You see the shelter. You can imagine the person who receives the ChapStick you ordered from a wish list. The cause matters, of course, but so does the act itself.
In short, generosity is becoming less like delegation and more like participation. The older model asks people to trust an organisation to take their money and do the right thing with it. The newer mode asks them to feel part of the doing: buying supplies, sharing directly, volunteering, amplifying, turning up. For many donors, the emotional reward now sits as much in the action as in the outcome.
This is something we have also seen in our UK work. There has been growing energy around grassroots organisations, community-led responses and forms of support that feel closer to people’s everyday lives – especially since Covid. Large institutions can still be trusted and valued, particularly where they bring expertise, infrastructure or reach. But they also have to work harder to avoid feeling distant from the need they exist to address. What feels stronger in the US is the intensity of the move away from institutions as the default route to impact. The political context certainly matters. For some left-leaning donors, local action feels like solidarity in the face of hostile national politics. For some right-leaning donors, it speaks to dignity, self-reliance, faith and community repair. The same behaviour can carry very different moral vocabularies. But across these differences, people are often seeking the same thing: a way to help that feels tangible, human and worth believing in.
For national nonprofits - especially in a country as large as the US, but in the UK too - this creates a relevance test. It is no longer enough to raise awareness of a cause, or assume that scale will automatically inspire confidence. Scale needs to be translated into visible outcomes. National reach needs to be rooted in named places, local partners and real-world routes to impact. And giving needs to feel relational, not just transactional.
The opportunity is not for big charities to pretend to be small. It is to show how their size can serve and amplify the kind of generosity people are gravitating towards: immediate, practical, emotionally meaningful and connected to the people or places affected.
If you’d like to find out more or to see the slides from our US research, please get in touch at hello@humankind-research.com
Photo creds: Bank of America Charitable Foundation