Fidelity Charitable Donors Channeled $9.1 Billion to Charities Amid the Pandemic

Fidelity Charitable, the nation’s largest grant maker, has reported a banner 2020, with grants surging 24 percent from 2019 to $9.1 billion — by far the largest total on record. That comes after donors contributed $14.4 billion to Fidelity’s donor-advised funds last year.

Yet so deep were the hardships caused by the viral pandemic that even a record high in contributions fell well short of the need.

The charity reported Wednesday that donations to nonprofits that address food insecurity rocketed up twelvefold, with Feeding America, Meals on Wheels, and World Central Kitchen becoming among Fidelity Charitable’s top 20 most popular charities for the first time. And contributions to the CDC Foundation, which advances the mission of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, jumped 9,582 percent.

Yet in contrast to food and medical research, some other sectors of philanthropy, especially those in arts and culture, have not fared so well. A survey of nonprofits by CCS Fundraising found that donations declined at roughly 44 percent of the charities and increased at 38.6 percent of them. Those figures are supported by a recent Wells Fargo-Gallup study that found that 20 percent of investors who were surveyed donated less in 2020 because of the pandemic; 18 percent gave more.

“We’re just really proud to be able to get this much money out to nonprofits during a time of crisis,” said Pamela Norley, president of Fidelity Charitable, which handles donor-advised funds and is independent of Fidelity Investments — “2020 was a terrible year for so many organizations, and our donors jumped into the opportunity to be able to give money away from their donor-advised funds.”

Outsize Demand

Even at the CDC Foundation, which benefited from a boom in donations last year, the additional funding didn’t come close to matching the outsize demand generated by the pandemic, said Judy Monroe, president and CEO of the CDC Foundation.

“We’ve been really pleased with what we’ve been able to do,” Monroe said. “But the short answer is we could have used a lot more.”

Monroe said the additional money that poured in starting last spring was used to pay for some efforts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before government funding arrived. The CDC Foundation helped state health departments buy Covid-19 testing equipment. It funded early research at the University of California San Francisco on the effects of Covid-19 on pregnant women and infants. And it supported the early development of the Sara Alert system, which enables contact tracing.

Even so, the CDC Foundation lacked enough funding to fully support some projects involved in monitoring the effectiveness of Covid-19 preventive measures in schools. Monroe said that numerous international programs that the foundation wanted to support had to be delayed.

Such difficult choices are common among nonprofits and will likely continue this year, said Robert Kissane, chairman of CCS Fundraising, a global fundraising consulting and management firm.

“We see a spike in giving — some really enormous gifts and then some grassroots help,” he said of donations during 2020. “But it never keeps up with demand.”

The economic downturn and the police killing of George Floyd fueled increases in donations to fight food insecurity and racial injustice, Kissane said. Yet much of the funding, he said, was directed toward well-known charities, while newer, less-established nonprofits suffered from a decline.

The nonprofit world has lost about 960,000 jobs since the pandemic began, with the deepest cuts coming in arts and education, according to a report that the John Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, released Tuesday. It estimates that it will take until 2023 for the sector to regain its prepandemic levels of employment.

The most recent CCS Fundraising survey of more than 1,000 nonprofits helps explain the delay: About 43 percent of the nonprofits surveyed said they expect their fundraising to decline in 2021. Only about 27 percent expect an increase.

That is due, in part, to fewer people contributing. Kissane noted that half of the $400 billion donated to charities each year now comes from only 1 percent of American households, whereas in the past, much of the money typically came from a sizable proportion of American families with household incomes of $100,000 or less.

“Philanthropy in America has evolved,” Kissane said. “That appears to be a direct correlation to the economic crisis and the recovery that was not seen among working-class folks.”

People who have fared well in the stock market or, in some cases, from cryptocurrency trading seem poised to increase their donations. Norley of Fidelity Charitable said grant making in the charity’s donor-advised funds — which accept cash, publicly traded securities, cryptocurrency, and even limited-partnership interests to establish tax-free accounts — is so far up 50 percent this year.

“We’re trying to make sure people know this isn’t over,” she said. “It’s important for people to recognize that there’s still a huge demand for funding.”

Editor’s note: This article is part of a new partnership the Chronicle has forged with the Associated Press and the Conversation to expand coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits. The three organizations receive support for this work from the Lilly Endowment. The AP is solely responsible for the content in this article.