The Gift Remained. The Gathering Left.

This is a guest post from Kimberley Hartman Wilt, originally published on LinkedIn on May 31, 2026, as part of her Field Notes series on housing groundwork and conditions.

It was Sunday morning, around six, and I was doing what I apparently do for fun: sitting at my desk with a cup of coffee that was going cold, watching thirty-five years of charitable-giving data scroll across a bar chart race on my screen. Most people sleep in on Sundays. Some make pancakes, go fishing, read something that has nothing to do with nonprofit finance. I accidentally turned an animated visualization into a meditation on community, trust, housing, and what happens when a country quietly forgets how to gather.

At first I was just looking for trends. Then one name kept surfacing, year after year, anchoring the top of the rankings the way a familiar face anchors an old photograph.

The longer I watched, the less the chart felt like nonprofit data and the more it felt like one of those family photo albums you find after somebody dies: every face is familiar but the world those people inhabited no longer exists. A grandfather standing in front of a factory that closed twenty years ago. A church picnic on a field that is now a shopping center. A Little League team sponsored by a company that got bought, merged, and relocated three states away. The photographs survive. The arrangements that made them possible do not.

I have spent nearly fourteen years around nonprofits: first helping with marketing for a historical organization, then eleven years with Habitat for Humanity learning what it actually takes to turn generosity into homes, and nearly two years with United Way learning what it takes to gather community resources in the first place. Long enough to recognize that most cultural shifts arrive without announcing themselves. Nobody wakes up one morning and declares that society has changed. People just start behaving differently, one small decision at a time, until the day you realize you are living somewhere else entirely. The fundraising charts felt like that.

Because the story the data told wasn't that United Way disappeared. It was that America stopped gathering in quite the same way.

The Ritual Underneath

The more I stared at those charts, the less interested I became in fundraising mechanics and the more interested I became in anthropology. We talk about philanthropy as though it is primarily about money. We measure contributions, endowments, campaigns, grants, annual totals. But anthropologists have a habit of asking a more irritating question: not what a thing claims to do, but what social function it actually performs.

And the longer I looked at those numbers, the more I wondered whether we have fundamentally misunderstood organizations like United Way and Habitat for Humanity. Maybe they were never primarily fundraising organizations. Maybe they were ritual organizations. The annual workplace campaign was less about collecting dollars than about periodically reminding people that they belonged to one another. Maybe the Habitat build was less about lumber and drywall than about demonstrating, in public, that shelter was not solely the responsibility of the person who needed it.

Maybe the real thing being produced was not money or houses. Maybe it was obligation.

That word makes modern Americans uncomfortable. We have come to prefer choice, empowerment, personalization, autonomy: words that place the individual at the center. Obligation sounds old, heavy, restrictive. But communities have always depended on it. For most of human history, people survived because they were embedded in networks of mutual obligation: families, churches, guilds, villages, unions, neighborhoods, volunteer fire departments, civic clubs, community suppers, barn raisings, mutual aid societies. These structures served the same fundamental purpose: they periodically interrupted individual life long enough to remind people that they owed something to one another.

The ritual mattered because the ritual created identity. You were not simply a person. You were a member, a participant, a neighbor whose life was materially tied to other people's lives whether you chose it or not.

The old United Way campaign belonged to that tradition. Not perfectly, not romantically. Anyone who lived through enough workplace campaigns knows they could be awkward, pressured, and shaped by local power dynamics. Nostalgia is not analysis. But even imperfect rituals perform social functions, and one of those functions was gathering people into the same civic room. The secretary and the executive. The warehouse worker and the bank teller. The maintenance technician and the manager. The person giving five dollars from a paycheck occupied the same philanthropic space as the person giving five thousand, and that shared space mattered. Not because everybody agreed, but because everybody participated. Participation is how communities learn themselves.

Before going further, the honest version of this argument has to reckon with a real objection: was the workplace campaign actually civic ritual, or was it workplace pressure dressed up as philanthropy? The answer is that it was frequently both, sometimes in the same envelope. People gave because they felt they were supposed to give. Managers tracked participation rates. The person who opted out sometimes wondered if it would be noticed. That coercion is real, and dismissing it would be dishonest. But ritual has almost always carried an element of social obligation. Think of the barn raising you attended partly because you'd need your neighbors next winter, or the church you showed up to partly because the community expected it. The pressure and the belonging were not opposites. They were the same system. What mattered was that the system produced something beyond the transaction: people who had, however imperfectly, practiced deciding together. The uncomfortable truth is that voluntary, frictionless giving may be more individually comfortable while being less socially generative.

A Note on What the Chart Is and Isn't Measuring

The visualization referenced below tracks the largest charitable organizations in America by annual contributions received, from 2002 through 2024. The data comes from the Institute for Policy Studies, drawn from IRS Form 990 returns and Forbes' list of America's Top Charities. It excludes government grants and religious organizations. You can explore the full animated bar chart race at inequality.org.

One thing the chart does not show is important to name directly: these are national mothership organizations, not local affiliates. United Way Worldwide is the consolidated figure for the national network. It is not your local United Way, the one that ran the Impact Grant panel, that knows which zip codes need which services, that has been showing up for your community for decades. Similarly, Habitat for Humanity International appears as a single line, but the real work of building homes happens in hundreds of local affiliates, each operating independently, each penciling out their own projects one by one. The chart captures the motherships. The mission lives in the locals. That distinction matters enormously when reading what the numbers mean.

An Inversion Twenty Years in the Making

In 2002, United Way Worldwide sat at the top of the list of U.S. charities receiving the most contributions, at roughly $3.9 billion, ahead of the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and the rest of the country's largest operating charities. By 2024, the top of that same list looked almost unrecognizable: Fidelity Charitable at $15.9 billion, National Philanthropic Trust at $14.5 billion, Schwab Charitable at $9.3 billion, Goldman Sachs Philanthropy and Vanguard Charitable both above $5.5 billion. United Way Worldwide, meanwhile, had fallen to roughly $2.5 billion, now sitting near the bottom of the same top-twenty list it once led.

The crossover happened around 2013 to 2014. Track the two lines side by side and you can watch United Way hold steady near $4 billion for a decade while Fidelity Charitable's curve bends sharply upward, crosses it, and never looks back. By 2024, Fidelity Charitable alone received more than six times what United Way Worldwide did. These are national-level figures. Your local United Way and your local Habitat affiliate are not in this data at all. They are doing the work the chart cannot see.

The easy version of the chart is that United Way used to sit at the top of American philanthropy and now organizations like Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, and National Philanthropic Trust occupy that territory. That's true, but it is also the least interesting thing about the data. The more interesting question is why.

Most explanations reach for mechanics: tax advantages, donor-advised fund structures, wealth management platforms, shifting donor demographics. Those explanations are not wrong. They simply feel incomplete. They describe the instrument while missing the cultural impulse behind it.

The old United Way model required a donor to trust something beyond themselves. You gave money into a shared pot, and then a group of local volunteers, allocation committee members, nonprofit leaders, and community representatives sat around tables arguing about where those resources could do the most good. Sometimes they got it right. Sometimes they got it wrong. Sometimes local politics crept in and personalities mattered too much. That is simply what happens when human beings try to solve human problems together. The important part was that the system required trust, specifically the trust that the community might know something the individual donor did not. That assumption feels increasingly foreign.

The dominant instinct today runs in the opposite direction: keep control, decide later, trust your own judgment. The donor-advised fund did not create that instinct. It gave it a home. People often describe donor-advised funds as a triumph of efficiency, and in financial terms they frequently are. But I increasingly wonder whether they also represent something else: a formalization of distrust. Not because the people using them are cynical. Most are not. But distrust has become a defining feature of modern American life, and it did not appear from nowhere. The last twenty years gave people genuine reasons to distrust institutions: a financial crisis that exposed the gap between who bore the risk and who absorbed the losses; political polarization that made every civic space feel contested; nonprofit scandals that reminded donors their faith could be misplaced; the collapse of local news that once held institutions accountable; the slow unwinding of church participation and civic membership that had structured community life for generations. When I argue that distrust is reshaping philanthropy, I am not arguing that people are wrong to distrust. Many institutions earned their diminished standing. The harder point is that even justified distrust has consequences. When control starts looking like wisdom and wisdom starts looking like deciding alone, the systems that depend on collective judgment begin to erode. That erosion has a cost, even when the original skepticism was reasonable.

The donor-advised fund makes a simple promise: you don't have to trust the system. You can trust yourself. There is nothing inherently wrong with that arrangement. In many individual cases it makes real practical sense. But when a whole culture moves in that direction, something shifts beneath the surface.

That may be the deepest shift hidden in these charts. Not that Americans stopped giving (the data makes clear they did not), not even that charitable wealth declined (in many ways it has expanded dramatically), but that giving became increasingly detached from the rituals that once taught people why giving mattered in the first place.

Hope Has to Survive Contact With Math

When I was at Habitat for Humanity, I learned quickly that money was never the whole story. People tend to assume affordable housing is primarily a funding problem, and sometimes it is. But after eleven years in that work, I can tell you that money is only one ingredient in a much larger and more unforgiving recipe. A project can have its full funding secured and still die on the table, killed by land it can't acquire, infrastructure that doesn't reach the site, construction costs that moved faster than the budget, an appraisal that came in low, an interest rate environment that changed the math overnight, utility connections that turned out to be prohibitively expensive, or a neighborhood meeting that went badly.

The phrase I heard over and over in that world was simple: the project has to pencil out. At first it always sounded cold to me, a financial test applied to what was fundamentally a human need. Eventually I understood what it really meant.

That lesson followed me when I moved to United Way. The details changed, but the underlying reality felt strangely familiar. At Habitat, I watched people underestimate what it takes to turn generosity into a home. At United Way, I watched people underestimate what it takes to gather generosity in the first place.

One of the things that surprised me most was watching nonprofit agencies occasionally speak about United Way allocations as though they were guaranteed, a stable line item in the budget rather than the product of a campaign that had to be run, defended, and won each year. Those same agencies would never treat a private foundation, a government grantmaker, or a corporate donor with that kind of casual assumption. But because United Way had been woven into the civic fabric for so long, some people had simply stopped seeing the labor underneath it. Someone still had to raise those dollars, defend the campaign, steward the donors, and make the case, year after year, for why collective giving mattered in a culture increasingly organized around individual choice. That work did not disappear. It just became invisible until the pressure dropped.

Opposite Ends of the Same Pipeline

People sometimes ask why I talk about Habitat and United Way in the same breath. The simple answer is that these are the nonprofit worlds I know. But the deeper answer is that they sit on opposite ends of the same pipeline: United Way asks whether communities can still gather resources together, and Habitat asks whether those resources can actually become homes. The real crisis lives in between. Not in a shortage of concern; America is overflowing with concern. Not in a shortage of money; there is an astonishing amount of charitable wealth moving through this country. The crisis is in the weakening of the local systems that once translated one into the other.

Which is why I keep returning to the idea of ritual. The annual workplace campaign was a ritual. The Habitat build was a ritual. The allocation committee was a ritual. The volunteer day, the fundraising breakfast, the wall raising, the civic club meeting, the church supper, the volunteer fire department drill: all of them were rituals. They looked like fundraising activities or service projects or community events. But the money and the labor were never the deepest things happening. The deeper thing was belonging. For a brief and recurring moment, people stopped being isolated individuals and became participants in a shared story. And I wonder if that is what the charts are actually measuring: not a change in fundraising behavior, but a change in how Americans understand obligation itself.

This is where housing comes back in, not as a metaphor but as the destination. The communities that are struggling hardest to produce affordable homes are often the same communities that have watched their civic infrastructure thin out over the same decades the charts are tracking. The volunteer fire department that used to double as the social fabric. The church network that connected families to resources before the referral form existed. The local United Way campaign that, year after year, reminded people employed at the same company that they shared a stake in the same school district, the same emergency shelter, the same housing market. These were not separate systems. They were the same system, the one that generated local leadership, neighborhood trust, volunteer capacity, and the political will to say yes to a housing development on a street where people actually lived. When those rituals erode, housing doesn't just lose funding. It loses the relational infrastructure that turns a funded project into a welcomed one. And it isn't only housing. The communities struggling most to build nonprofit ecosystems, to sustain local leadership, to hold together the organizations that translate concern into action, are often the same communities that lost these civic rituals first.

Participation and Concentration

The twentieth century distributed philanthropy through participation: millions of people giving a little, gathered into collective pools that funded collective decisions. The twenty-first century increasingly distributes it through concentration. A smaller number of people give astonishing amounts, often through instruments that optimize for individual control rather than collective deliberation.

MacKenzie Scott demonstrated the most compelling version of that new model. Her gifts transformed organizations across the country, including many Habitat affiliates, and the remarkable thing was not only the scale but the nature of the trust. She moved money quickly. She gave it unrestricted. She largely trusted organizations to understand their own work. Many nonprofits received those gifts with something close to astonishment, because they had nearly forgotten what unrestricted trust looked like. That response is itself a data point about how the sector had been conditioned to expect the opposite. It is worth acknowledging the tension here: in some ways Scott's approach acts more like a collective allocator than many traditional foundations do. She gives broadly, she gives fast, she imposes few conditions. A sophisticated reader might argue she is closer to the old United Way spirit than the DAF model suggests. The difference, I think, is still the room. The decision remains with one person, however wise and generous that person is, rather than with the community that will live with the consequences.

Yet even Scott's philanthropy, remarkable as it is, illustrates the larger transition. The old United Way campaign distributed responsibility and decision-making across thousands of people. The concentrated model places that influence in one person. That is not a criticism; it is an observation about what different systems produce beyond the dollars themselves.

By 2024, Fidelity Charitable alone received more than six times what United Way Worldwide did, with the crossover landing around 2013 to 2014. Again, these are national-level figures only. Your local United Way and your local Habitat affiliate are doing the work the chart cannot see, and that work is exactly the kind of relational labor that no donor-advised fund, however large, can replicate.

As artificial intelligence begins generating new fortunes at speed and scale that would have seemed implausible a decade ago, this question becomes more urgent, not less. One model teaches participation; the other teaches gratitude. One builds habits of collective obligation; the other produces admiration for individual generosity. Neither is purely good nor purely bad. But they create different kinds of citizens, and that difference compounds over time.

Money can move resources, fund projects, build houses, and save organizations. But money alone cannot teach belonging. That lesson has always lived somewhere else: in the gathering, in the room, in the ritual, in the uncomfortable and unglamorous act of deciding that another person's problem is, in some real way, partly yours.

What the Charts Are Really Measuring

What I see when I look at those fundraising charts is a country that became very good at storing and moving charitable wealth while becoming less practiced at the rituals that taught people why charity mattered in the first place. The money stayed. The ritual left. And the gap between them is not primarily a fundraising problem, a tax policy problem, or a nonprofit management problem. It is a community problem: the accumulated cost of choosing, year after year, to optimize for individual control rather than collective belonging.

The question waiting for all of us, whether we work in housing, philanthropy, community development, government, or nowhere near any of those worlds, is whether we can rebuild the habit of belonging before we lose the memory of how it worked. Generosity alone has never been enough. Generosity moves resources. Community turns resources into action. And action begins when enough people decide that another person's future is, in some small but very real way, tied to their own.

Kimberley Hartman Wilt

Kimberley writes Field Notes, a series on housing groundwork and conditions drawn from nearly fourteen years in the nonprofit sector, including eleven years with Habitat for Humanity and time with United Way. She writes about the systems, rituals, and relationships that turn charitable intent into homes and communities. Find more of her writing on LinkedIn.