The COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique opportunity to study how people living across different countries and contexts, with various welfare and health systems, and different public and private responses to manage COVID-19, manifested generosity behaviors. Between June and December of 2020, teams of researchers surveyed over 20,000 people in eleven countries including Israel. We analyzed data to consider the prevalence of different generosity behaviors across countries, including informal helping, formal volunteering, and charitable giving, and how these have been affected by the crisis.
Three key findings emerged from the Israeli report:
1. The pandemic has led to a decrease in philanthropic behavior, especially in informal giving rates and both in formal and informal volunteering rates.
2. In contrast, the rates of formal giving and the amounts of donations to nonprofit organizations remained mostly unchanged during the crisis.
3. The impact of the crisis regarding philanthropic behavior was most evident among economically vulnerable populations, whose positions in the labor market are relatively weaker.
This research was conducted by Galia Feit (ILP) and Dr. Hagai Katz (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev).