Carney is a journalist and founder of The Civic Circle, which uses the arts to empower young students to understand and participate in democracy.
From omicron infections to climate disasters, gun deaths to economic uncertainty, congressional stalemate to ongoing threats to democracy, Americans arguably have more to worry about than to celebrate this holiday season.
Yet bad times also have a way of bringing out the best in people, and nowhere is this more evident than in the charitable sector. Charitable giving in the United States reached a record $471.4 billion in 2020, a 5.1 percent increase over the previous year, driven by Americans’ concerns over the pandemic, economic hardship and racial justice.
“Giving is an important metric of civic participation, a way to build the kind of society we want to live in,” Asha Curran, co-founder and CEO of GivingTuesday, told The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
GivingTuesday, the global day of giving launched in 2012, netted $2.7 billion from Americans this year, a 9 percent increase over last year. Said Curran of the increase: “Our hope is that this boost of generosity is an inspiration for continued giving, kindness, and recognition of our shared humanity each day of the year.”
The picture is not all rosy for charities, of course. More than half of the nation’s approximately 1.8 million nonprofits (57 percent) decreased overall expenses in 2020, according to Independent Sector, and the nonprofit workforce lost 1.6 million jobs.
Giving went up for nonprofits focused on human needs, racial inequity, and environmental and animal organizations, but dropped for arts, culture and humanities groups. Close to half (47 percent) of nonprofits reported serving fewer people by the end of 2020.
Still, charities continue to demonstrate the power of individual Americans, through both charitable donations and volunteer hours, to help tackle massive problems the government can only do so much to fix.
From the public health and poverty crises triggered by the pandemic, to global warming and disaster relief, social justice, animal welfare and the arts, Americans are donating millions of dollars and billions of volunteer hours to help one another, often neighbor-to-neighbor. On GivingTuesday, volunteering also rose by 11 percent over 2020, and gifts of food, clothing and other goods spiked 8 percent.
For Americans wondering where their charitable dollars might go furthest, there’s no shortage of guides, lists and rankings. The nation’s top three charities, according to Forbes, are United Way Worldwide, Feeding America and the Salvation Army. But there are literally millions of local neighborhood and civic groups, hundreds of them with tiny budgets, working to help their communities.
One “how to help” guide offered by CNN gives a snapshot of the nation’s diverse nonprofit universe, listing among other groups Broadway Cares and the Actors Fund, which offer financial relief to struggling performers. The New York Times Holiday Giving Guide 2021 offers a series of articles from Opinion writers on their favorite charities. For those who want to research individual charities on their own, Candid collects and distributes exhaustive data about the nonprofit sector.
Here are just a few nonprofit success stories that demonstrate the civic power of charities in 2021.
• After tornadoes killed 90 people and displaced hundreds in the South and Midwest last month, Jim Finch of Clarksville, Tenn., drove with his meat smoker to the hard-hit down of Mayfield, Ky., to feed hurricane victims barbecue chicken, burgers and soy patties. Said Karen Smith, a Kentucky coordinator for Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, which rounded up volunteers for brush cleanup and meal deliveries: “We want to give people hope. You look at all of that, and it feels hopeless. I think if they have hope, then they can begin to heal.”
• Amid food shortages caused by the pandemic, WhyHunger created a crowd-sourced map that identified free meal sites throughout the U.S., and in some parts of the world. The World Central Kitchen has distributed more than 300 million meals in some 400 cities around the country, according to CNN. Collecting, preparing and distributing food is a leading volunteer activity in the United States.
• A 68-year-old Colorado retired nurse, Teresa Dilka, used to donate money to the Food Bank of the Rockies but now that her income has dwindled she is volunteering there instead. “Sometimes it seems like it’s helping me more than I’m helping them,” Dilka told The Chronicle of Philanthropy. “It just feels good to be able to help.” About one out of four of Americans volunteers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, donating hours of service into the billions.
National leaders have long appreciated the charitable sector’s essential social role, which is both civic and monetary. Nonprofits contributed $1.2 trillion to the economy in 2020, according to Independent Sector. As President George H.W. Bush put it when first awarding more than 1,000 volunteers “points of light” in 1990, the government’s capacity is limited, “but the potential of the American people knows no limits.”
Ben Droz
Ben Droz
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Pinnacle Bank Expo Center on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds on October 05, 2026 in Grand Island, Nebraska.
The President Invited Iran to Bomb My Home
I was driving home to San Diego from Los Angeles on Monday night when I heard that the President of the United States had offered both cities up to Iran as bomb targets. At a rally in Nebraska, defending his war, Trump told the crowd, “let [Iran] take out Los Angeles, let ‘em take out San Diego.” It was, he said, “a very small price to pay.”
I was coming from a Bernie Sanders rally for Proposition 40, the one-time tax on California billionaires that would send 90% of its revenue to healthcare. We desperately need it to pass because, in order to give tax breaks to billionaires, Trump signed a law that will strip health coverage from 10 million Americans; this tax will make sure we can still cover Californians. Call me crazy, but I think taxing billionaires one time so we can make sure kids in California get to see a doctor is a very small price to pay. I also think that even if Trump were joking, it is indefensible to make jokes about the potential destruction of so many lives. Human life is never a small price to pay. Human life is priceless.
Plus, the reality is: here in San Diego, we’re already paying the price for Trump’s actions, and it’s not small at all. He has gutted FEMA, tried to kill climate resiliency programs, and destroyed public health standards, while his signature law is set to cut off health insurance and food support for hundreds of thousands of San Diegans. Like plenty of American cities, San Diego is already busy finding local solutions to respond to the problems this president has recklessly created.
Not to mention, at least 19 American service members have been killed in this war already. Human rights monitors have documented more than 3,600 dead in Iran by April alone. Here at home, gas is sitting just pennies below its all-time record. Taxpayers have already spent more than $45 billion on the war, while Trump’s oil and gas portfolio has grown by roughly $15.5 million this year alone. Of course anything is a “small price” to someone paying free.99 for this war, and profiting from it. Meanwhile, We the People are paying twice: first for the war, and then for the consequences of that war. But now he wants San Diego to pay a third time, flippantly offering us up to Iran.
It is worth noticing which cities he thought to name. Were San Diego and Los Angeles strategically chosen to signify something to his audience, or were they simply the first cities that came to mind as expendable places? Either way, the effect is to normalize—-and to gauge a crowd’s reaction to–the idea of massive violence in major California cities, suitable targets because of their perceived liberal lean. So what if Iran needs to bomb a little bit of America before the war can be over? Who cares, says Trump, if they target Los Angeles and San Diego?
By the way, why didn’t he offer up San Francisco, the free-love hippie-town MAGA loves to hate (and also my birthplace)? Could it be because that’s where the tech titans live? The same ones who joined Trump for Xi Jinping’s state dinner, a guest list worth a combined $2.4 trillion?
San Diego may have fewer billionaires, but it is home to more than 115,000 active-duty service members and 230,000 veterans. One in six active-duty sailors–in the entire Navy–is stationed here. So is one in four Marines. You cannot throw a rock in this county without hitting a military family: brats and spouses and veterans are among us. I got out of the Navy last year after ten years, and eight of those were here in San Diego. When Trump says “let ‘em take out San Diego,” he’s talking about the backbone of the United States military. He’s also talking about the people fighting his war.
San Diego has not been watching this war from the sidelines. Today, the USS Abraham Lincoln returns to North Island after an almost yearlong deployment to the Middle East that featured food shortages, broken toilets, and mold in the showers after 286 days at sea without a single port call. Eight sailors in the Lincoln’s strike group attempted suicide, but in August, when a reporter asked whether the deployment had gone on too long, Trump said “not nearly long enough.” Now he has told a crowd in Nebraska that we should let Iran take out the city those sailors call home. These are sociopathic sentiments.
Last week at Quantico, Pete Hegseth closed his address to the force by telling them, “President Trump has your back and so do I.” To the contrary, President Trump has put one of the biggest military towns in the country forward as a target for our adversaries. With friends like these, the “domestic” in “against all enemies, foreign and domestic” starts to sound a lot less hypothetical.
San Diego is home to Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Base San Diego, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, the Point Loma submarine base, Camp Pendleton, and Miramar (and I have been permanently stationed at or trained at all of them). If Iran bombed San Diego and Los Angeles, aside from the devastating loss of life, it would cripple an immense share of our national security readiness.
And for what, exactly? Trump says the war is “essentially almost over with.” This is the same man who claimed in June 2025 that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated,” then launched a war over it anyway on February 28. More than seven months later, he wants us to believe two things at once: that we’ve basically won, and that we might need to sacrifice an American city or two to finish winning. If the war is almost over, why does anybody need to take out San Diego?
I wonder if Trump’s endorsed candidate for California’s 48th District here in San Diego County will respond to these remarks. He recently said “no pain, no gain,” when referring to the gas prices San Diegans are paying. Jim Desmond, would you apply that same mindset if we were bombed? Or do you have the moral courage to stand up for the people you’re running to represent?
Last November, six Democratic members of Congress, all veterans, including Senator Mark Kelly, recorded a video reminding troops of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, restating the law that says so. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and then his Justice Department went looking for an indictment, which a grand jury refused. The president treated reading the law out loud to the troops as a capital offense, but then he himself invited a foreign enemy to destroy two American cities, possibly as a punchline. Is anyone calling the latter sedition? Who is demanding accountability?
Calling our lives a small price to pay affirms a moral bankruptcy, as well as an obvious dereliction of duty to the office he holds. While we can’t impeach him or invoke the 25th Amendment ourselves, we must stop being so quiet about what we’re paying already. We can make our voices heard by calling our representatives, writing op-eds, knocking doors, phone banking, and voting in defiance of the man who threatens the safety of our city. Ballots are already arriving in mailboxes. Vote, and vote yes on 40 (and no on 41 and 42).
Trump has been harming our cities for a while, but now he is inviting our military adversaries to join him in the harm. If we have any self-respect as Americans, we must not tolerate our leaders disregarding the dignity of lives in this way. We must fight for our home.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.