GivingTuesday: 5 North Andover Nonprofits That Could Use Your Help

NORTH ANDOVER, MA — If you’re like many Bay Staters, you’ll spend many of the last few days of November immersed in consumerism, buying this and that for your friends and family, and even indulging yourself. GivingTuesday on Nov. 29 is a chance to turn your attention to local nonprofit groups seeing an alarming decline in small gifts.

Since 2012, nonprofits, community and grassroots groups, and mutual aid networks worldwide have used GivingTuesday to galvanize fundraising, rally volunteers and add momentum to their causes.
Local nonprofits are having a particularly tough time this year. The number of donors shrunk by 7 percent in the first half of 2022, largely due to a “collapse” in the number of small-gift supporters, according to the most recent GivingTuesday quarterly fundraising report.

Donors giving $100 or less were down 17 percent in the first six months of the year, and 8 percent fewer donors made gifts of $101 to $500, according to the report.

You likely have your own favorite causes among the nonprofits, community and grassroots groups and mutual aid organizations that address local needs here in North Andover.

Some worthy causes here in North Andover include:

• Friends of North Andover Trails is an all-volunteer team of area residents, dedicated to preserving and enhancing North Andover's 70 miles of trails and open spaces.
• Merrimack Valley Black & Brown Voices provides Black, Indigenous, and People of Color across the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts with a safe space to connect, share resources, and create systemic change to eliminate prejudice and discrimination in surrounding communities.
• North Andover Historical Society aims to be a hub for culture, history, preservation, and community engagement. Using its multiple properties, the society hosts programs and collects, preserves, and shares material that reflects the region's identity, excites the imagination, and promotes a sustainable society.
• Windrush Farm promotes confidence, independence and well-being in children and adults with physical, cognitive or emotional challenges through therapeutic riding and horse-related programs.
• Angel Flight New England arranges free air and ground medical transportation for patients with limited financial resources who require frequent trips to life-saving medical care. The organization also provides humanitarian efforts such as flying medical supplies during times of crisis, organs or donors to specific medical facilities, patients to specialty medical camps or retreats, and family members to loved ones requiring critical medical care.

There are some bright spots in the fundraising report, released by the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, a research effort of the Association of Fundraising Professionals Foundation for Philanthropy and GivingTuesday.

Importantly, although the pool of donors shrunk in the first half of 2022, the dollars contributed increased 6.2 percent as major donors stepped up. At the same time, the increase in large donor contributions was outpaced by second-quarter inflation rate of about 8.5 percent.

“Recaptured donors” — people who at one point had given to an organization, but not in the most recent reporting period — grew by 6.3 percent.

That group likely includes people who supported a charity in a surge of pandemic giving in 2020, as well as those who paused their charitable donations during the first two years of the pandemic and gave again this year, said Lori Gusdorf, executive vice president of the Association of Fundraising Professionals group.

The key takeaway for charities is to stay in contact with donors and include them in fundraising pitches, regardless of when they last gave, Gusdorf said.

The report “underlines the importance of employing targeted strategies for retaining this key donor segment, especially in times of economic volatility, when donors are more frequently evaluating their financial commitments,” she said.

GivingTuesday was created in New York City in 2012 with a simple goal: to encourage people to do good. Over the past nine years, the idea has grown into the global movement it is today.

The goal of GivingTuesday is “radical generosity” — the concept that the suffering of others should be as intolerable to us as our own suffering, according to the movement’s website.