This field report explores how nonlocal grassroots organizations provided effective and quick responses during the initial stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan and surrounding regions. Despite the lack of resources and local connections, they were able to overcome administrative failures and provide quick responses to the crisis. Built on a researcher-practitioner collaborative action research project, three strategies facilitating grassroots organizations' quick and effective responses are analyzed and discussed: putting pandemic relief as the strategic priority of their organizations, leveraging social media platforms to scale up existing organizational networks and foster cross-sector collaboration, and effective online trust-building.As COVID-19 unprecedently pushes nonprofits to transform how they deliver services and engage stakeholders, these findings have important policy and theoretical implications for an expanded view of how nonprofits may engage in disaster responses and how public and private funders may shift their funding strategies to cultivate such capacities of grassroots nonprofits.

Almost all of the scientific literature on charitable giving is implicitly based on a static paradigm which posits there are non-donors who never give and donors who habitually give year-in/year-out to a specific charitable purpose. This article presents evidence that charitable giving is not static, but dynamic: Few Americans never give, and among Americans that donate the majority are switchers—giving in some years but not others or switching from one charitable purpose to another. The implications are that a static perspective is misleading, and research questions should place more emphasis on the time dimension of charitable giving.

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In a volatile, uncertain, and heterogeneous world, community philanthropic organizations play critical roles in community building. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the strategies of community philanthropic organizations in community building and the tensions they encounter in fluid communities. This study investigated four community foundations in highly mobile and diverse suburban communities and found that the strategies of community building involved highlighting the distinctiveness of locality, protecting the integrity of localities against the control of the metropolis, ensuring geographic representation of foundation leadership, and building an inclusive community identity that acknowledges diversity. Nevertheless, with the concern of alienating donors of dispersed interests, community‐building efforts have only created what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “cloakroom community,” a substitute for genuine communities, where people come together for a time, but their individual concerns are not blended into group interests, and collective actions to address community issues do not occur. This deters community foundations from effectively engaging local people and creating long‐lasting social solidarity.