Does taking the standard deduction mean I lose out on my charitable donations?

If you take the standard deduction, your charitable gifts generally do not produce a separate tax benefit, because charity is an itemized deduction. To get value from giving, your total itemized deductions must exceed the standard deduction. A popular workaround is 'bunching': combine two or three years of donations into a single year, often through a donor-advised fund, so you itemize that year and take the standard deduction in the off years. Retirees over the age at which the IRS allows qualified charitable distributions can also give directly from an IRA to satisfy giving tax-efficiently. So you are not being penalized for generosity; you simply need enough total deductions in a given year to clear the standard-deduction hurdle.