Among households making $200K+ in 2020, here's the share that was given to charity.
— Ryan Burge 📊 (@ryanburge) December 13, 2023
Arkansas leads - 6.7%.
Utah is second - 5.8%.
States in New England are lowest.
Rhode Island - 1.5%.
The IRS classifies houses of worship as charities along with other non-profits. pic.twitter.com/0wvDNqWZ9P
Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy.
A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech.
Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s charitable arm.
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As the main attraction at a Zoom meeting for top Kennedy School donors on Oct. 29 that year, Donovan said the papers showed that Meta knew the harms it was causing. Former top Facebook communications executive Elliot Schrage asked repeated questions during the meeting and said she badly misunderstood the papers, Donovan wrote in a sworn declaration included in the filing.
Ten days after the donors meeting, Kennedy School dean Doug Elmendorf, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, emailed Donovan with pointed questions about her research goals and methods, launching an increase in oversight that restricted her activities and led to her dismissal before the end of her contract, according to the declaration. Donovan wrote that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s $500 million gift for a new artificial intelligence institute at the university, announced Dec. 7 that year, had been in the works before the donor meeting.
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The Donovan case comes at a time when researchers who focus on social media platforms find themselves under increasing attack. Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s legal foundation has sued academic and independent researchers, claiming that they conspired with government agencies to suppress speech, and Republican-led congressional committees have subpoenaed their records, adding to the pressure.
In addition, Big Tech companies themselves have sponsored research, made grants to some colleges and universities, and doled out data to professors who agree to specific avenues of inquiry.
Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy.
Jo Becker and Julie Tate at NYT:
The charity, the Supreme Court Historical Society, is ostensibly independent of the judicial branch of government, but in reality the two are inextricably intertwined. The charity’s stated mission is straightforward: to preserve the court’s history and educate the public about the court’s importance in American life. But over the years the society has also become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation. The justices attend the society’s annual black-tie dinner soirees, where they mingle with donors and thank them for their generosity, and serve as M.C.s to more regular society-sponsored lectures or re-enactments of famous cases.
At least $6.4 million — or 60 percent — came from corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court, according to an analysis of archived historical society newsletters and publicly available records that detail grants given to the society by foundations. Of that, at least $4.7 million came from individuals or entities in years when they had a pending interest in a federal court case on appeal or at the high court, records show.
The society has raised more than $23 million over the last two decades. Because of its nonprofit status, it does not have to publicly disclose its donors — and declined when asked to do so. But The New York Times was able to identify the sources behind more than $10.7 million raised since 2003, the first year for which relevant records were available.
The donors include corporations like Chevron, which gave while embroiled in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving efforts by cities to hold the oil company accountable for its role in global warming. Veteran Supreme Court litigators gave while representing clients before the court that included Tyson Foods and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China.ER
Three stats we find reassuring:The bottom line: Every current trend suggests politics will get more toxic before it normalizes. But the silent majority gives us hope beyond the nuttiness.
- 75% of people in the U.S. never tweet.
- On an average weeknight in January, just 1% of U.S. adults watched primetime Fox News (2.2 million). 0.5% tuned into MSNBC (1.15 million).
- Nearly three times more Americans (56%) donated to charities during the pandemic than typically give money to politicians and parties (21%).
Global Giving Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund
The Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund by Global Giving sprung into action once Russia declared war on Ukraine earlier this week.
According to the organization's official website, your donation will help "affected communities in Ukraine, with a focus on the most vulnerable, including children, who need access to food, medical services, and psychosocial support."
Not only that, but the Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund will "support humanitarian assistance in impacted communities in Ukraine and surrounding regions where Ukrainian refugees have fled."
International Rescue Committee
As the conflict in Ukraine escalates, the International Rescue Committee is getting ready to prepare for the worst. Right now, it is mobilizing resources to aid the people in Ukraine who were forced to flee their homes.
"The IRC is meeting with partners and local civil society organizations in Poland and Ukraine to assess capacity for responding to an increase of refugees and people in need," said the organization on its official website. "We will work to respond where we are needed the most and with the services that are needed urgently. Whatever the needs are, we are preparing to meet them.”
Save the Children
According to Save the Children, there are 7.5 million kids who are in danger of physical harm, emotional distress and displacement due to the invasion in Ukraine. Even before the conflict escalated this week, there were already 400,000 children there who needed humanitarian aid.
That's why Save the Children has made their own Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund to help Ukrainian families now. On their official website, the organization said that it will use donations to help families meet their basic needs such as food, medicine and shelter.
Save the Children's specialist teams will also help Ukrainian children get access to education and psychosocial support.
People wait in a traffic jam as they leave the city of Kharkiv, after Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized a military operation in eastern Ukraine.Antonio Bronic / Reuters
Razom for Ukraine
Razom for Ukraine has been helping Ukrainians since the organization was first established in 2014. It aims to help Ukraine pursue a democratic society that has civil rights for all.
"This is not the first time we are all facing the hybrid war against us. And together we will stand strong!" the charity said on its Facebook page.
According to its official website, the organization is named Razom for Ukraine because Rzaom "means 'together' in Ukrainian and serves as a constant reminder of the community that it takes to create, build and do, to stay the path towards a more prosperous and democratic Ukraine."
The International Committee of the Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross is helping the Ukrainian Red Cross assist people who were affected by the conflict there.
Across the U.S., historic urban churches built decades ago to accommodate hundreds or thousands of worshipers have struggled with shrinking flocks and rising preservation costs. Many are finding new ways to use their buildings that let them keep the sacred places viable while serving the neighborhoods they’ve anchored for decades.
In Minneapolis, landmark churches have hosted everything from food pantries and Finnish language classes to tai chi practices and group discussions on reparations.
Elsewhere in the country, they’ve rented space for preschools, bringing in much-needed revenue, and made their buildings available for free to community group gatherings as diverse as nutrition clinics and arts workshops.
Historic religious buildings are not just civic and cultural landmarks but crucial social centers, with noncongregants making up an estimated 90% of the people served, according to Bob Jaeger, president of Partners for Sacred Places. The nonprofit helps religious institutions nationwide make plans and raise money to repurpose their spaces for a different era.
“Congregations have enormous civic value but are often underused,” he said.
Surveys show that the United States is growing more secular, with churchgoing and membership on the decline. Fewer souls in pews mean less money coming in to pay for staffing, maintenance and programs, forcing many smaller congregations to sell their buildings.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated those problems by further shrinking attendance. It has also heightened the need for food, housing, job and educational ministries among both the faithful and broader communities.
Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed:
Ilana M. Horwitz’s new book focuses on the one in four American high school students who are “raised with religious restraint”—they orient their lives around God and try to behave in ways that they believe will please God. Her book is based on 10 years of survey data and 200 interviews.
She finds that these religious students excel in high school and college. Generally, these students are more likely to graduate from college; boys from lower-middle-class families especially benefit. But girls—especially from middle- and upper-class families—question the value of attending religious colleges and “undermatch” in their choices.
Horwitz shares the results of her work in God, Grades & Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success (just published by Oxford University Press). Horwitz is the Fields-Rayant Chair in Contemporary Jewish Life at Tulane University, but her book is primarily (as she explains below) about Christian students. She responded via email to questions about the book.
"... Why do religious adolescents earn better grades in secondary school than their less religious peers? In my book, I argue that schools and churches promote similar ideals—both institutions value kids who abide by the rules and respect authority figures. Intensely religious teens are precisely these types of kids—they are deeply conscientious and cooperative. As it turns out, the very dispositions that teens adopt to please God are also the dispositions that help them earn good grades."
Eighty-one percent of Americans say they donated money to a religious or other charitable organization in the past year, and 56% volunteered time to such an organization. After dipping in April 2020 during the early stages of the pandemic, charitable donations have rebounded and are essentially back to the level measured in 2013 and 2017 surveys.
Volunteer activity also dropped in 2020 but, in contrast to charitable giving, remains lower than it was in pre-pandemic surveys. While lower today than in recent years, the rate of volunteering has been at its current level in the past, most notably during the Great Recession.
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With respect to donations, the bounce back from 2020 appears to be confined mostly to secular giving. Forty-four percent of Americans say they gave money to religious organizations in the past year, unchanged from 2020, which was the lowest in Gallup's trend by a significant margin.
Meanwhile, 74% say they gave money to another charitable cause, up from 64% a year ago and essentially the same as the 75% who did so in 2013 and 2017.
Over time, as formal church membership has declined, so too have donations to religious organizations. The 44% of U.S. adults donating to a religious organization nearly matches the 47% who belong to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple.
2020 saw a surge in charitable giving, and 2021 could top it.
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What's happening: Americans donated $2.7 billion on Giving Tuesday this year — a 9% jump from last year.It’s not just individuals. Companies are also joining the giving trend, Yahoo Finance reports.
- Overall, Americans donated $471 billion in 2020, up 5% from 2019. 2021 is still in the middle of its giving season — in fact, Dec. 31st is one of the most popular giving days of the year, says Osili.
- More of the super-wealthy are pledging to give away their billions. Two of 2020's biggest donors were MacKenzie Scott, who was married to Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.
- And more rich people signed the Giving Pledge in 2021 — including DoorDash founder Tony Xu and Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann — promising to give away the majority of their wealth, the Wall Street Journal reports.
- Madewell, the clothing retailer, will match and triple any donation made to No Kid Hungry through its platform — up to $100,000 — until the end of the year.
- Our Place, the kitchenware brand, will donate 10 meals to Feeding America for every purchase.
- The home goods company Brooklinen is taking advantage of holiday returns and giving returned products to domestic violence shelters around the country.
Many posts have discussed the political uses of philanthropy.
Neither party will admit it, but the line between philanthropy and politics has, frankly, been completely obliterated over the last few years. What counts as “philanthropy” versus “politics” depends on your political tribe: I can tell you that the Koch network views their campaigns to deregulate the economy as philanthropy that helps the poor, although liberals won’t believe it. Similarly, conservatives won’t believe that registering likely Democratic voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona is “philanthropy.” Many liberals see that as plainly pro-democracy, and given the racial inequities in voter turnout, as anti-racist. Conservatives see these well-tailored charitable gifts—such as the half-a-billion dollars that Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan donated for elections administration last year—as driven by a sinister agenda, or at least as a bank-shot progressive power play. You’d have an equally difficult time convincing Democrats that the Kochs’ lobbying against the E.P.A. is done for the benefit of the rural poor.
If there was a silver lining to Citizens United, it’s that most insiders now will admit, in candid moments, they’re in on the joke. Cynicism abounds. Technically, there should be an easy way to distinguish between philanthropy and politics: According to the tax code, a donation to a 501(c)3 organization is tax-deductible because it is philanthropy, while a donation to a 501(c)4 group, a super PAC or a campaign is not tax-deductible because it counts as politics. And technically, there should be a way to distinguish between policy advocacy—the purpose of dark-money 501(c)4 organizations—and explicit elect-him or oust-her electioneering, which is the provenance of super PACs and campaigns. But the territory has become decidedly murky, as the new filings from outside groups reveal....
None of these tactics are illegal. But one consequence of the aforementioned loopholes and exploits is that ever more of the money that shapes civic life is retreating into the shadows. This trend began in philanthropy over the last decade, as billionaires moved their charitable work from tax-filing foundations into donor-advised funds and LLCs that don’t share anything with the I.R.S. And now what has eaten philanthropy has eaten campaign finance, too. The upshot is that the public disclosures that are filed with the government have never meant less. Reading the tax documents that private foundations must file, or the F.E.C. reports that campaigns and super PACs must declare, reveals an awfully incomplete snapshot of big-money philanthropy and big-money politics. The real innovation, and the real money, increasingly flows in the unaccountable backwaters of America’s political swamp.
The 1917 veterans benefits system is the system that the Department of Veterans Affairs uses today, groaning under the weight of an enormously expanded set of veterans benefits haphazardly added on after a century’s worth of wars, all reflecting changing (and often conflicting) views of individual rights, government benefits, economics, and military service. Richard Levy has written out a helpful explainer of the contemporary conflagration resulting from the dynamics at work in these benefits—something he calls the “uneasy mixture of two basic models of government benefits,” the charitable and the social insurance models.
In the charity model, “whatever moral obligation the nation may owe its veterans, the fulfillment of that responsibility is, from a legal perspective, a voluntary undertaking.” The charity model prevailed for a significant portion of American history, including during the time the veterans benefit system emerged. The creation of Social Security, Welfare, and Medicare decades later signaled a different understanding of government benefits, what we commonly call entitlements, and which Levy calls the “social insurance model” of benefits. Levy writes that in this latter model, “benefits are a form of social contract through which the government uses its taxing and spending powers to spread the costs of old age, disability, unemployment, and poverty.”
In the expansion of modern veterans benefits to include now housing insurance and fertility treatments, we can see the social insurance model in play, along with the charity model. The dual motivations of gratitude and a just repayment of a debt behind those two models are not difficult to discern. But the range of benefits the contemporary veteran can qualify for is so expansive that the veteran’s relationship with the VA may be the most important relationship in her post-service life. The VA can define who, as a veteran, she is in her own mind—whether disabled, because she receives a check for such, or not. And in its capacity as the second largest federal agency and the most visible public expression of the nation’s gratitude towards its veterans, the VA certainly shapes the American public’s expectations and understanding of who the veteran is.
Society’s medicalized perception of the veteran is further reemphasized, as James D. Ridgeway has noted, by veterans service organizations frequently lobbying for all benefits as compensation that is owed the veteran, as their right. But in fact, the “wounded warrior” is the centerpiece of veterans’ legislation in the 21st century not only because medical care is its historical root, but also because stakeholders and legislators have learned that highlighting the “brokenness” of veterans is the most effective mechanism to move legislation through Congress.
In 1980, Harris and Associates explicitly recommended this tactic to legislators even while noting its risky downsides for the public image of the actual veterans. That Congress liked the recommendation and paid no attention to the warning seems obvious in the post-9/11 context by the frequency with which members in the House and Senate introduce suicide prevention legislation despite repeated empirical evidence that veterans’ most consistent source of stress is understanding how to navigate the veterans benefits system, and being able to secure meaningful employment.
This by no means is to make light of the statistics about veteran and military suicides. But at what point does holding one single perspective distort the truth of a photograph or a profession, a person or a phenomenon?
According to a CalMatters analysis, the number of nonprofits affiliated with California legislators or caucuses grew from at least three in 2010 to at least 12 last year, with total revenue of about $2.9 million.
Much of the money has come from corporations and unions with business before the Legislature, including oil, tobacco and other lobbies whose political contributions are officially or unofficially shunned by the member’s party. The upshot, experts say, is a monetary backchannel that, while legal and even sometimes beneficial, has also become an increasingly common way for politicians to raise and spend money outside the limits even of California’s tough regulations.
“It provides another way for the lawmaker to wield influence as well as a way for those who seek to influence the legislator to curry favor,” said Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine. “This gives a donor some potential extra influence that they couldn’t buy through a campaign contribution.”
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A 2018 report by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law named presidents, governors, members of Congress and prominent mayors from both major parties who had used nonprofits to raise millions of dollars. Among them: Trump, Barack Obama, Sen. Bernie Sanders, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and, in California, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. The report found, in particular, that “spending by nonprofits that coordinate with elected officials after they take office goes almost entirely unchecked.”
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Nonprofit entities offer politicians enormous flexibility in how much they tell the public about who’s giving them money. Federal law generally does not require that nonprofits disclose their donors to the public.
State law does require California politicians to publicly report payments of $5,000 or more made to a group at the politician’s request for a legislative, governmental or charitable purpose — a transaction called a “behested payment.” Most of the nonprofits affiliated with California lawmakers report the bulk of the donations they receive as behests to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission. The amount of money lawmakers reported raising as “behested payments” for their nonprofits grew from $105,000 in 2011 to $2.9 million in 2019, for a total of nearly $13.3 million over the nine years.
As Mr. Bloomberg traverses the country as a presidential candidate, he is drawing on a vast network of city leaders whom he has funded as a philanthropist or advised as an elder statesman of municipal politics. Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has assets totaling $9 billion, has supported 196 different cities with grants, technical assistance and education programs worth a combined $350 million. Now, leaders in some of those cities are forming the spine of Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign: He has been endorsed so far by eight mayors — from larger cities like San Jose, Calif., and Louisville, Ky., and smaller ones like Gary, Ind., representing a total of more than 2.6 million Americans.
For all of those endorsers, Mr. Bloomberg has been an important benefactor. All have attended his prestigious boot camp at Harvard that gives the mayors access to ongoing strategic advice from Bloomberg-funded experts. More than half have received funding in the form of grants and other support packages from Mr. Bloomberg worth a total of nearly $10 million, according to a review of tax documents and interviews with all eight mayors.
[T]ax cuts have removed philanthropic incentives for many Americans. That's because the standard deduction is so large that the middle class no longer sees any benefit from itemizing charitable deductions.
Philanthropy is increasingly looking to supplant or replace government.
How it works: Individuals like Charles Koch, Mike Bloomberg and Bill Gates use their philanthropies to advocate for societal changes and interventions that they would like to see enacted by governments. Often they engage in explicit lobbying, and often that lobbying is successful, both domestically and internationally.
- Swiss bank UBS, in its fifth annual report on billionaires, says that many "are seeking new ways to engineer far-reaching environmental and social change."
- Within our lifetime, we will see “the reemergence of a benevolent aristocracy," UBS's head of Ultra High Net Worth, Josef Stadler, told Forbes.
What they're saying:
- Older philanthropies may no longer be controlled by their founders, but care just as much about changing global public policy. The Ford Foundation, for instance, has focused on combating inequality around the world — something that can only be done if it gets governments on board.
Foundations are an unaccountable, nontransparent, perpetual, and lavishly tax-advantaged exercise of power."
— Rob Reich, Stanford University
Most Americans have donated their time and their money to social causes and charities in the last year, according to an Axios-SurveyMonkey poll on philanthropy that breaks down the most popular charitable giving causes.
The bottom line: Education tops the list of causes Americans have supported, followed by human services and health — but they give less to the arts and international affairs.
The big picture: Education is the top cause for both millennials (46%) and Gen X (42%). Gen Z supports health causes most (47%), while Boomers support religion (41%) more than other causes.
International affairs ranks last in giving for all age groups, with only 6% of Americans saying that they’ve donated to related causes in the last 12 months.A June report from Giving USA:
Amid a complex climate for charitable giving, American individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations gave an estimated $427.71 billion to U.S. charities in 2018, according to Giving USA 2019: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for theYear 2018.
Total charitable giving rose 0.7% measured in current dollars over the revised total of $424.74 billion contributed in 2017. Adjusted for inflation, total giving declined 1.7%. (Please see below for a more detailed breakdown of the numbers for each philanthropic source and sector.)
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A number of competing factors in the economic and public policy environments may have affected donors’ decisions in 2018, shifting some previous giving patterns. Many economic variables that shape giving, such as personal income, had relatively strong growth, while the stock market decline in late 2018 may have had a dampening effect. The policy environment also likely influenced some donors’ behavior. One important shift in the 2018 giving landscape is the drop in the number of individuals and households who itemize various types of deductions on their tax returns. This shift came in response to the federal tax policy change that doubled the standard deduction. More than 45 million households itemized deductions in 2016. Numerous studies suggest that number may have dropped to approximately 16 to 20 million households in 2018, reducing an incentive for charitable giving.
With near unanimity, 97% of upper-income investors in the U.S. say they have donated money to a charitable organization in the past year, according to a Wells Fargo/Gallup survey of investors. Majorities of upper-income investors identify four factors as major reasons behind their decision to donate -- 78% strongly believe in the causes they support, 71% want to make a difference, 62% enjoy helping others, and 56% have a personal connection to the issue or organization.
Although less than half of upper-income investors say the following are major reasons behind their donations, majorities consider them to be at least a minor reason: moral obligation, desire to give back after benefiting from others' generosity in the past, setting an example for their children and being taught to do so by parents. Far fewer say tax savings and social pressure motivate them to donate.
In an era of increased public awareness and scrutiny of both real and perceived political corruption and questionable ethical behavior, this report sought to investigate a very substantial issue that has succeeded in evading the public eye despite significant implications for both the public and the integrity of our system of elected democracy.
This report, titled “California Shakedown: An Investigation of Behested Payments to Elected Officials in California,” was produced by the Kersten Institute for Governance and Public Policy at the request of the Center for Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (CETA).
CETA asked the Kersten Institute to take an in-depth look at an emerging campaign finance issue whereby publicly elected officials steer contributions from individuals, corporations, unions, and other organizations to the nonprofitor charitable cause of their choice (commonly referred to as “behestedpayments”).
Moreover, these so-called “behested payments” are essentially an end-run around state and local limitations on campaign finance contributions to candidate committees directly controlled by elected officials.
Furthermore, a case study of the City of Sacramento in 2010-2013 alerted CETA, the Sacramento Bee, and good government watchdogs up and down the state regarding the perceived unethical behavior of large “charitable” contributions made by Wal-Mart and other special interests with business before the city to then Mayor Kevin Johnson and City Councilman Jay Schenirer.
This report sought to investigate this City of Sacramento case study and others like it to produce a written report on the origins of the behested payment issue in California and an analysis of potential policy solutions that have been take or could be taken to address the problem.
The following report represents the findings and conclusions reached in this investigation and ultimately provides a look at an emerging issue that raises important ethical questions about the role of behested payments in our state and local political system, as well as potential issues that may merit additional investigation and political action.
In short, this report found significant evidence regarding the highly questionable practice of California elected officials accepting large behest payment payments from special interests which then at least gave the perception of impropriety and improper influence buying by these special interests, particularly when behests appeared to directly benefit the elected official.
The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board even went so far as to refer to practice of elected officials soliciting behest contributions from special interests with business before their elected body as a “shakedown.”
The intent of this report is to provide an initial look at the issue, present relevant case studies, data and sources, and discuss potential solutions to this importantpublic policy issue.
Bill and Melinda Gates have launched the Gates Policy Initiative to lobby for issues the billionaire couple has been working on through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Hill first reported.
The initiative will be focused on global health, global development, U.S. education and outcomes for black, Latino and rural students specifically, and efforts to move people from poverty to employment.
Rob Nabors, ex-White House director of legislative affairs under former President Obama, is the executive director of the 501(c)(4) initiative. He currently serves as a director at the Gates Foundation.
Scrolling through the GoFundMe website reveals seemingly an endless number of people who need help or community support. A common theme: the cost of health care.
It didn’t start out this way. Back in 2010, when the crowdfunding website began, it suggested fundraisers for “ideas and dreams,” “wedding donations and honeymoon registry” or “special occasions.” A spokeswoman said the bulk of collection efforts from the first year were “related to charities and foundations.” A category for medical needs existed, but it was farther down the list.
In the nine years since, campaigns to pay for health care have reaped the most cash. Of the $5 billion the company says it has raised, about a third has been for medical expenses from more than 250,000 medical campaigns conducted annually.
Religious causes are, and always have been, Americans’ favorite charitable targets. Of course, “Religion” is a very broad category. Some of those funds are used to support houses of worship and clergy, to maintain the faith, and to proselytize future generations. Much religious charity, however, ultimately goes into sub-causes like relief for the poor, medical care, education, or aid sent to low-income countries or victims of disaster.
Keep in mind too that religious charities tend to have less access to supplemental funds than other nonprofits. Hospitals and colleges charge users fees to supplement their donated income; other nonprofits sell goods; many museums charge admission; some charities receive government grants. Churches and religious charities, however, operate mostly on their donated funds depicted in this graph.
Powered by a booming stock market and a strong economy, charitable giving by American individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations to U.S. charities surged to an estimated $410.02 billion in 2017, according to Giving USA 2018: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2017, released today.
Giving exceeded $400 billion in a single year for the first time, increasing 5.2 percent (3.0 percent adjusted for inflation) over the revised total of $389.64 contributed in 2016. (Please see below for a more detailed breakdown of the numbers for each philanthropic source and sector.)
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In addition to the S&P 500, other economic factors, such as personal income and personal consumption, are associated with households’ long-term financial stability and have historically been correlated with giving by individuals. These factors also experienced strong growth in 2017.
Highlights about Charitable Giving by Source
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- Giving by three of the four sources of giving grew 5 percent or more.
- Giving by individuals represented 70 percent of total giving.
- Giving by foundations has seen strong growth for the past seven years, according to data provided by the Foundation Center. Its five-year annualized average growth rate of 7.6 percent far exceeds the 4.3 percent annualized average growth rate for total giving.
- Corporate giving was boosted by $405 million in contributions for relief related to natural and manmade disasters.
The Numbers for 2017 Charitable Giving by Source:
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- Giving by individuals totaled an estimated $286.65 billion, rising 5.2 percent in 2017 (an increase of 3.0 percent, adjusted for inflation).
- Giving by foundations increased 6.0 percent, to an estimated $66.90 billion in 2017 (an increase of 3.8 percent, adjusted for inflation). Data on foundation giving are provided by the Foundation Center.
- Giving by bequest totaled an estimated $35.70 billion in 2017, increasing 2.3 percent from 2016 (a 0.2 percent increase, adjusted for inflation).
- Giving by corporations is estimated to have increased by 8.0 percent in 2017, totaling $20.77 billion (an increase of 5.7 percent, adjusted for inflation).
Highlights about 2017 Gifts to Charitable Organizations
- Charitable subsectors receiving contributions generally experienced strong growth.
- Giving to foundations saw the largest growth in charitable contributions, increasing 15.5 percent, based on data provided by the Foundation Center. This growth was driven by extraordinarily large gifts by major philanthropists, such as Michael and Susan Dell and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, to their foundations.
- Giving to eight of the nine major types of recipient organizations increased in 2017.
- The exception was giving to international affairs organizations, which declined after several years of steady growth. However, giving to this subsector still reached its third-highest level ever recorded.
- Seven of the nine types of recipient organizations experienced growth of 5 percent or more....
The Numbers for 2017 Charitable Giving to Recipients:
- Giving to religion increased 2.9 percent (0.7 percent adjusted for inflation), receiving an estimated $127.37 billion in contributions.
- Giving to education is estimated to have increased 6.2 percent (4.0 percent adjusted for inflation) to $58.90 billion.
- Giving to human services increased by an estimated 5.1 percent (2.9 percent adjusted for inflation) totaling $50.06 billion.
- Giving to foundations is estimated to have increased by 15.5 percent (13.1 percent adjusted for inflation) to $45.89 billion, based on data provided by the Foundation Center.
- Giving to health organizations is estimated to have increased by 7.3 percent (5.1 percent adjusted for inflation) to $38.27 billion.
- Giving to public-society benefit organizations increased an estimated 7.8 percent (5.5 percent adjusted for inflation) to $29.59 billion.
- Giving to arts, culture, and humanities is estimated to have increased 8.7 percent (6.5 percent) to $19.51 billion.
- Giving to international affairs is estimated to have declined 4.4 percent (6.4 percent adjusted for inflation) to $22.97 billion.
- Giving to environment and animal organizations is estimated to have increased 7.2 percent (5.0 percent adjusted for inflation) to $11.83 billion.
In addition, giving to individuals, which is less than 2 percent of total giving, is estimated to have declined 20.7 percent (22.4 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars) in 2017, to $7.87 billion, primarily as a result of an unusually high increase in 2016. The bulk of these donations are in-kind gifts of medications to patients in need, made through the patient assistance programs of pharmaceutical companies’ operating foundations.
Unallocated giving was negative $2.24 billion in 2017. This amount can be considered the difference between giving by source and use in a particular year. It includes the difference between itemized deductions by individuals (and households) carried over from previous years. The tax year in which a gift is claimed by the donor (carried over) and the year when the recipient organization reports it as revenue (the year in which it is received) may be different.