The Big Problem in Charity That Giving Tuesday Can’t Fix
Charities and nonprofits could hardly contain their enthusiasm leading up to Giving Tuesday. On social media, everything from National Geographic to the Kennedy Center has been promoting it for days. No shame there. Whole Whale, a consultancy for nonprofit organizations, estimates that the charitable-industrial complex can expect to end the day with a record haul of $250 million.*
But beneath the success of Giving Tuesday is an uncomfortable reality. While Americans are giving more money to charity than ever before, a little-noticed report released last month by the left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies finds that the money is coming from fewer and fewer people. And that, the research group says, has troubling implications for our democracy, not to mention our nation’s traditional reliance on charity as a mechanism for smoothing gaps in the social safety net.
These donor dropouts may be yet another manifestation of income and wealth inequality. Americans gave a record-setting $373 billion to charitable endeavors in 2015, according to the Giving USA Foundation’s annual philanthropic survey. When the Institute for Policy Studies crunched the data to discover who exactly was giving what, it discovered that itemized charitable donations from households with earnings of at least $10 million annually increased by 104 percent in the decade between 2003 and 2013. Even those with low-six-figure earnings upped their giving—those in households earning at least $100,000 increased their donation budgets by 40 percent in the same period. But those earning less than $100,000 did the exact opposite: Their contributions declined by 34 percent.
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