A New England renaissance?

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Fall 1999 by McCully, George

CHANGING THE REGION'S CULTURE OF PHILANTHROPY

In December 1997, a major gifts officer at a leading university in the Boston area told me, in response to the first edition of the Massachusetts Catalogue for Philanthropy and its Generosity Index, "There isn't a college or university development officer in the country who doesn't know that New Englanders are cheap.

Anywhere else, you make your pitch and you either get a major gift or you don't. Here in New England, if you're lucky, they'll give you a thousand bucks and think they've done their job. So you're onto something big, but it isn't going to change overnight; and I urge you to stick with it and not give up."

The Catalogue is a collaborative project of Massachusetts grantmakers, donors, fundraisers and charities established to promote charitable giving, The Generosity Index was conceived to help clarify the significance of annual federal data on itemized charitable deductions. Alone, the deductions, even when averaged, are meaningless, because levels of giving for an entire state or income group may vary for many different reasons-such as available income, investment assets, distribution of wealth and cost of living. Nor does it help to compare average deductions directly with average adjusted gross incomes, because only one in four taxpayers itemizes charitable deductions, and we don't know the incomes of either itemizers or nonitemizers. These gaps and fallacies have impeded strategizing in philanthropy.

Lacking any alternative, we decided to compare each state's and each income group's national rank in average adjusted gross income, or having, with its national rank in average deductions, or giving. This yields a plus or minus number-plus if the group is ranked higher in giving than having, minus if it is ranked lower in giving than having. The Generosity Index, in turn, is a ranking of those plus or minus numbers.

Named with a bit of irony and intended more for education than science, the Generosity Index has acquired a life of its own nationwide. But what does it tell us?

First, it suggests that we have no national culture of charitable giving. If all Americans were equally generous in giving in relation to having, they would have equal scores on the Index, if they gave consistently in relation primarily to their incomes, that equal score would be zerothat is, there would be no difference between their ranks in having and in giving. But in fact, there is a wide variation-an 85-point spreadbetween the highest and lowest scores.

Second, our charitable giving evidently is not related to income at all. The average state has a 20-point disparity between its ranks in having and giving.

Third, the relation between giving and income levels is strongly regional as illustrated by a map published in the August 1999 issue of Governing magazine. Using the 1997 generosity data, the national magazine color-coded 10-state groups: the top 10, second 10, third and so on. The map reveals clearly that contiguous states tend to share similar levels of generosity. Most generous are the Bible Belt and Utah, where generally low ranks in income combine with very high ranks in giving, encouraged bv evangelical Protestant tithing and a strong sense of community. Next comes the great internal mass of the countrystrongly Protestant, warmly communitarian and generous. Then comes the relatively wealthy northern Pacific Coast. And finally at the very bottom are the relatively wealthy, urban, secular, sophisticated states including New England, two Midwestern states (Minnesota and Wisconsin), two Middle-Atlantic states (Maryland and New Jersey) and Colorado.

The charts on page 33 profile each New England state's generosity for the state as a whole and among the top three income groups (which give the most) for the years 1991 through 1997. One purpose of the Generosity Index was to let lowerincome states off the hook. so Vermont and Maine, which rank low in giving but also have low incomes, rise into line with the rest of the country. The other four states-Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts-have consistently high average incomes and low average deductions, and therefore, low generosity. For the period as a whole, they ranked 47th, 48th, 49th and 50th, respectively. These numbers suggest a strongly distinctive New England regional identity in charitable giving as it relates to income.

Though more clearly documented than before, the story of New England's tagging generosity was not really news even when the Catalogue first published the Index in 1997. A year earlier, Tufts historian John Schneider wrote in CONNECTION Of New England's "elusive philanthropic dollar." Schneider cited three previous articles in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the sector's national newspaper, showing that New Englanders, and Bostonians in partiCUlar, give less of their relatively high incomes to charity. The New England Nonprofit Quarterly had also analyzed the Cbronicle data and asked: 'Just how much is it coincidence that basically every state in New England hit the bottom rung on donations? Is there a regional factor? A regional component to the solution?"