A New England renaissance?

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

That article caught the attention of the Ellis L. Phillips Foundation, a small family foundation established in New York in 1930, now headquartered in Boston. The foundation's trustees asked what they might do to help ameliorate this situation, and came up with the Catalogue for Philanthropy, now in its third year. in 1997, during prime fundraising season, the Catalogue was mailed to more than 300,000 affluent households and professional offices in Massachusetts, to publicize the region's low levels of charitable giving and to showcase the philanthropic sector by profiling 100 of the best small-to-mid-size charities that the public never hears about.

Predictably, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data and attendant state rankings at first were greeted with denial: Thej, are misleading. Even if true, they are insignificant-we give in other tra-111S, such as bY volunteering. Me pay taxes instead. Cost of living6rces us to give less. We have a disproportionate number of Catholics (the loic-west-giving religious group). We are better-educated and therefore do not respond so gullibly to the telemarketing and direct-mail appeals that drive charitable giving elsewhere. Me Yankees are thrift)' and individualistic, and what's wrong with that?

Gradually, however, the weight of evidence (more than 821 million tax returns from 1991 to 1997) has produced consensus on two points: 1) New England and Massachusetts lag behind the rest of the country in charitable giving in relation to income, and 2) we can well afford to give more.

National Scene

But we needn't think the rest of the country is doing so well. Giving TSA reports that U.S. charitable giving has stood below 2 percent of gross domestic product and well below 2 percent of personal income for decades. The Newtithing Group in San Francisco has estimated that Americans could triple their giving without noticeably affecting their lifestyles. Why should we be satisfied that only one in four taxpayers itemizes charitable deductions or that only one in five estates worth over $1 million makes any charitable bequests at all? Philanthropy aside, this is not even good money management. The truth is that not only do we lack a national culture of philanthropy, but most Americans give at unjustifiably low levels and too often in response to superficial-and not infrequently fraudulent-manipulations by direct mail and telemarketing. There is plenty of room for improvement.

The major responsibility for this anemia in giving belongs to the philanthropic community itself. While it is true that the sector has been professionalized during these decades-and that internally perhaps has never worked better-we have done a poor job of teaching philanthropy.

One symptom of this is that almost no one knows what "philanthropy" means, and when it is explained, the general impression is negative. While preparing the first Catalogue, we asked people how they might respond to receiving such a publication in the mail. Everyone we asked said they would wonder if it was legitimate.