The Chronicle of Philanthropy notes a slightly happier fundraising machine in the nation’s largest charitable organizations. Overall donations in their ‘top 400’ are up 2.3 percent. It’s nothing like the glory days of the past decade, when annual increases in giving hit the double digits. But it’s something.
As with all development news, this aggregate increase is tempered by the shaky environment still to come:
As charities head into the two busiest fund-raising months of the year, with the holidays and the end of the tax year motivating many donors, fund raisers say trends that are mostly out of their control could cause another slowdown in giving. Among them: the forthcoming presidential election, stock-market fluctuations, the war in Iraq, the possibility of a terrorist attack, and growing Congressional scrutiny of charities, which has already led to new legislative restrictions on certain types of donations.
And buried in the moderately good news for all charities was some rather stark statistics for arts and culture (including museums and libraries), where total private giving among the 17 organizations in the ‘Philanthropy 400’ actually dropped 24 percent from 2002 to 2003 (the 2.3 percent total gain was mostly due to international causes, health, and hospitals).
As I’ve said before, statistics are just one way of getting a sense of the world. But they’re an important piece of the puzzle. These numbers suggest that even as the economy ticks up and the money starts flowing again, it may flow to other priorities than the arts.
