More Charitable Numbers :: From the Salmon

More Charitable Numbers

In the discussion that followed a previous post, ”Are We As Generous As We Think We Are? (Redux),” Greg pointed out some interesting numbers that I thought worthy of posting here so that more people would get the chance to see them.

Greg called attention to a recent New York Times article that looked at a few issues surrounding US giving to non-profits and the tax deductions people took for those donations. Here are the excerpts that are most germane to our recent discussion:

Last year, the share of giving going to organizations most directly related to helping the poor hit a record low, accounting for less than 10 percent of the $248 billion donated by Americans and their philanthropic institutions.

[...]

According to the Treasury Department, the charitable deduction will amount this year to a $40 billion tax subsidy, mostly to upper-income households - overshadowing the roughly $20 billion the human services sector is likely to raise.

[...]

Research by Mark Chaves, a sociology professor at the University of Arizona who was principal investigator of the 1998 National Congregations Study, the first comprehensive study of churches and their spending, showed that less than 3 percent of the average congregation’s total budget was spent on social services.

[...]

FEGS, like Safe Spaces, is mostly supported by income from government contracts, and Mr. Tisch cited that as the biggest reason giving to human services has shrunk. “Why should a philanthropist pay if the government will?” he asked.

The federal budget for health and human services rose 183 percent, adjusted for inflation, to $459.4 billion in 2002 from $68.3 billion in 1980, according to research by Patrick Rooney, director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

Nonprofit leaders counter that they have been forced to seek more government support as donations have declined. “It becomes a chicken and egg kind of thing,” said Peter B. Goldberg, chief executive of Alliance for Families and Children, which represents more than 300 family service groups nationwide. “I’d argue that my agencies have become increasingly dependent on public sector funding because nongovernmental funding simply hasn’t kept pace.”

[...]

“If there’s one thing that’s true, it’s that people give to people because they have a personal connection to the place they’re giving to, and people who have personal connections to human service organizations are not usually people with money, “ Ms. Anderson said.

That assertion is supported by demographic data showing that older donors, particularly women, have been the biggest supporters of groups helping the poor, said Robert F. Sharpe, a fund-raising consultant. Those donors are dying out, he said, and the emerging generation of baby boomer donors is less likely to support social service organizations. “People who grew up in comfortable, clean, prosperous suburbs have just never had as much familiarity with how many others live,” Mr. Sharpe said.

Those are the most salient passages from a wholly interesting article. The numbers and ideas here could lead to a number of interesting questions, but for now, I’ll present them without comment.

But I also wanted to add another set of numbers I came across recently as the result of the sermon our pastor gave on Sunday.

Ram Cnaan, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work, did a study that tried to approximate the value of social services provided by congregations throughout the US. I have to confess that I’ve only given these a cursory reading, but here are a few excerpts worth considering:

From a 2003 article in Christianity Today:

The net value of congregational, social, and community services averaged $15,307 per month, or approximately $184,000 per congregation per year. This contribution is, for the most part, in the form of volunteer hours and other non-cash support. The magnitude of this congregational contribution to social services can best be appreciated by comparing it to costs incurred by secular providers who must pay for the types of in-kind support that congregations voluntarily provide at no cash cost.

I’m not sure how many congregations there are in the US, so I can’t do the math for you, but to give you an idea of what that might look like for a city, Cnaan did a census of congregational social ministry in Philadelphia:

The monthly replacement value of an average congregation in Philadelphia is estimated at $9,490.54 or an annual replacement value of $113,886.48. We assess the annual replacement value of the entire body of congregations in Philadelphia at $227,772,960.

One final bit from Cnaan’s research. I offer this, because it seems to contradict the Chaves study from the NYT article. Without delving into the methodology and detailed findings, I have no idea of knowing which is right or if they’re even measuring the same things, but here’s a tidbit from a 1999 article Cnaan wrote for the Brookings Review (PDF, HTML Google Cache):

For the entire sample, the mean share of the annual operating budget allocated to social ministry was 17.4 percent.The highest share was 21.2 percent (in Philadelphia); the lowest was 13.1 percent (in Mobile).

Interesting stuff.

One final note… Keep in mind that most of the numbers here are for social services addressing the problems of poverty within the US, while many of the numbers we’d looked at previously were for development aid and programs aimed at addressing poverty outside the US.

2 Ripples from “More Charitable Numbers”

Streak says:

November 17, 2005 at 7:11 am

I read the CT article rather quickly, but it sounded like those congregations it studied were those closer to the poorer neighborhoods. What about the large wealthy churches that are in the suburbs?

As N. T. Ammerman noted in 1997, “The two institutions most likely to remain connected to the immediate neighborhoods they serve are elementary schools and congregations. But even that has changed. In many places, busing has strained the tie between school and community.” This leaves the congregations as the final link between communities and their residents.

Seems like kind of a good news bad news thing. Good news that those churches that maintain a connection to a community actually make a huge difference in that community, but suggests that those that leave for bigger complexes and parking are really not doing much. ?

zalm says:

November 21, 2005 at 3:12 am

That’s a good point, Streak. Here’s more about the methodology from the Brookings study I linked to above:

In this article I report the findings of my 1997 study, supported by Partners for Sacred Places, of 113 historic churches???all built before 1940 and still used as places of worship � in six American cities. Its purpose is to document the extent to which religious congregations are involved in community social service activity.

What Services?
My study consisted of extensive interviews by a research team with clergy, lay leaders, and social service providers in mostly urban churches in Chicago, Indianapolis, Mobile, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. Congregation size ranged widely � from a low of 20 to a high of 4,800 � with an average membership of 624. Most congregations consisted mostly of one ethnic group. Of the 113 congregations, 90 reported that three-quarters or more of their members belonged to one ethnic group, usually either African American or Caucasian.

The congregations ranged from politically and theologically conservative (the former tended to cluster in Indianapolis and Mobile, the latter in Indianapolis, Mobile, and Philadelphia) to politically and theologically liberal (the former in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia, the latter in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York). Though some denominations were over-represented in particular cities, overall the sampling of denominational distribution was reasonably well balanced: 9 Presbyterian, 18 Baptist, 22 Episcopal, 11 Methodist, 18 Catholic, 10 Lutheran, and 25 others, including Jewish synagogues, independent churches, Pentecostal churches, and Friends Societies.

This certainly doesn’t sound like it included larger suburban churches.

On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell referenced Cnaan in a <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_09_12_a_warren.html">New Yorker article</a> about Rick Warren a month or two ago. He used Cnaan to make a fairly interesting point about small group membership as a predictor of involvement in volunteer ministry:

Ram Cnaan, a professor of social work at the University of Pennsylvania, recently estimated the replacement value of the charitable work done by the average American church--that is, the amount of money it would take to equal the time, money, and resources donated to the community by a typical congregation--and found that it came to about a hundred and forty thousand dollars a year. In the city of Philadelphia, for example, that works out to an annual total of two hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of community “good”; on a national scale, the contribution of religious groups to the public welfare is, as Cnaan puts it, “staggering.” In the past twenty years, as the enthusiasm for publicly supported welfare has waned, churches have quietly and steadily stepped in to fill the gaps. And who are the churchgoers donating all that time and money? People in small groups. Membership in a small group is a better predictor of whether people volunteer or give money than how often they attend church, whether they pray, whether they’ve had a deep religious experience, or whether they were raised in a Christian home. Social action is not a consequence of belief, in other words. I don’t give because I believe in religious charity. I give because I belong to a social structure that enforces an ethic of giving. ”Small groups are networks,” the Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow, who has studied the phenomenon closely, says. “They create bonds among people. Expose people to needs, provide opportunities for volunteering, and put people in harm’s way of being asked to volunteer. That’s not to say that being there for worship is not important. But, even in earlier research, I was finding that if people say all the right things about being a believer but aren’t involved in some kind of physical social setting that generates interaction, they are just not as likely to volunteer.” (Emphasis mine)

I wonder if this is part of the answer to the questions we left hanging in a previous post… Maybe people give such a small percentage to church because our churches don’t provide a social structure that encourages an ethic of giving.

Or, to paraphrase Jim Wallis, churches really only ask for the edges of our lives. And yet they’re surprised when that’s all they get from us.
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From the Salmon