A 48th place ranking on the annual Catalogue for Philanthropy’s “generosity index” doesn’t portray “the Rhode Island we know.”
Rick Schwartz, president of communications for the Rhode Island Foundation, said the ranking is a surprise each year.
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“Rhode Island has always been in the bottom five,” Schwartz said.
While the ranking would make Rhode Islanders seem a bit stingy when they have the 15th-highest adjusted gross income in the country – at $45,925 – the index used IRS statistics from 498,227 Rhode Island households who itemized their charitable deductions in 2002. Using that method of determining the ranking means that only about one-third of Rhode Island residents and their donations were considered, Schwartz said.
Mississippi, Arkansas and Oklahoma finished first, second and third, respectively. Neighboring New England states finished on the lower half of the list as well. Massachusetts ranked 49th, New Hampshire 50th, Connecticut 44th, Vermont 35th and Maine 32nd.
The average itemized charitable deduction for Rhode Island was $2,295 for a total of $392.7 million, which means, Schwartz said, that one-third of the state’s residents gave the equivalent of 10 percent of the state’s annual budget.
“And that’s not bad,” Schwartz said.
But ask a nonprofit organization that relies solely on philanthropy, and they’ll tell you while Rhode Islanders are generous, that doesn’t mean it’s easy to keep the doors open in today’s economic climate.
“It’s not that people don’t have good hearts,” said Denise Panichas, interim director of the Samaritans of Rhode Island, a suicide-prevention organization. “It’s that competition for corporate funding has become very tight, and many of these companies are not locally owned anymore.”
Out-of-state owners of those companies, Panichas said, “don’t feel the same vested interest in the community as the original industrialists did.”
Those original mill owners who lived within the communities where they owned businesses tended to invest in things like child care, hospitals and other community assets.
“There are many companies that are very generous – they’ve figured out how to find the balance,” Panichas said.
Small businesses that don’t have the capital to donate instead offer their time for volunteering.
In addition to competing for corporate funding, nonprofits now also face the responsibility of proving their mission statements, Panichas said. Over the past 15 years, academia has endorsed the concept of “proving what a good deed is.”
To provide that proof, nonprofits must commission studies, which aren’t free – or cheap, Panichas said.
“You have to prove your mission statement – and in our case, we’re saving lives, which is more difficult to prove than showing how (a literacy agency) improved a child reading on a third-grade level to a fourth-grade level,” Panichas said.
Keeping up with documenting the statewide agency’s progress is both time- and resource-consuming.
“To maintain the standard that has now emerged costs money,” Panichas said. “And there’s no money to do that either. The larger onus becomes what are you going to spend your (funding) on – providing the services or commissioning the studies that show we provide them.”
Panichas said one reason personal generosity has been dwindling over the past 25 years is that “people don’t feel secure in their own lives – jobs, family, finances – and people hold everything closer to the vest pocket to first ensure their own security, then worry about the rest of the community.”
Schwartz listed three possible reasons Rhode Island might rank so low on the generosity index.
One is that there’s a certain “Yankee” mentality that “people have a certain responsibility to take care of themselves.”
Another, he said, could be the nature of the other states in the country.
“A Southern Baptist state might be high on the list because of giving through the church,” Schwartz said. “You can see where having a sizable part of your population tithing puts (a state) higher on the list.”
Thirdly, Rhode Island charities “don’t always know how to ask” for donations, Schwartz said. Northeast nonprofits are very “sure” about the work they do and “we don’t always approach (donors) in the most businesslike manner,” Schwartz said.
To that end, the Rhode Island Foundation makes every effort to fund development positions for nonprofits who request one.
The generosity index found that the level of giving varies only slightly in different income brackets. Rhode Island households that reported more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income – averaging $453,491 in income – donated about 3 percent of that – $13,397 per household – which is 36th in the country for that income level.
Households reporting between $100,000 and $200,000 ranked 39th in generosity in their income level. Those reporting between $75,000 and $100,000 ranked 46th.
The generosity index’s findings don’t consider “discretionary giving” such as money donated at sporting events, to Salvation Army bell-ringers or at small-scale fund-raisers, Schwartz said.
“People who make under $75,000 are the ones that don’t itemize,” Schwartz said. “But they give.”
Households reporting an average income of less than $75,000 gave an average of $1,349 per household that claimed charitable deductions for a total of $133.7 million in that income category.
The Rhode Island Foundation received $3.2 million for the Station Nightclub Fire Relief Fund, “and that’s just the fund here that the foundation received. I would bet that most of that didn’t show up in itemized charitable deductions,” Schwartz said.
Another heartening example of charitable giving in the state happened on Nov. 20, Panichas said. The Rhode Island Greyhound Owners’ Association held its fourth annual holiday season charity recognition day, at which the association gave $150,000 to 41 charities.
“People are doing good,” Panichas said. “They made sure the money went to the hungriest of the hungry and the neediest of the needy. They don’t have to do this, they choose to do this.”
The $150,000 came from association members’ personal donations and through the association fees.
At Crossroads Rhode Island, which provides services to the homeless and disconnected population in the state, the 48th-place ranking doesn’t portray Rhode Islanders they know.
“I have found that when people are asked and educated about an issue, they open their hearts and wallets,” said Lisa Roth Blackman, director of development at Crossroads. “I would be surprised if that were really true – that we were the stingiest.”
Roth Blackman said it’s possible much of the state’s generosity goes unrecorded in studies such as the generosity index.
“When people adopt a family for the holidays and buy them clothes and toys … that kind of thing doesn’t generally show up in studies like this,” she said.
