INDIANAPOLIS – Charitable giving nationwide last year reached a record $240.92 billion, according to a report released yesterday by the Giving USA Foundation.
Donors gave an estimated $11.97 billion or 4.2 percent more in 2006 than in 2005, the report found. “Mega-gifts” accounted for 1.3 percent of the total, a share that billionaire investor Warren Buffett predicted will rise as the wealthy become more philanthropic.
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Buffett, 76, gave $1.9 billion in 2006, the first installment of his pledge to pay more than $30 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and four others over 20 years, and eventually to donate his entire $48 billion stake in Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (NYSE: BRK.A and BRK.B), Bloomberg News said.
“I’ve heard from a lot of people since last year that are making big plans,” he told Bloomberg in an interview today about his annual charity auction for the Glide Foundation. “I know of one fellow that’s just been involved in a public offering. I think he’s going to be setting up a billion-dollar foundation.”
Buffett may have been referring to Peter G. Peterson, a co-founder of New York-based Blackstone Group LP, a private-equity firm that raised $4.13 billion in its initial public offering last week, Bloomberg News said. In a filing Thursday with the the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the firm said Peterson, 81, plans to donate a “substantial amount” of the cash and stock he gets from the IPO to “various charities.”
The stock market’s rapid rise last year was credited by the Giving USA report with helping increase grants by charitable foundations. Such grants rose 12.6 percent last year to $36.5 billion or 12.5 percent of total giving in 2006, the report said.
But donations by corporations and corporate foundations lfel 7.6 percent to $12.7 billion in 2006. But compared with non-disaster giving in 2005, corporate giving increased 1.5 percent, the report said.
Charitable bequests declined as well, falling 2.1 percent to $22.9 billion or 7.8 percent of the 2006 total.
Giving by individuals rose 4.4 percent (1.2 percent after inflation) to $222.9 billion, accounting for 75.6 percent of all charitable giving last year.
“About 65 percent of households with incomes lower than $100,000 give to charity,” noted George C. Ruotolo Jr., chair of the Giving Foundation’s parent, the Giving Institute: Leading Consultants to Non-Profits. “That is higher than the percentage who vote or read a Sunday newspaper.”
Last year’s increase in total giving is all the more noteworthy given that the 2005 figures include almost $7.4 billion “in extraordinary disaster-relief giving,” spurred by the Gulf Coast hurricanes and other disasters, the report noted.
“If disaster gifts are excluded from the 2005 total, giving in 2006 rose 6.6 percent,” it said, or “3.2 percent after adjusting for inflation.”
“Giving USA 2007,” released yesterday by the AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, is described by the foundation as an annual yearbook of philanthropy. The report was researched and written by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Additional information is available at www.aafrc.org.
