Tag: Individual giving

Fidelity Charitable: New grants to surpass deposits in 2022

[ad_1]

Fidelity Charitable, the nation’s largest grantmaker, expects 2022 will be the first year since 2018 that the value of grants from its donor advised funds exceeds the value of investments going into the funds.

Jacob Pruitt, Fidelity Charitable’s president, told The Associated Press that donations this year are on track to set a record, even before counting gifts from GivingTuesday, which has grown into a major fundraising day for charities since its launch 10 years ago. In 2021, Fidelity Charitable donated more than $10.3 billion in donor-recommended grants to more than 187,000 organizations.

“It’s kind of amazing when you think about the generosity,” Pruitt said. “Even in spite of inflation and all kinds of noise in the marketplace, our donors are truly engaging and getting money to the right places.”

Pruitt cautioned that December generally brings plenty of investments into donor advised funds — or DAFs — as people move money around for tax purposes. However, he also expects strong end-of-the-year donations as well.

“With the situation in Ukraine and all these natural disasters, our donors are ready,” Pruitt said. “That’s what these accounts are designed for. Individuals put money in and they grow. Then, when there’s a scenario where it’s needed, it can flow out in a thoughtful way. And so I think that the platform is doing what it is there to do.”

The strength of Fidelity Charitable grants comes at a time when donor advised funds are under fire for what critics call loopholes that allow donors to receive tax benefits immediately, while grants can be delayed indefinitely. The bipartisan Accelerating Charitable Efforts Act to require funds invested in donor advised funds to be granted to nonprofits within 15 years is under consideration in Congress.

Chuck Collins, director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, said the growth of donor advised funds remains troubling because loopholes in their oversight allow billions of dollars to be parked in the funds instead of going to communities in taxes or directly to charities.

“It’s great that more money is flowing out,” Collins said. “But we want to know more. We want to know that it’s reaching charities instead of being shuffled around from DAF to DAF.”

In “ Gilded Giving 2022,” a study Collins co-authored, he found that the popularity of DAFs is speeding a shift in philanthropic donations from community-building to legacy-building gifts to universities and museums.

However, Pruitt said donor advised funds can help reverse the ongoing drop in the number of individual donors in America. He said Fidelity Charitable removed the $10,000 minimum requirement to open a donor advised fund, making it available to everyone.

“It’s simple, effective and it allowed individuals from all walks of life to have an opportunity to participate in this amazing product,” he said. “What we’re focusing on next is expanding the education and awareness in the marketplace.”

Fidelity Charitable recently began offering NFTs in an effort to reach younger investors. And Pruitt said it is also working on improving its smartphone apps.

“We want to make sure that these tools are where the next generation of investors are,” he said. “We want to continue to make this simple and effective from a digital perspective so people can engage in a comfortable way.”

However, Collins said the issue with the declining number of individual donors isn’t due to a lack of technology. It’s due to a lack of money.

“Fewer middle class and lower middle class people are donating and it has nothing to do with tax laws,” he said. “It has to do with economic insecurity. They have less money and less of a cushion for donations.”

Rather than opening more donor advised funds, Collins suggests that people simply donate directly to charities in their communities, much like many nonprofits on GivingTuesday suggest.

GivingTuesday CEO Asha Curran said the day raised $2.7 billion in 2021 and offers people many ways to show their generosity.

“The relatively small act of giving something invests a person in their community in ways that have powerful knock on effects,” she said. “Once a person is a giver and really feels like ‘I have the capacity to make a difference in the world,’ there are many, many wonderful things that happen in terms of their place in their community as a result.”

—————

Associated Press reporter Thalia Beaty contributed to this report from New York.

—————

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 29, 2022
Buffett donates over $750 million to his family charities

[ad_1]

OMAHA, Neb. — Billionaire investor Warren Buffett donated more than $750 million in Berkshire Hathaway stock to the four foundations run by his family Wednesday, but unlike his annual gifts to charity each summer, the recipients didn’t include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Buffett has been making annual donations to the same five charities every year since 2006 when he unveiled a plan to give away his fortune over time, with the Gates Foundation receiving the biggest donations. Wednesday’s donations mark the first time the 92-year-old has made a second major gift within the same year.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed Buffett gave 1.5 million Class B shares in the Omaha, Nebraska-based conglomerate he leads to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for his first wife. He also gave 300,000 Class B shares apiece to the three foundations run by his children: the Sherwood Foundation, the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and the NoVo Foundation.

In June, he gave 11 million Class B shares to the Gates Foundation, 1.1 million B shares to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation and 770,218 shares apiece to his children’s three foundations.

It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the new donations this week, and Buffett didn’t immediately respond Wednesday to questions about them. The Gates Foundation and the Buffett family foundations that received the gifts also didn’t immediately respond to questions.

The only other major change Buffett has made to his giving plans over the years came a decade ago when he significantly increased the amount pledged to the foundations his children run because he was pleased with what they had done with his money.

The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation keeps a low profile, but over the years it has been a major supporter of abortion rights, making large gifts to Planned Parenthood and other groups. Buffett hasn’t announced any changes in his giving plans since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year.

Susie Buffett, 69, uses her Sherwood Foundation to strengthen early childhood education and support a number of projects around Buffett’s hometown of Omaha where she also lives. Howard Buffett, 67, is helping farmers in impoverished nations produce more and working to end world hunger with his namesake foundation. Peter Buffett, 64, has dedicated his NoVo Foundation to empowering women and girls worldwide through education, collaboration and economic development to end violence against women.

Even after these latest gifts, Buffett still controls more than 31% of Berkshire’s voting power.

Berkshire Hathaway is an eclectic conglomerate that owns more than 90 companies including BNSF railroad, Geico insurance, several major utilities and an assortment of manufacturing and retail firms including Precision Castparts, Dairy Queen and Helzberg Diamonds. In addition to the companies it owns outright, Berkshire owns major investments in Apple, Bank of America, Coca-Cola and other companies.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 23, 2022
FTX bankruptcy also endangers founder’s philanthropic gifts

[ad_1]

NEW YORK — The rapid collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX into bankruptcy last week has also shaken the world of philanthropy, due to the donations and influence of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in the “effective altruism” movement.

The FTX Foundation — and other related nonprofits mostly funded by Bankman-Fried and other top FTX executives – says it has donated $190 million to numerous causes. Earlier this year, the foundation’s Future Fund announced plans to donate an additional $100 million, with hopes of donating up to $1 billion in 2022. Because of the bankruptcy, that won’t be happening now.

And donations to numerous nonprofits, even those that have already received money from groups related to Bankman-Fried, are now in doubt.

FTX, the hedge fund Alameda Research, and dozens of other affiliated companies sought bankruptcy protection in Delaware Friday after the exchange experienced the crypto equivalent of a bank run. Customers tried to remove billions of dollars from the exchange after becoming concerned about whether FTX had sufficient capital.

Bankman-Fried has resigned from the company. His net worth, estimated earlier this year at $24 billion, has all but evaporated, according to Forbes and Bloomberg, which closely track the net worth of the world’s richest people.

On Thursday night, FTX Future Fund’s leadership team resigned, warning grantees that they were unlikely to pay out promised funds.

“We are devastated to say that it looks likely that there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor,” the team wrote in a joint post in the Effective Altruism Forum. “We are so sorry that it has come to this.”

ProPublica, the investigative journalism nonprofit, said it has been told by Building a Stronger Future, a foundation funded by Bankman-Fried, that the remaining two-thirds of its $5 million grant to report on pandemic preparedness and biothreats is now on hold.

ProPublica received one-third of the grant in February and expected one-third annually until 2024. The nonprofit said Building a Stronger Future is assessing its finances and that it was talking to other funders about taking on some of its grant portfolio.

“Regardless of what happens with the remainder of the grant, we are deeply committed to this important work and the team we have assembled to pursue it,” the nonprofit said in a statement. “We will use other resources to make sure that work continues.”

Bankman-Fried, 30, is the best-known proponent of the “effective altruism” social movement which believes in prioritizing donations to projects that will have the largest impact on the most number of people. Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook and current Asana CEO and co-founder, and his wife Cari Tuna, are also major funders and backers of the movement, which also emphasizes that the lives of all people should be weighted equally, regardless of where they live now or if they will inhabit the earth generations in the future.

“I wanted to get rich, not because I like money but because I wanted to give that money to charity,” Bankman-Fried told an interviewer in a YouTube video called “ The Most Generous Billionaire,” published in January last year.

His ability to promote himself and FTX gave the exchange a higher profile than larger companies. FTX purchase the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s home arena last year, though Miami-Dade County decided Friday to terminate its relationship with the company and rename the arena. It purchased a buzzed-about ad during this year’s Super Bowl.

Bankman-Fried did set up a philanthropic infrastructure through his exchange, FTX, which promised that 1% of its crypto exchange fees would be donated to charities. It also matched user donations made through its platform up to $10,000 a day. In total, the company said more than $24 million was donated through user fees, donations and its matching program before it suspended its services.

Some “effective altruism” proponents advance the idea that making a lot of money is ethical as long as your goal is ultimately to give it away — sometimes shortened to “earning to give.” Bankman-Fried believed in this, signing The Giving Pledge in June as a promise that he would give away the majority of his wealth.

However, some now blame Bankman-Fried’s “effective altruism” mindset for FTX’s troubles.

“Either (‘effective altruism’) encouraged Sam’s unethical behavior, or provided a convenient rationalization for such actions,” tweeted Moskovitz, who has also signed The Giving Pledge. “Either is bad.”

William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford University and a co-founder of the “effective altruism” movement, condemned Bankman-Fried for allegedly misusing customer funds.

“Sam and FTX had a lot of goodwill,” MacAskill, who was also an unpaid advisor to the FTX Future Fund, wrote in a thread on Twitter. “And some of that goodwill was the result of association with ideas I have spent my career promoting. If that goodwill laundered fraud, I am ashamed.”

MacAskill’s book, “What We Owe The Future,” prompted a wave of media coverage of the “effective altruism” movement this summer.

Requests for comment were sent to the largest grantees listed on the FTX Future Fund’s website, including other “effective altruism” advocates like the Long-Term Future Fund and the Centre for Effective Altruism and Longview.

In an interview with The Associated Press in May, Nick Beckstead, the CEO of FTX Foundation until he resigned Thursday, said there were about five people working at the foundation and that they were still working out how the various philanthropic projects started by Bankman-Fried would be structured.

“It’s a bit shoestring,” he said.

The community grew out of the work of philosophers at Oxford, including MacAskill, and debates of the merits of approaches and proposals on forums reflect the high-flying thinking of its origins.

Beckstead acknowledged the community can be “strange and intense,” but also that its emphasis on quantifying impact helps decide where to direct donations. Beckstead did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“What is the cost per life saved or what is the cost per quality adjusted life year from this kind of activity?,” he previously said were some of the questions he likes to try to answer, drawing on input from subject matter experts.

—————

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 14, 2022
Small Kansas college announces $500 million anonymous gift

[ad_1]

MCPHERSON, Kan. — An anonymous donor is pledging up to $500 million to McPherson College, a small liberal arts college in central Kansas, officials announced Friday.

The anonymous donor will match match every financial gift to McPherson College two to one up to $500 million. The college has until June 30 to raise $250 million. If it does, the school will receive the donor’s entire $500 million, for a total of $750 million.

The announcement comes just months after California philanthropist couple Melanie and Richard Lundquist announced they were giving $25 million to the school, which has about 800 students.

Melanie Lundquist said during Friday’s announcement that they would raise their donation to the school’s Building Community Campaign to $50 million.

With the donations and commitments already raised, plus the Lundquists’ $50 million, McPherson College has already raised $130 million of the $250 million needed.

McPherson College President Michael Schneider said the donations will be used to fund a project that provides matching funds for students who hold jobs while attending school, and a new campus master plan.

It will also fund a Kansas Center for Rural & Community Health Science and a National Center for the Future of Engineering, Design & Mobility.

McPherson College offers more than 30 undergraduate degree programs.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 4, 2022
‘Slow day:’ Guard emails don’t match Noem border ‘war’ talk

[ad_1]

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem described the U.S. border with Mexico as a “war zone” last year when she sent dozens of state National Guard troops there, saying they’d be on the front lines of stopping drug smugglers and human traffickers.

But records from the Guard show that in their two-month deployment, the South Dakota troops didn’t seize any drugs. On a handful of occasions, they suspected people of scouting for lapses in their patrols, but mission logs don’t contain any confirmed encounters with “transnational criminals.” And a presentation from the deployment noted that Mexican cartels were assessed to be a “moderate threat” but were “unlikely” to target U.S. forces.

Some days, the records show, the troops had little if anything to do.

“Very slow day. No encounters. It has been 5 days since last surrender,” wrote one Guard member whose name was redacted from a situation report created as the deployment neared its end in September 2021.

For Noem, who is up for reelection Tuesday amid speculation she could be a 2024 White House contender, the deployment was an eye-catching jump into a political fight more than 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) from her state. Noem justified the deployment — and a widely criticized private donation to fund it — as a state emergency. Dangerous drugs, she said, made their way to South Dakota after coming over the southern border.

But the documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington through an open records request cast doubt on whether the deployment was effective at stopping drug trafficking, even as Noem claimed that Guard members “directly assisted” in stopping it.

Most drugs don’t come through unwatched expanses of the border or the Rio Grande where the Guard members were stationed, said Victor Manjarrez, a former Border Patrol senior officer who is now a professor of criminal justice at the University of Texas at El Paso. They are smuggled into the United States at established border checkpoints, he said.

South Dakota Guard members were stationed at observation posts where they parked Humvees or other military vehicles alongside the Rio Grande. They watched for groups of migrants to report to Border Control, which would then take them into custody. On several occasions, they reported groups of hundreds of people migrating, and at one point, a Guard member performed CPR on a child who had drowned.

During the two-month deployment, the Guard logged 204 people who were turned back to Mexico and 5,000 others who were apprehended by the Border Patrol to evaluate for asylum claims. Those apprehensions were a small fraction of the over 162,000 encounters Border Patrol reported during July and August in the Rio Grande Valley Sector — the 34,000-square-mile swathe where the Guard was stationed.

“Like any operation there are going to be busy days and some slow days, that is expected in all operations,” Marshall Michels, a spokesman for the South Dakota Department of the Military, said in an email response to questions on the records from AP.

Noem last year joined with seven other Republican governors to harden the border through Texas’s Operation Lone Star. The state-backed mission sought to discourage migrants by making arrests under Texas laws.

The mission gave Republicans occasion to deride President Joe Biden’s border policies, but the operation has not curbed the number of people crossing the border. It has also faced criticism for being a rushed mission that gave members little to do while potentially running afoul of federal law.

Noem’s decision to send 48 Guard members was met with particularly harsh criticism because she covered most of its cost with a $1 million donation from a Tennessee billionaire who has often donated to Republicans. Top brass from the National Guard Bureau and an aide to South Dakota U.S. Sen. John Thune, a fellow Republican, questioned what legal authority the state had to accept a donation to fund the deployment, the recently released emails show.

CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) sued the South Dakota Guard and the U.S. Army after they refused a Freedom of Information Act request for records on the deployment and communication between the National Guard, the governor’s office and the Department of Defense. Under that legal pressure, the agencies turned over the documents, which CREW shared with The Associated Press.

Noah Bookbinder, CREW’s president, said they wanted to bring transparency to a donation that he called “a particularly craven example of how money can drive not just politics but how governments operate and how military forces can be used.”

Congress later banned such private donations for Guard deployments.

Noem’s administration has insisted that the National Guard, with its military training, was best-suited to tackle what she called “a national security crisis.”

“It literally is a war zone,” she told reporters this July.

Noem’s office referred questions on the deployment to a statement last year when she called Biden’s border policy an “utter disaster” that facilitated illegal border crossings and said that Mexican cartels were using the surge in migrants as a “distraction for their criminal activities.”

“The scope of the drug smuggling and human trafficking taking place has been made clear to us, and it is staggering,” she said.

During the two-month deployment, Guard members reported spotting 11 people they deemed to be scouting for lapses in surveillance. On another occasion recorded in the logs, Guard members pointed flashlights at five people with backpacks crossing the Rio Grande who then retreated. Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Marlette, the head of South Dakota’s Guard, later told a South Dakota legislative committee they were likely carrying drugs.

Those were the only times the Guard members reported suspected drug trafficking. The South Dakota National Guard said it accomplished its mission by supporting Texas’s Operation Lone Star and referred questions on its success to the Texas National Guard.

Texas’s 17-month operation has recorded 21,000 criminal arrests with most of those resulting in felony charges, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office recently reported. The Texas National Guard also said it has been responsible for 470,000 migrant detections, apprehensions and turnbacks, as well as the construction of 114 miles of fencing and barriers.

[ad_2]

Source link

November 4, 2022
MacKenzie Scott gifts $5.7M to Urban League of Louisiana

[ad_1]

NEW ORLEANS — Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given the Urban League of Louisiana a $5.7 million gift, the largest donation in the agency’s 84-year history.

The Urban League of Louisiana, founded in 1938, hosts a variety of programs covering youth education, economic development and policy.

With the gift from Scott, the agency plans to expand its programs aimed at securing economic self-reliance and civil rights for underserved communities, the organization’s president and CEO, Judy Reese Morse, said in a statement Monday.

“So often the work of black-led, community-serving organizations goes unnoticed and under-resourced,” she said. “Ms. Scott’s spirit and conviction to address historic disparities by supporting organizations that prioritize and engage the community inspires us to remain unwavering in our commitment to deliver even more for black and other underserved communities in Louisiana.”

Morse said Scott’s gift would be “transformational.”

With a net worth estimated at over $30 billion by Forbes, Scott is one of the wealthiest people in the world. Much of that fortune stems from her 2019 divorce from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, in which she received a 25% stake in the company.

Along with other billionaires, Scott has signed what is known as The Giving Pledge, a promise from the mega-wealthy to give away most of their fortunes.

Scott, in a statement, said her giving was guided by her desire to support local organizations rather than tell them how to solve problems.

“We don’t advocate for particular policies or reforms. Instead, we seek a portfolio of organizations that supports the ability of all people to participate in solutions,” she said. “This means a focus on the needs of those whose voices have been underrepresented.”

[ad_2]

Source link

November 1, 2022
Gates Foundation boosts GivingTuesday with $10M donation

[ad_1]

NEW YORK — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $10 million to the organization that grew out of the hashtag #GivingTuesday in part to fund a database of charitable giving and other acts of generosity.

GivingTuesday, the organization, has helped people realize there is a lot they can give, said foundation co-founder Melinda French Gates in an interview.

“Whether people are giving their voice, their time, their expertise or their money, and given that it was the ten year anniversary of GivingTuesday, it seemed like the right time to step up with another commitment,” French Gates said.

Asha Curran, GivingTuesday’s CEO, described the foundation as a thought partner in addition to being a funder.

“It’s a really wonderful thing to see the partnering of big philanthropy and grassroots generosity, that those things don’t have to live in separate worlds and be viewed as totally separate things,” Curran said.

The new gift announced Tuesday also represents the Gates Foundation’s ongoing efforts encouraging people to give. The Giving Pledge, which the Gates’ founded with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, asks billionaires to donate more than half of their wealth to charitable causes within their lifetimes, while GivingTuesday seeks to mobilize everyone else.

“We believe philanthropy is the right thing to do and that anybody can do it,” said French Gates in an interview. “And so, it’s more making it a societal norm, quite frankly, that you give something back.”

GivingTuesday started in 2012 as a project of the 92nd Street Y and became an independent nonprofit in 2020. It now convenes a network of people who run campaigns for communities around the world, adapted to relevant holidays and giving traditions.

Most people still associate the organization with the now-familiar flood of emails and other solicitations for charitable donations that pour in on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the U.S., which Curran said she doesn’t mind.

“I just wish they also associated it with grassroots leadership and young people leading the way in philanthropy,” she said.

Last year, the organization said donors gave more than $2.7 billion on Giving Tuesday, despite many fundraisers and organizations professing exhaustion with trying to design campaigns that breakthrough.

The Gates Foundation has previously given the organization $10.5 million since its founding. GivingTuesday also received $7 million from novelist and philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in 2021.

Curran said the gift will accelerate the organization’s plans to expand a database that includes information about giving from a range of sources including the payment processor PayPal, Charity Navigator, crowdfunding sites GoFundMe, DonorsChoose and Tiltify as well as major institutions that offer donor-advised funds like Fidelity Charitable and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

GivingTuesday said they aim to raise $26 million over five years to fund the data project and already have 40% of that amount committed.

The software company Blackbaud, which works with nonprofits, universities and foundations, said they do not share their raw donation data with third parties. though they do provide GivingTuesday the total amount of donations they process on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

Other organizations also track philanthropic giving — including Candid, which collects giving data from philanthropic foundations, governments and nonprofits, as well as major academic studies like one at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy that has surveyed the giving behavior of the same American households for decades. The Giving USA Foundation also releases an annual analysis of giving trends, that includes many datasets but doesn’t capture person to person giving or mutual aid.

GivingTuesday aims to collect data about individual donations, which Jake Garcia, vice president of data at Candid, said could complement these other projects and help answer questions about giving trends.

“The stock market’s down, do donations go up or down?” Garcia said. “Number of donations, amount for donations, the type of donations they make. . . Those trends, I think, are the kinds of things that could be really revelatory if they can get a good enough body of data.”

———

Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.

[ad_2]

Source link

October 18, 2022