Report Warns of Risks of Top-Heavy Philanthropy

The charitable sector in the United States is increasingly top-heavy, with a growing amount of philanthropic power held by a handful of very wealthy individuals and foundations — a trend that poses risks to the sector's effectiveness and independence, a report from the Institute for Policy Studies finds. The report, Gilded Giving 2018: Top-Heavy Philanthropy and Its Risks to the Independent Sector (36 pages, PDF), found that the charitable sector is changing from a sector with broad-based support contributed by a wide range of donors to one dominated by a relative handful of individuals at the top of the income and wealth ladder. In 2017, for example, households with income of at least $200,000 accounted for 52 percent of all charitable deductions, compared with 30 percent in the early 2000s. Similarly, the percentage of charitable deductions from households with more than $1 million in income grew from 12 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2015. According to the report, the share of all households giving to charity fell from 66 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2014, while over the same period the number of low-dollar and mid-level donors who traditionally have made up the vast majority of charities' supporters fell by about 2 percent annually.