Charitable Giving

Hats off to you, America - charitable giving is up this year, and Charity Navigator predicts that Americans will contribute at least $100 billion in individual donations to charities during this holiday season. To help you spend that money wisely, Charity Navigator has created its Holiday Giving Guide for 2006. Says Sandra Miniutti, a spokeswoman for Charity Navigator, "The key is to do your homework and check up on the charity you're donating to." Here are a few other things to keep in mind when deciding who gets your dollars: Arts and cultural charities need your money.

If it's already better to give than to receive, technology has made giving even better by making donating to charity more accessible and participatory. Or, as Bill and Melinda Gates put it last week, "easier and more fun. " The combination is especially attractive to seasonal or infrequent donors, such as the many now catching the holiday spirit, gifting for an altruistic friend or seeking to increase their tax deductions. With this audience in mind, the Gateses blogged five ways to give online they believe are innovative and well-run.

If you're like most Americans, you donate money to charity in a rather haphazard way. You'll give a couple of bucks to the homeless man on the street, and maybe a bit more to the charity that solicits you by phone. But you don't think deeply about your charitable giving, nor do you plan it out in advance. And usually, ++ you feel a little resentful or put-upon when someone asks you to give.Meanwhile, the homeless man doesn't get any lasting benefit from your money. And the charity that called you can't do much with a small donation.

Having recently had a discussion with a friend regarding our experiences contributing to various charities, I was especially interested in Eileen Ambrose 's column on the subject ("What's next after Black Friday and Cyber Monday?" Nov. 25). I contribute to several local, national and religious charities, and I have experienced problems with most of them. The fundraisers for many charities are relentless. How can bi-weekly solicitations by mail be justified? When a charity inundates me with solicitations ,it makes think I would be better off contributing to charities that have a business model I can live with.

AMHERST, Mass. -- Everyone agrees that it's good to donate to charity. Less certain is whether the U.S. government should allow tax deductions for charitable giving. The answer may seem like a no-brainer, but consider this: They don't necessarily encourage giving, and they don't always help the poor. A growing chorus of voices has been complaining about tax-deductible gifts that appear to benefit the giver. A hefty donation to a local symphony hall, for example, gets the donor noticed as civic-minded and cultured, but the benefit to society is far more difficult to pin down.

Washington. -- The definitive history of greed is yet to be written but the broad outlines are well-known. Greed was inserted into the human story a while back by a serpent. Since then it has waxed and waned.For example, there was a little of it during the Dark Ages, when there was little to covet. True, the Visigoths were grasping people, but a distinction should be drawn between their innocent Third World ebullience and the greed Ronald Reagan let loose in America.There were gobs of greed during America's Gilded Age after the Civil War, when robber barons made disgusting amounts of money.

Late each spring, a packet of material arrives on my desk from the American Association of Fund-Raising Councils (AAFRC) that details giving patterns among Americans for the previous calendar year. The 1993 statistics were encouraging.Despite economic woes at home, Americans managed to keep their charitable giving in pace with inflation. Americans donated $126.22 billion to charity, an increase of 3.6 percent from 1992.Giving by individuals, whether living or by bequests, accounted for 88 cents of every charitable dollar received by nonprofits.

You and famed investor Warren E. Buffett may have more in common than you think - at least when it comes to charitable giving. Sure, you can't donate as much: Buffett announced last month that he would start to give away roughly 85 percent of his fortune, worth more than $40 billion. But the way he decided to make his donation - entrust the bulk of his funds to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose co-chairs he believes will "do a good job" with the cash, according to an interview in Fortune magazine - mirrors the thinking of many young philanthropists today.

The nation's economy is on the mend, but Maryland charities are still mired in a recession at a time of growing need. The United Way of Central Maryland appears unlikely to meet its fund-raising goal again this year - the third year in a row - falling an estimated $500,000 short of the $40.4 million it hoped to collect and $3.6 million short of the goal two years ago. While the United Way's income has been slumping, the need for aid provided by the...

The student member on the Howard County school board was selected to take part in a program this month with an exclusive group of high school juniors. Adejire Bademosi went to Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., on April 16 as part of the 2009 Bentley Tomorrow25. Bademosi joined 24 other students from around the world for the conference that featured interaction with industry leaders about environmental change, fair trade, health care and charitable giving. Bademosi, a junior at Marriotts Ridge High, will appear along with the other students on the list in an ad in Time magazine as part of Bentley's advertising campaign.

After the big shopping days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, nonprofits across the country want you to spend more - on Giving Tuesday. This is a fundraising initiative in which nonprofits and even big corporations will encourage people to make a charitable donation on Tuesday. Promoters hope Giving Tuesday will become an annual event as popular as those two post-Thanksgiving shopping days. "It's an opportunity to redirect the conversation and narrative at this time of year," said Daniel Lee, vice president for external relations for Baltimore-based Lutheran World Relief, which is participating in Giving Tuesday.

Mitt Romney's tax returns are a distraction. The Republican presidential candidate should release them for the sake of transparency. But the clamor for them by Gov. Martin O'Malley in his role as head of the Democratic Governors Association says more about him and his fellow leftist ideological travelers than anything contained in the returns will say about Mr. Romney, who does not hide that he is rich. For Mr. O'Malley, making money in the free-market system is abhorrent. In Virginia in July he said, in reference to supply-side economics, "There might not be anything illegal about any of it, but it's certainly not a good economic theory - unless you're a Romney.

The CEO of sports apparel company Under Armour plans to sell up to 1,125,000 personal Class B shares over 10 months beginning in February, according to a regulatory filing made Friday. Kevin Plank also plans to sell 125,000 shares of the company's Class B stock for his charitable organization. Plank owns 12,500,000 shares of the company's Class B stock, or about 24.5 percent of the total shares of Class A and B shares available as of Oct. 31. He owns 76.5 percent of voting stock.

By his own calculations, David Rubenstein, the Baltimore-born businessman and philanthropist, has just a couple of short decades left to make his mark on the planet. "I'm 60 now," Rubenstein says." "I'm running out of time. The average white man my age can expect to live to age 81, and before I die, I'd like to make an impact on the world. I'd like to have been truly transformative in at least one area." The sense of urgency is striking, if somewhat puzzling. Rubenstein is the son of a postal carrier and homemaker who grew up in a blue-collar enclave in Northwest Baltimore.

The student member on the Howard County school board was selected to take part in a program this month with an exclusive group of high school juniors. Adejire Bademosi went to Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., on April 16 as part of the 2009 Bentley Tomorrow25. Bademosi joined 24 other students from around the world for the conference that featured interaction with industry leaders about environmental change, fair trade, health care and charitable giving. Bademosi, a junior at Marriotts Ridge High, will appear along with the other students on the list in an ad in Time magazine as part of Bentley's advertising campaign.

More people than ever are calling the Salvation Army's Baltimore offices this year, asking for help paying their utility bills or for food to feed their families. And contributions from individuals, the charity says, are down $100,000 from a year earlier. Around the state, nonprofits are seeing donations fall and pleas for help increase. Their costs to supply food and other assistance are soaring. And they worry that fundraising will fall far short of goals this year, with even the most steadfast of donors, from individuals to foundations, tapped out in light of the economic slowdown.

AS THE year winds down, many people are making last-minute decisions about charitable gift giving.One question that perennially pops up is whether or not tax concerns affect such giving.In the past 25 years, 11 major tax law changes have created a mind-numbing 9,455 Internal Revenue Service tax code revisions. Despite the 1997 tax overhaul, we already have proposals before Congress for new changes. Some of these proposals could have a major impact on our nation's charities and, by extension, on the quality of life in our communities.

The drop-off in donations to Baltimore area charities and social service organizations during this holiday season hasn't been felt in Howard County. While other suburbs say a bad economy has discouraged charitable giving, groups in Howard report that donations have remained at least the same as in recent years. They expect the Christmas season to be equally rich with contributions.The easy answer to why Howard has fared better than all other area counties would be to suggest that the county's relative affluence has insulated it against the economy's downturn.

AMHERST, Mass. -- Everyone agrees that it's good to donate to charity. Less certain is whether the U.S. government should allow tax deductions for charitable giving. The answer may seem like a no-brainer, but consider this: They don't necessarily encourage giving, and they don't always help the poor. A growing chorus of voices has been complaining about tax-deductible gifts that appear to benefit the giver. A hefty donation to a local symphony hall, for example, gets the donor noticed as civic-minded and cultured, but the benefit to society is far more difficult to pin down.

The message of giving is all around us now. That makes the holiday season a good time to develop philanthropic habits in children. Children are empathetic by nature, but charitable impulses need nurturing in a climate where kids are bombarded with messages to look out for No. 1, philanthropy experts say. "There's so much media blasting them all the time about the things they need to get themselves," says Susan Crites Price, author of The Giving Family:...