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30 Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Q. 5 (2001)

handle is hein.journals/npvolsq30 and id is 1 raw text is: ARTICLES Wealth and the Commonwealth: New Findings on Wherewithal and Philanthropy Paul G. Schervish John J. Havens Boston College Drawing in large part on the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances, the authors describe the pattern of charitable giving by families at the upper reaches of income and wealth, as well as across the income spectrum. The overriding empirical motif is that the distribu- tion of charitable giving is more highly skewed toward the upper end of the financial spec- trum than previously documented, and that there appears to be a trend toward becoming even more so. The overriding theoretical motif is that income and wealth are so thoroughly imbricated, especially at the upper end of the financial spectrum, that the analyses of the determinants of charitable giving need to shift from their currentfocus on the dynamics of income to a complementary focus on the dynamics of wealth. In recent years, the number of wealthy families' and the amount of their wealth have grown to large proportions. The number of millionaire families as measured by net worth is now about 4.5 million, whereas the number of indi- vidual tax returns registering adjusted gross income of $1 million or more cur- rently approaches 250,000. A substantial portion of the people at the higher ends of family wealth and income distribution are what we might call the young rich, although the majority of wealth holders tends to be older and aging. These two groups are increasingly being targeted by fund-raisers for both inter vivos and testamentary charitable contributions. For more than a decade, we have been studying the role of financial resources (income and wealth) in generating charitable giving by individuals and their families. This research has raised several findings relevant to the relationship between Note: The authors are grateful to the T. B. Murphy Foundation Charitable Trust and the Lilly En- dowment, Inc. for their support of this research. We are also grateful to Platon E. Coutsoukis, Mary A. O'Herlihy, and Adam J. Kidd for their gracious and competent assistance in the prepara- tion of this article, as well as to Steven Rathgeb Smith and the anonymous reviewers for their care- ful reading and perceptive suggestions. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1, March 2001 5-25 © 2001 Sage Publications, Inc. 5

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