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The Giving Game
Indeed, Florida's heart is not as big as its wallet. The state has the third highest number of top wealth-holders in the nation, according to the Internal Revenue Service, but ranks 20th in the average itemized contribution to charity. (Odahowski's Minnesota, by comparison, ranks 15th in wealth and 10th in charitable contributions.)
Florida can count on some extraordinarily generous families: Just this year, Robert Pew donated $25 million to the Community Foundation for Palm Beach and Martin counties; the Winn-Dixie-founding Davis family wrote a $20 million check to Jacksonville University.
But overall, patterns of giving and other factors dilute Florida's philanthropy into a thin soup. For one, more than 22,000 nonprofits compete to collect money here. Then there's the divided allegiances of residents, only 3 in 10 of whom were born in Florida. They may give, but the checks often go to causes "back home." That phenomenon extends to corporate philanthropy as well because the state lacks Fortune 500 headquarters; corporations, too, tend to give most in their home community. "In our residents, we have a population of exiles, and in our corporations, a population of colonies," says Ruth Shack, president of the Dade Community Foundation and a former Dade County commissioner. "And that does not bode well for the emerging needs of our communities."
Further watering down the impact of philanthropy is a stingy state government - Florida ranks 47th nationally in general expenditures per capita. So donations too often make up for what the state isn't doing, instead of supplying investment capital for long-term, innovative programs that would really make a difference. Sara Herald of the Children's Home Society of Florida says her organization relies increasingly on charity as state funding stagnates: Florida for years has spent the same amount to clothe a child in foster care - $250 a year. "Even if you buy at a Salvation Army thrift shop, you cannot clothe a growing adolescent for $250 a year," Herald says. "We have more kids to serve, less money to serve them with and more demands for quality outcomes."
There's a saying that charity comforts the afflicted, while philanthropy confronts the affliction. Florida needs more of the latter, say Herald and others who see philanthropy as a key indicator of the health of Florida's communities, and as the only solution to the state's most intractable problems. "Florida can be an amazing testing ground for solving some of our nation's most pressing social and economic issues," says David Harris, director of Florida philanthropy for the John D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation. "But first it's got to get over this problem with sense of community," pervasive among the state's residents, its companies and its nonprofit organizations as well.
Crowded field
To scope out the playing field for the giving game in Florida, visit the musty Mayo Building on South Calhoun Street in Tallahassee. There, a handful of state employees in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services tries to keep up with more than 25,000 consumer calls a year about the 5,377 charitable organizations registered to collect money in Florida for causes ranging from abuse shelters to zoos. Another 17,000 or so groups aren't monitored because they fall under religious, educational or other exemptions. The volume of fund-raising poses serious regulatory issues: The state shut down two "children's" charities this fall for scamming Florida residents. But with only eight employees, the division cannot possibly check up on every hand that's out.
The sheer number of organizations creates other problems as well. There's the potential for huge inefficiencies - overlapping missions, redundant bureaucracies and competing fund-raising efforts. "It's getting much harder to compete all the way around," says Ted Granger, president of the United Way of Florida. Some say organizations such as United Way simply would prefer less competition for the state's charitable dollar. But few would dispute that the number of solicitations leaves many Floridians feeling overwhelmed. "There is too much fund-raising everywhere, but particularly in Florida," says William Carlton of Carlton & Company, a Boston fund-raising firm with offices in Orlando. "There is all this nickel-and-dime, selling tickets to events and a huge increase in telephone solicitations. So the average middle-class person and the average middle-class retiree just dribbles a little bit to everything.'' And that type of giving does little to effect change.
Attracted by Florida's huge retiree population and healthy share of millionaires, many of the groups registered to collect money here are from somewhere else. Those in the field say Florida is one of the last fund-raising frontiers, where prospectors from around the world come in hopes of hitting the mother lode. Before taking the reins of Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Peter Armacost was president of a Kentucky university for 10 years. In all that time, he says, he never once received a visit from a fellow president passing through to raise money. But in Florida during the winter, "it happens to me every week," he says. "I'll get a call saying, 'Hi, I'm in your territory, hope you don't think I'm poaching.'"
Competition among nonprofits is high, particularly in seasonal communities, where fund-raising events are packed into a frenzied five months and donors rush from golf tournament to gala with little thought of maximizing the impact of their giving. Cooperation, though, is scant. Florida's nonprofits lack a strong lobby, clearinghouse or annual bench-marking program - attributes that give nonprofits, or the third sector, in many states the clout to shape public policy. A half dozen fund-raising organizations have formed to try and strengthen the sector, with little success. This fall, three held "statewide" conferences - all in the same week, all with similar themes, all in separate venues.
Marina Pavlov, president of one of the organizations, the 500-member Florida Association of Nonprofit Organizations (FANO), based in Miami Lakes, says the sector here is simply young: "You go to Boston or New York or Philadelphia and these groups have been around for years and years and years and people's parents and grandparents were involved," she says. "Here, 25 years is really old."
Florida's nonprofits, according to FANO, pump an estimated $15 billion annually into the state's economy and make up an estimated 7% of its wages and benefits. That should make them key players in state and local issues. Instead, they are often seen merely as supplicants. The organizations, says Pavlov, "are doing more with less resources, so you have very dedicated people in this state working like crazy but not getting ahead."
People
Further complicating the giving game is the pervasive lack of connection in Florida between residents and their communities. The issue is acute because individuals are responsible for the vast majority of philanthropy in the United States - 85% of all giving, compared to 9.3% from foundations and 5.7% from corporations."I believe that when people commute to Florida or settle in Florida, they want anonymity," says Carlton, whose clients include the Miami City Ballet. "They don't want to play the role they played with institutions in Dayton or Philadelphia or New Jersey. They feel they've done that." While the IRS figures indicate new residents don't stop giving, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence that much of their charity flows out of the state. The Jacksonville Community Council Inc. surveyed 25 gifts of $1 million or more by local benefactors and found that all but five were sent elsewhere. Even the most generous longer-term residents clearly see Florida as less deserving than states to the north. When the lights dim and the curtain opens to Puccini's "La Boh?me" at the Palm Beach Opera next month, George and Frayda Lindemann will settle in their box, a place of honor for the benefactors who give some $75,000 a year to the regional opera. But while the Lindemanns call Palm Beach their permanent home, the bulk of their philanthropy this year will go to New York. The couple recently wrote a $10 million check to The Met. "Surely nobody is going to build a Metropolitan Museum or Metropolitan Opera in Florida - that's just not in the cards," says Stephen Wertheimer, the southeastern U.S. representative for Brakeley, an international fund-raising firm. "But certainly people want a good museum and a good opera."
Shack, of the Dade Community Foundation, sums up the problem this way: "There are people who have lived here for 25 years, and they still fly home to get their teeth done. If they haven't yet bought into the local dentist, how are we going to get them to buy into local philanthropy?"
Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, sees his own office's location on the 38th floor of upscale One Biscayne Tower in Miami as a metaphor for the separation between society's ills and the people and organizations that try to solve them. Likewise, he says, Florida's residents may be aware of the state's problems, but housing patterns and other factors prevent the personal connection it takes to get involved and help solve them. "The biggest obstacle to compassionate, intelligent philanthropy," Carter says, "is the existence of a gated America."
Companies
The same themes recur on the corporate philanthropic scene. Florida's lack of corporate headquarters creates two problems: One, companies tend to give more in their home communities. In addition, many executives are in Florida on their way to the next corporate stop, making for tenuous connections with local charities. "So many of these problems have to do with us being a transient community," says Alfred Sanchez, Miami's former Red Cross chief who was lured to cruise line Royal Caribbean in April as community relations director to beef up philanthropy. "People don't feel a tie. They know they're doing their corporate stint to move up to something bigger and better." Orlando's Chamber of Commerce has been a leader in integrating transient executives into the community [FT cover story, Nov. 1995]. And Sanchez has been trying to get the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce to introduce third-sector awareness into its senior executive orientation program. In Baltimore where he worked previously, he says, "if you were part of the leadership, you got a severe orientation that included sleeping in a homeless shelter."
But perhaps more of a threat to corporate philanthropy, in Florida and around the nation, is a changing landscape brought on by stockholder pressure, competition, mergers and downsizing. While corporate America's giving is up nationwide - to $8.2 billion last year - its generosity as a percentage of pre-tax income has dropped from about 1.5% a decade ago to 1.1%.
Even the most generous companies are feeling the heat, says BellSouth's Curt Reilly, who doles out the company's Palm Beach philanthropy. (BellSouth has someone like Reilly in each of its regions to spend hundreds of thousands a year on local giving.) At a recent conference on corporate giving held at West Palm's Kravis Center - the performing arts center that philanthropy built - Reilly's advice was a sharp contrast to the posh surroundings: "Corporate giving used to be free money, but that's all changed now," he told a roomful of disheartened fund-raisers. "If you're going to sit there and take my money, your phone needs to be a BellSouth phone. That's the first thing I'm going to look for."
In addition to changing relationships with companies like BellSouth, some nonprofits fear corporate support shrinking as generous Florida-based companies pack their bags - like Knight-Ridder, which is moving from Miami to California - or get gobbled up - like Barnett Banks, which was acquired by North Carolina's NationsBank. "The fact is that the gift you get from the merged NationsBank and Barnett Banks is not going to add up to what you used to get from them separately," says Paul Kralovanec, head of Florida's chapter of the National Society of Fund-raising Executives. "That's one of the reasons the banks are merging." President of NationsBank Florida, Adelaide "Alex" Sink, counters by promising that the merged bank will match or outdo the prior giving of the two. NationsBank's philanthropy budget is $60 million nationwide this year and will reach $100 million next year, when its merger with Bank of America is completed. NationsBank will not disclose how much it spends in Florida vs. its home state. But even allowing for a bias in favor of the Tar Heel state, the bank is part of a charitable elite in Florida that includes Publix Super Markets, Darden Restaurants and JM Family Enterprises, among others. "What we need to be concerned about is the fact that there are a lot of other banks and a lot of other corporations in Florida that don't give at all," says Odahowski with the Bush foundation. "We need to hold up the NationsBanks and the Darden Restaurants (as examples) and say, 'Okay, now how about the rest of you?'"
Solutions
Almost everyone involved in the giving game believes that the best way to beef up philanthropy in Florida is to get residents and companies to feel more connected to the state. "We do not have the histories of the Northeast and Midwest, and we do not have the Carnegies, or even the Bill Gates, so we've got to work harder," says Will Ray, president of the Palm Beach Cultural Council and volunteer president of a group called Florida Philanthropy, which aims to keep Florida's giving here in Florida. "We need to invite families to send their children to school in Florida, keep their business in Florida, and, as they make their fortunes in Florida, to pass their philanthropy on to a better future for the state."
At the Center for Florida's Children in Tallahassee, president Jack Levine has high hopes for the huge baby boom generation now hitting grandparenthood. The need for philanthropy looms particularly large in Levine's office, which tracks key indicators of Florida children's well-being: 24% live in poverty; 30% in single-parent families; 12% of Florida teens are neither in school nor employed. "Where our message is being heard now in tremendous degree is not so much in the new parents, but in the new grandparents," he says. "They are seeing the realities for Florida's children through the eyes of their grandchildren, and they have an ideal for wanting to be remembered for making a difference that is rooted in the '60s."
Another positive trend: an increase in the number of community foundations. While still numbering only 20 in Florida, community foundations are the fastest-growing type of organized philanthropy in the nation. They raise money (both locally and from state and national sources), manage endowments and make grants for long-term solutions to local problems. Take the Dade Community Foundation's current partnership with financier George Soros' Open Society Institute. Soros wants to fund citizenship and welfare-reform initiatives for immigrants in Miami, but he wants to ensure that the money goes to the worthy nonprofits, and that it's spent on programs local people and companies will support. So he gives the community foundation $400,000. The foundation, in turn, finds local sources to match it and goes through a grant-making process to make sure it's well-spent. One recipient: World Relief, a network of Dade churches that distributes food to those who have lost food stamp benefits. Other community foundations around the state, meanwhile, are raising capital to pay for everything from downtown redevelopment to daycare. "They are an instrument in community self-determination," says Andy Bell, president of the Jacksonville Community Foundation, founded in 1964 and the oldest in Florida. "And they can be as different as the communities they serve."
Just as national foundations funded pilot programs for what became Head Start, Sesame Street and the nation's 911 system, local foundations are shifting Florida's dynamic away from plugging emergencies and toward creative solutions, according to Jo Anne Chester Bander, executive director of The Donors Forum, a regional association of grant-makers in south Florida formed to spur philanthropy there. Its membership has grown from 38 three years ago to 88 today, a sign to Bander that the state of philanthropy in her part of Florida is improving.
Bander says giving will only increase as the state sheds its reliance on tourism and part-time residents and grows more community-minded companies and people.
An estate planner by trade, Douglas J. Bartolf, the vice president at NBD Bank in North Palm Beach, agrees. For many years, he has watched both clients at his bank and fellow worshippers in his church decline to give locally but send donations back home. Finally, he's figured out a way to keep their money in the state: "Just get them in your car and drive them around and let them see for themselves what the needs are," he says. "Quit constantly asking these residents and companies for money. Instead show them what you do. Show them that there are people here who need them."
