In Brooklyn, N.Y., Residents Make a Religion of Charitable Giving

Sunday isn’t the only day that Concord Baptist Church is one of the busiest places in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.

On one spring Tuesday afternoon, for instance, several dozen parishioners are seated at a luncheon following a

funeral service. Next door, dozens of schoolchildren are in class at Concord Baptist Elementary School. Around the corner, an elderly man in a wheelchair chats animatedly with an attendant outside the Concord Seniors Residence — which sits next to the Concord Nursing Home. Four blocks away, at Concord Family Services, families are getting help adopting youngsters and obtaining social services, while neighborhood residents are taking child-rearing classes and job-training courses. In the same building, other residents are getting care from doctors at a medical practice that bases its fees on a patient’s ability to pay and turns nobody away. A half-dozen blocks in the opposite direction, the staff of Concord Home Services for the Elderly is sending

housekeepers and home health aides to help elderly people throughout the borough.

“In Brooklyn, I don’t think churches have the luxury of not being involved in some aspect of social service,” says the Rev. Gary Simpson, the pastor of Concord Baptist. “A dollar given to a church is not just a statement of one’s faith; it also is a community-development dollar, an economic-development dollar, a health-care-providing dollar. People in the African-American church understand that a dollar dropped in the plate in the church is a philanthropic dollar. That’s probably why they give.”

That also helps explain why Kings County, which includes Brooklyn, has the fourth-highest rate of philanthropic giving among the nation’s large counties in The Chronicle’s charitable-giving study. On average, Brooklyn residents donated $5,289 to charity in 1997 — slightly less than 20 percent of the discretionary income available to people who made $50,000 or more and itemized on their federal tax returns. “After all, Brooklyn is known as the borough of churches,” adds Mr. Simpson — a phrase echoed by other leaders of religious and secular charities there. Indeed, it is difficult to walk more than a couple of blocks in any Brooklyn neighborhood without passing a church, synagogue, or mosque.

‘We Want to Be Helpful’

Parishioners in Brooklyn expect their churches to be integral parts of the community. “You can’t say you have faith and you have no works,” says Bernice Minott, 76, who has been a member of Concord Baptist’s congregation since she moved to Brooklyn from Biloxi, Miss., in 1944. “We know there are needs that we have in the community, and we are part of God’s plan for making these things happen. We want to be helpful.”

That is a common attitude in black urban churches, say some researchers. Largely because demand for social services is so much greater, money given to urban black churches is more likely to be used for human services than are donations to suburban churches, says Julian Wolpert, a professor at Princeton University.

Mr. Simpson says members of his congregation are especially responsive to giving when they are told about a problem facing the congregation’s social-service units. Several years ago New York State officials discovered they had made $1-million in Medicaid overpayments to the Concord Nursing Home a decade earlier.

“They said, ‘Give us that money back.’ The nursing home is trying to figure out how in the world are they going to make up that $1-million,” he recalls. “The church started a campaign, Save Concord Nursing Home, and every month, we raised $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 to pay back, and they got out of that debt. The credibility and the integrity of the church is such that once the story was made known to the people who are here, they would do something even if they brought their quarters and dimes wrapped up in a napkin.”

Like many of the church’s parishioners, Ms. Minott learned to give at an early age. “You were brought up in the faith to give,” she says. Her parents would give her a nickel each week, and while she might “take a few pennies to buy candy,” she recalls, most of it went to the church. That is a tradition she says she handed down to her own children.

‘A Real Pride of Place’

Generous giving at Brooklyn religious institutions is common outside the black community as well. “I’ve been here 30 years, and I’ve always felt a generosity of spirit that translates into financial contributions,” says Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, of Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights, a mostly middle-class neighborhood in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, which links the borough to Manhattan. “I’m always asking people to give, and every time I ask, they give.”

For many older members of the congregation, he says, generosity stems from personal memories of hardship.

“They didn’t have a lot when they were younger, and they’ve never forgotten some of the pain they witnessed growing up,” Rabbi Potasnik says. Like Ms. Minott, he adds, Jews have passed the tradition of giving down to their children. “Our parents didn’t have a lot of money, but even though they had little, a portion of that had to be given to help others.”

While the members of his congregation are generally better off financially than earlier generations of Brooklyn Jews, the rabbi says that tradition of giving continues — at least partially because there is often not much physical distance between their middle-class neighborhood and the communities where less fortunate individuals live.

“One thing about Brooklyn is that you can live in a middle-class neighborhood and next door is a low-income one,” Rabbi Potasnik says. “If you walk eight minutes across Flatbush Avenue, you’re into the projects. That helps create a sense of communal responsibility that cuts across groups. For example, we have a homeless program that we share with some of the churches.”

Aside from being taught charity by their parents, Brooklynites also have an ingrained culture of helping their fellow man, says Penny Rosen, who has held numerous top volunteer positions in the UJA-Federation of New York and, with her husband, founded the first Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Brooklyn Heights.

“Over a century ago, Brooklyn Heights had the underground railroad running through it,” she adds, referring to the pre-Civil War network set up to aid runaway slaves.

Another reason behind the borough’s generosity, Ms. Rosen says, is that “Brooklyn is a small town” — even though, with 2.3 million residents, it would constitute the nation’s fourth-largest city if it were broken off from New York. Despite its size, she explains, the borough is really a collection of neighborhoods, to which residents feel a strong, close connection.

“People who live in the borough have a strong sense of neighborhood,” adds Lynne Williams, director of development at Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens. “This has been a borough of immigration going way, way back. There’s always been a real caring about neighbors, a sense of when you hardly have anything still giving to help the person next to you.”

“Brooklyn inspires intense pride in its residents,” says Steven Parkey, vice president for development and marketing at the Prospect Park Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and promoting the borough’s largest park.

“Since September 11, there’s been an economic downturn in New York City, yet contributions by individuals and business members of the alliance have been growing,” he says. “I attribute that to a real pride of place, a sense that people want to invest in their community,” adds Mr. Parkey, who expects that his group will raise $100,000 more this year than the $1.1-million it did last year.

Many Brooklyn nonprofit organizations have consciously reached out to as many of its neighborhoods as possible. Carol Enseki, president of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, says, “We’ve made a major effort to recruit people of color” and representatives of various parts of the borough for the museum board. “Our board has about 30 people, at least one-third of whom are people of color,” she adds. “That’s pretty unusual for a nonprofit board, particularly for a cultural institution like a museum.”

As a result, Ms. Enseki adds, the museum has had considerable success attracting black donors, including those of Caribbean descent, who live in Brooklyn. “People have a really high level of pride not just in their own neighborhoods, but in the community of the borough,” she says. “Ask someone here where they’re from, and proudly they say, ‘I’m not from New York City. I’m from Brooklyn.’”

Serving the Down and Out

Some charity leaders, however, say the largess of Brooklyn residents does not generate enough money to meet the needs of the borough’s poorest residents — and secular groups serving them do not see the same flow of gifts that religious institutions do.

Donna Santarsiero, executive director of the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, says that government and foundation grants provide the vast bulk of her group’s $27-million annual budget.

“Yes, there is a tremendous commitment and generosity by minority persons giving to churches and houses of worship,” Ms. Santarsiero says. “But whether anything like the money that is donated to the churches is available to other human-service organizations, I have my doubts about.”

Her organization would not be able to serve its clients if it had to rely on individual charity, Ms. Santarsiero says.

The Bureau of Community Service received only about $250,000 in charitable donations from individuals last year, she adds — less than 1 percent of what it needs to operate.

“The persons we serve are the most down and out,” Ms. Santarsiero says. “We’re not serving people who are participating in their churches and their community.”