January 15, 1998 | Read Time: 3 minutes
A commemorative stamp to honor philanthropy will be issued in mid-October, the U.S. Postal Service has announced.
The stamp, which carries the line “Giving and Sharing: An American Tradition” across the top, shows a picture of a bee about to pollinate a flower — which the Postal Service hopes will be a good symbol of the way philanthropy works.
The Postal Service plans to issue enough of the first-class stamps to be available at post offices for about three months. Stamps are also usually available for as long as a year through stamp-collecting centers at some post offices and by post-office mail order.
Non-profit leaders have long been urging the Postal Service to issue such a stamp. The crusade has been led by Milton Murray, a fund raiser who says he began lobbying the service 18 years ago to create a philanthropy stamp.
Mr. Murray, director emeritus of the Philanthropic Service for Institutions of the Seventh-day Adventist World Headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., hopes the stamp will inspire generosity among Americans and that charities will use it on their own mailings as well as for fund raising. For example, he says he hopes charities will adopt the design for T-shirts or mugs that they sell to raise money. Because the designs are copyrighted, however, anyone wishing to reprint a design is required to get permission from the Postal Service.
A stamp collector from the age of 8, Mr. Murray got the idea after looking at the stamps that have been issued in honor of individual charities, such as the Girl Scouts and the American Red Cross. “Having a stamp recognizing your charity brings a degree of pride to the agency,” he says. “There’s something energizing about it.”
But most charities will never have their own stamp, he says, so he hopes a generic one will help all kinds of non-profit groups.
The Postal Service’s Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, which decides what stamp proposals to accept, gets 40,000 suggestions a year, of which about 30 are given a nod of approval. It often takes three years or more to have a stamp idea approved, designed, and produced.
Mr. Murray believes his proposal took much longer for a variety of reasons. “Philanthropy is a hard thing to define, to grab hold of,” he says. “It’s hard to illustrate. And it’s not a popular subject. No one wants to talk about it.”
All along, though, Mr. Murray was encouraged in his efforts by charity officials whose stamp ideas had been rejected by the Postal Service, and he was aided in his campaign by 22 organizations that represent charities and fund raisers, including the American Association of Fund Raising Counsel, Independent Sector, the National Catholic Development Conference, the National Committee on Planned Giving, and the National Society of Fund Raising Executives.
Mr. Murray hopes that the philanthropy stamp will be a gentle nudge to remind people to give. “It’s a way of pressing philanthropy that’s not pinning the individual down but sensitizing him or her to the possibilities of giving.”
