Giving Back to Their Homelands

Charities worldwide get support from emigrants in America

In California’s Silicon Valley, an Indian-American venture capitalist writes a large check for

his alma mater in Bombay. In a New York City apartment, two dozen young Brazilian-American professionals gather to meet the founder of a nonprofit group that works with street kids in São Paulo. And in a Chicago neighborhood, 1,500 Mexican-Americans attend a dance featuring the music and food of their home state of Zacatecas, in central Mexico, and raise $3,000 to finish building a church there, more than 1,500 miles away.

These and countless other scenes in communities across the United States exemplify the latest wave of giving by immigrant Americans to the countries from which they hail. Building largely on the success of Jewish Americans, who have been raising millions of dollars for Israel for decades, some of the more recent attempts exploit cultural characteristics and introduce new wrinkles into what has become known as “diaspora philanthropy.”

In the original Diaspora, Jews were deported to Babylon in 597 BC, but the term has come to refer to the scattering of any people with a common heritage or background.

“There is an enormous potential” in diaspora giving, says Kathleen D. McCarthy, a history professor at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York who studies philanthropy. “People are just beginning to figure out how to tap it.”

While Ms. McCarthy says she knows of no comprehensive research on the issue, she adds: “My conclusion is that almost every [immigrant] group has or is putting into place some sort of mechanism to capitalize on diaspora giving.”

Many American immigrants give generously to U.S. charities; in fact, some of the country’s most prominent philanthropists (including Andrew Carnegie and George Soros) emigrated from overseas. But whether inspired by sentimental attachment to their homeland, compassion in times of disaster, concern for relatives, friends, and compatriots left behind, or desire to reshape their native country’s culture or governance in fundamental ways, many immigrant Americans increasingly are seeking to exert their influence abroad through financial donations.

Among recent developments:

• The Asia Foundation, which runs programs on governance, economic reform, and other topics in the United States and Asia, has created a separate fund, called Give2Asia, to facilitate donations from Asian immigrants and others to projects in Asia.
• Brazilian-Americans have formed a foundation in New York to support projects in Brazil, with the first round of grants expected to be awarded this summer.
• A Philippine company has set up an office in the United States and created a Web site to make it easier for Filipino-Americans to help underwrite improvements in their native country.
• A new foundation set up by Indian-Americans is not only making grants but also sending young volunteers to work for several months in India.

In an era of cheap international travel and high-tech communications, “our very notions of community are being redefined,” Ms. McCarthy observes. “With constant migrations of people and with the Internet as a way of keeping in touch as a community, there’s a possibility for rethinking the scope and nature of philanthropy.”

Indeed, scholars and policy makers recently have paid more attention to the billions of dollars that flow out of the United States every year to places like Africa, China, Eastern Europe, India, Latin America, and the Philippines, from people whose jobs in the United States also help improve the lives of their families back home. Much of the money goes to feed, clothe, and shelter relatives, although some of it supports charitable projects to meet local needs.

Elena Duran, president of the Zacatecas Federation, in Chicago, points out that the one million Mexican-Americans in that metropolitan area are financing the purchase of buses and ambulances and the construction of schools, roads, bridges, and water and electric systems back in their native regions of Mexico.

Her federation represents some 35 clubs organized by their members’ hometowns in Zacatecas, each of which might be working on a separate fund-raising project.

A club might commit to raising $100,000 for a water system, for example, after reviewing wish lists submitted by municipal officials. The money, which does not flow through conventional charitable institutions (although her federation recently obtained charity status), is now being matched three-to-one by the federal, state, and local governments in Mexico.

Much of the money is raised at dances, festivals, rodeos, and other events that also reinforce a sense of cultural identity among those who participate. At such events, people from all walks of life, some of whom do menial labor during the week, dress up in fancy clothes, enjoy familiar food and music, and renew ties with others they may have known in Mexico. Raising money for a common cause helps to cement those social bonds.

“I’ve been here 38 years,” says Ms. Duran, “and I’m proud to be here, but my heart is also in Mexico.”

Corporate Ties

Similar patterns can be found among the 1.8 million Filipino-Americans who collectively send about $5-billion to the Philippines every year, says Mona Lisa Yuchengco, publisher of Filipinas Magazine, whose offices are in South San Francisco. Much of that money goes to support needy relatives, she says, but some is directed to community projects.

Some 3,000 Filipino-American associations have been organized around the United States, says Ms. Yuchengco, and “every weekend there’s a dinner-dance or fashion show to raise money to build a school or a church.”

Corporate leaders increasingly are trying to take advantage of that spirit of generosity by promoting philanthropy among their fellow countrymen overseas.

The Ayala Foundation, for example, which is financed by the Ayala Group of Companies, in Manila, has set up a U.S. affiliate with an office in San Francisco.

The idea is “to help raise awareness about the socioeconomic system in the Philippines among Filipinos in America who may wish to contribute to social developments there,” explains Gina Estipona, a senior development officer at the Ayala Foundation who is finishing a fellowship at the Council on Foundations, in Washington.

Through its Web site, the foundation enables Filipinos who are living abroad to support projects in the Philippines that might or might not be managed by the Ayala Foundation.

Community Foundations

Elsewhere, too, grant makers outside the United States have considered diaspora groups in the United States as potential sources of support.

Two years ago, the Via Foundation, in Prague, began to wonder whether Czech-Americans might be interested in helping to underwrite its work in the Czech Republic, which focuses on issues like community development, cultural heritage, environmental protection, and improving the lives of young people.

Since then, the foundation has set up Friends of Via as a U.S. charity. It has also identified several U.S. cities with substantial Czech-American populations — including Dallas, Pittsburgh, and San Jose, Calif. — and is now working with community foundations in those areas to identify potential areas of support and collaboration.

But although some donations have trickled in, including $1,000 from the Czech American Congress, in Chicago, and $20,000 from the Skoll Community Fund, in San Jose, fund raising has been slow going.

“It’s not easy to make a case for support of charitable projects outside the country when there are so many needs in U.S. communities where Czech-Americans live,” says Jiri Barta, the Via Foundation’s director. Furthermore, he says, many Czech-American community groups focus primarily on keeping Czech traditions alive in the United States. Second-generation Czech-Americans may have little interest in their parents’ homeland, which they perhaps have never seen.

$50,000 to Endow Fund

But the Heinz Endowments, in Pittsburgh, is donating $50,000 to endow a fund at the Pittsburgh Foundation, to be matched by donations from local Czech-Americans. Earnings from the endowment will be used to help support projects in the Czech Republic, which Heinz has underwritten since the mid-1990s.

And Mary Jalonick, executive director of the Dallas Foundation, says she is looking forward to helping Czech-Americans in Texas expand their giving options, both locally and to the Czech Republic. “It’s something new for community foundations,” which have tended to do most of their grant making within a metropolitan area or other specific geographic area in the United States, she says. This “just shows how small our world has become.”

Because giving abroad can take many forms and channels, much of it has been hard to quantify. Among Chinese-Americans, for example, “there is a lot of activity at the more grass-roots and less-visible level,” says Bob Lee, a retired executive vice president at Pacific Bell. Traditionally, giving by Chinese-Americans has been organized around associations of people from the same geographic area or who share the same family name.

“My own father never earned more than $10,000 a year,” says Mr. Lee, but donations he made over the years through the Lee Family Association to a school in China eventually earned him a treasured distinction: his photograph on the wall of the school.

But while donations of modest gifts to hometown institutions by older generations of Chinese-Americans are very much rooted in traditional Chinese culture, Mr. Lee says, “as you go up the food chain to larger gifts, the only thing that looks cultural is the tremendous emphasis on education. Chinese-Americans are extremely focused on their kids doing well in school, because that’s your ticket out of whatever state of life you started out in.”

Accountability Concerns

Several grant makers are trying to position themselves as conduits for larger gifts by responding to some of the objections people often cite for not giving overseas: that it’s difficult to identify appropriate organizations and monitor their performance; that donations sometimes go astray; and that such gifts don’t qualify for tax deductions.

“We’re hearing from people who’ve given informally but now want a tax break, or they want better service, or they’ve got concerns about accountability or transparency — they’ve heard stories about people who made gifts and never heard back,” says Mike Rea, managing director of Give2Asia.

Advice From the Irish

People hoping to capitalize on the generosity of diaspora groups often find their way to the New York office of the United Jewish Communities or the Boston headquarters of the American Ireland Fund, both of which have decades of experience.

Australians, Chinese, Indians, Scots, and South Africans have expressed interest in emulating the success of the American Ireland Fund, says its president, Kingsley Aikins, while he in turn spends a lot of time talking with Jewish groups about their strategies for building support for Israel.

“We often see ourselves as the community foundation of the Irish diaspora,” says Mr. Aikins, who notes that Ireland itself has virtually no private philanthropies. His foundation has raised about $150-million to date, including $21-million last year, and has supported more than 1,200 Irish nonprofit groups. Its annual dinner in New York last month generated $3-million, a new record.

It was not always so successful. Twenty-five years ago, he says, the group had to hold its second annual fund-raising dinner to pay off the debts left over from the first one.

But the universe of potential support is large: 70 million people worldwide claim some Irish blood, including 44 million Americans. And Ireland Funds in a dozen countries benefit from the emotional ties many of those people still have to their country of origin.

“As the world becomes more global,” Mr. Aikins says, “people want to be a little more local,” and are often intrigued by their own genealogy. And, despite the turnaround in Ireland’s economy, he adds, there are still plenty of projects that need outside support.

“We’re coming out of a 30-year conflict where a whole generation was lost, and there’s a huge job of reconciliation and reconstruction to be done there,” he says.

‘Porous Nature of Borders’

Indeed, bridging conflicts between hostile or suspicious parties may be one of the chief strengths of diaspora philanthropy, since donors often have strong connections to both their original homelands and the countries they have made their new home. And in a world where civic activism and advocacy is still not universally admired, people with such international perspectives can play a critical role.

“Given the porous nature of borders these days, and that capital and labor flows don’t respect borders, it’s only natural that diaspora philanthropy is one of a grab bag of new models of philanthropy,” says Barry D. Gaberman, senior vice president of the Ford Foundation. “It’s actually quite exciting.”

Foreign donors have often played key roles in nurturing nonprofit organizations in developing countries, Mr. Gaberman points out, since many such countries lack a cultural tradition of supporting such activities through either private donations or government subsidies.

But foreign donors without direct ties to a country can be fickle; what’s more, charities often face allegations that they are controlled by their foreign supporters.

“What’s interesting about diaspora philanthropy is that it might be a halfway house,” Mr. Gaberman observes, “an interesting new source of money that can come in and support the institutions of civil society, that can fill the potential gap left by others who might leave, and that might not be as open to criticism for being foreign.”