Ranking Generosity in the States

Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy and the Boston Foundation have released a new study

ranking states according to the generosity of their residents. To determine a state’s standing, researchers calculated its residents’ contributions to charity as a proportion of the total amount Americans donated in 2002. They compared that percentage with the state’s proportion of all after-tax income, making adjustments for differences in the cost of living from state to state.

For example, a state whose residents gave 2 percent of all charitable donations made in the United States and whose household income accounted for 1 percent of the national total would be assigned a ratio of 2, the result when the proportion of all donations (2 percent) is divided by the proportion of all household income (1 percent).

That state would rank above any states with a lower ratio and below those with a larger ratio. The results are very different from the annual Generosity Index compiled by the Catalogue for Philanthropy, in Boston, which ranks states in a similar fashion but does not adjust its data to reflect differences in the cost of living. Following is a look at how the two approaches compare.