June 18, 1998 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Fidelity Investments’ Charitable Gift Fund, the American Cancer Society, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute lead a new list of U.S. charities and community foundations ranked by the amount of money they disburse in grants to other non-profit organizations.
The list is included in the second edition of the National Directory of Grantmaking Public Charities, published by the Foundation Center.
The publication underscores an important, but often overlooked, characteristic of giving in America: Charities can be a promising source of money for other charities.
Giving through the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund totaled nearly $115-million in fiscal 1996, while the American Cancer Society disbursed $93-million. The Hughes Institute gave $88-million in fiscal 1997. Taken together, the top 10 charities ranked by total giving disbursed $677-million in fiscal 1996 or 1997.
The new directory, which updates one published in 1995, lists 1,050 charities, including 451 community foundations, that make grants or provide scholarships, fellowships, loans, or in-kind gifts to other non-profit groups or to individuals.
The directory focuses only on “public charities,” an Internal Revenue Service classification that does not include private foundations. Private foundations typically receive most of their money from a sole donor or family, while community foundations get their money from a variety of sources and generally spend it in a single geographic area.
Fidelity’s Charitable Gift Fund, which distributed $195-million to 16,000 charities in fiscal 1997, uses a controversial approach that lets donors decide which charities receive money. That system differs from the competitive approach used by most charities, which screen requests for grants.
In contrast to Fidelity, many charities in the Foundation Center directory also make grants mainly to organizations that work in specific fields of interest. The American Heart Association, ranked seventh in total giving by the directory, gave out about $51-million in grants in fiscal 1997, all of it to scientific researchers and research teams studying heart disease and stroke.
Copies of the National Directory of Grantmaking Public Charities are available for $115 each from the Foundation Center, Dept. RA, 79 Fifth Avenue, New York 10003. The directory also can be obtained by calling the Foundation Center at (800) 424-9836 or by using the order form that can be found on the Foundation Center’s site on the World-Wide Web (http://www.fdncenter.org).
