August 18, 2005 | Read Time: 1 minute
Gifts of Time and Money: The Role of Charity in America’s Communities
edited by Arthur C. Brooks
What leads people to give their time and money to charity? What characteristics distinguish groups that are involved in civic affairs from those that are not? And what can policy makers and nonprofit leaders do to promote giving and volunteering? This collection of essays, culled from two symposia organized by the nonprofit-studies program at Syracuse University, investigates those and other questions to determine how to maximize the reach of community involvement in philanthropic work.
Leslie Lenkowsky, founding director of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees AmeriCorps, and a columnist for The Chronicle, examines how AmeriCorps and other national-service programs can build a sense of community. Peter Frumkin, of the University of Texas at Austin, and Lazar Treschan, of the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development, discuss how the nonprofit organization City Year brokers corporate and community partnerships. Other essay writers explore the impact of corporate community-service programs and volunteer centers on local participation in social causes.
The volume also explores social and cultural factors that shape charitable giving. In an essay on religion and philanthropy, Peter Dobkin Hall, of Harvard University, writes that conservative Protestants tend to give more than liberals or Catholics, but that religious liberals are overrepresented on nonprofit boards. Eleanor Brown, of Pomona College, analyzes the interplay between education and charitable giving and finds that people who attend college build affiliations with different interest groups and organizations that result in an increase in charitable giving.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Md. 20706; http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com; 223 pages; $24.95; ISBN 0-7425-4505-9.
