Is Lexington a generous town? The answer is yes. And no.
Is Lexington a generous town? Are we charitable people? Do we adequately support the layer of charities and non-profits that promote our quality of life — everything from feeding the hungry to putting on classical music concerts?
Well, the answer is ... sort of.
Lisa Adkins knows more about generosity than anyone in town: Since she became head of the Blue Grass Community Foundation, it’s grown from $32 million in assets to $140 million.
“In many ways, generosity abounds throughout our community, and we can see it through charitable gifts that support an array of non-profit organizations and volunteer opportunities,” she said. “Is there the potential for everyone to do more? The answer is yes.”
For example, the Kentucky Philanthropy Initiative has now done two surveys on a concept known as “transfer of wealth,” the amount of money that passes from one generation to another that could be used for charity. In 2017, Fayette County residents had about $57 billion in assets. If people here left just five percent of their estates to charity, it would guarantee a payout of $14 million a year.
Or think about it this way: In 2011, the Blue Grass Community Foundation and Smiley Pete Publishing started the Good Giving Challenge, which centralizes information about non-profits and allows people to give online. It starts Dec. 3 and runs through Dec. 9. Last year, the challenge raised $1.5 million for 110 organizations. For a town worth $60 billion, that seems kind of weak.
Adkins says it’s all really about education. People may not know about organizations that would really interest them, thus prompting a donation. Or their estate lawyers and financial advisors may not be telling them about charitable giving in estate planning. If you have a $500,000 estate, for example, you could leave $25,000 or five percent to set up a fund at the community foundation, and still leave $475,000 to your family.
In national studies, Adkins said, Kentucky has high church-based giving compared to other states, but does not rank as well for secular charity.
“I think what this study (Transfer of Wealth) is trying to tell us is that there is so much potential and opportunity to change the conversation and help people follow through on their charitable impulses,” Adkins said.
Quality of life
And those impulses are so very needed in Lexington. Non-profits form such an important layer to our quality of life, filling in the gaps that government cannot or no longer does. Quality of life includes everything from food pantries and homeless shelters to theater and music and art. As income inequality gets worse, the non-profit sector does even more with social safety nets.
The people who work at these organizations are passionate about them, but they are underpaid and way overworked. Richard Young is a founder of several non-profits, including CivicLex and the Origins Jazz Series. CivicLex recently did a survey of 182 local non-profits and found that 50 percent of those employees planned to leave in the next five years.
In addition, only one in five organizations offered mental health benefits and one in three offer parental leave, even though the sector is majority-female.
That’s complicated by the fact that when people give to organizations, they often stipulate that their gift go directly to programming, explicitly not to administration.
“That hurts the organization, which loses staff, which detracts from the mission, and you’re in a doom loop that keeps reinforcing itself,” Young said.
“Non-profits pick up the slack of what’s left by government and the private sector, and with income inequality, federal and state funding is being stripped away from social services and the arts,” he added. Overworked, underpaid employees leave not just their jobs, but Lexington because nowhere in the non-profit world here will they be necessarily better paid. “If as a city we are trying to attract and retain talent, this is a huge part of our workforce that’s leaving.”
There are nearly 2,000 non-profits registered in Fayette County, although those include monoliths like the University of Kentucky and Transylvania University. A lot of big schools and big projects can take the lion’s share of charity, but they also have the most visibility.
“I think that there’s not a lot of education about what organizations exist in Lexington and what they do,” Young said. “I think it’s also organizations are not bold enough in how they talk about what their needs are.”
Even United Way of the Bluegrass, which is an umbrella organization for 80 nonprofits has a hard time being heard “above the noise,” even in a town as generous as Lexington, said Katie Williams, vice president of marketing and communications.
“We try to spread that message of what our partners are doing, but I do think nonprofits in general have a difficult time telling their story because we don’t have large marketing budgets,” Williams said. “For smaller non-profits even more of a challenge.”
Meaningful gifts
By next Tuesday, the Good Giving Challenge will post lots of information about lots of charities that need your help.
I was thinking about it as I started a holiday tradition: re-reading an essay by local author Rona Roberts about stepping back from Christmas craziness and expectations.
“Many people take for granted that the holidays will be a somewhat miserable, costly, health-damaging experience and yet believe their inability to enjoy the holidays is a personal failing, some private penury of spirit,” she writes. “January through October each year, we are clearer about all this. We see how a simple holiday of joy and love has gotten way out of hand. Before the 20th century, Christmas for ordinary people meant, at most, a feast day, a small exchange of useful presents, and perhaps a reason to share food and necessities with the poor. Try finding references in any literature written before 1920 to regular folk giving outrageous holiday parties, exchanging multiple extravagant presents, squandering money on outlandish decorations, or going on months-long holiday shopping sprees. It did not happen, and you will not find the references.”
So maybe this holiday season, we could all acquaint ourselves with a nonprofit organization that we didn’t know about before, and see if we think it would be a good fit for a donation. Honor a friend not with a fruitcake they won’t eat, but with a gift in their name. You’ll feel better and so will they, knowing you’ve helped this important sector of our city.
“I see there is so much potential here,” Adkins said. “I’m optimistic about creating an even more generous community not just in Lexington, but in all the counties and Appalachia, too.”
This story was originally published November 29, 2019 at 8:39 AM.
