Understanding the Correlates of Donor Intention: A Comparison of Local, National, and International Charity Destinations

The United Kingdom is generous toward charitable donations, and this commitment appears robust against a background of economic uncertainty. While prior work has identified a clear preference for domestic over international causes, research has yet to identify the range of variables that significantly correlate with this important element of charitable choice. A survey of 1,004 U.K. residents was designed to assess willingness to donate to local, national, and international causes. For each destination, stepwise multiple regression analysis identified the key variables that correlate to an individual’s willingness to donate. Findings suggest that donor willingness correlates with levels of trust, preferred types of charitable cause, and donation channels. In contrast, the role of donor demographics is relatively limited. The findings suggest some commonality in the variables that associate most significantly with willingness to donate locally and nationally, but those relating to international donation intention are relatively distinct.

Policies and Programs

Chapter 8 details the long-standing history in the United States of official position statements by religious institutions and organizations regarding medical and healthcare issues, legislation, and policies that impact the health and well-being of the broader population. This history is highlighted by the recent national debate on healthcare reform, which was influenced by advocacy reports for or against features of proposed legislation issued by denominations and faith-based organizations across the religious spectrum. This chapter also provides perspectives on the contentious subject of federal faith-based initiatives since the passage of legislation authorizing charitable choice, under President Bill Clinton, which led to establishment of a White House faith-based office in the subsequent three administrations. Programmatic and policy successes of this initiative are described, especially in the areas of community and global health, an example being PEPFAR, the most successful program ever established to address AIDS in the developing world.

Faith-Based Charitable Giving and Its Impact on Notions of “Community”: The Case of American Muslim NGOs

With the current economic downturn, increased levels of unemployment, and poverty, the role of non-profits has come into spotlight. Considering that there are over 1.5 million NGOs in the U.S.A., and a proliferation of faith-based organizations (FBOs), their role in social capital, civic engagement cannot be discounted (Salamon, Sokolowski, and Anheier 2000). The role of FBOs has also been recognized as being important, and this became a part of mainstream discourse with the Charitable Choice provisions introduced by President Bill Clinton and consolidated under George W. Bush. While there is a lot of literature on Christian FBOs, there is very little written matter on American Muslim NGOs, or comparative research. American Muslim FBOs have emerged in the last 20 years, as important players in both domestic and international humanitarian aid movement. I will examine the case of Muslim faith-based giving to organizations to analyze how charitable giving towards them is influencing discourse about the American Muslim “community,” and how it is best to understand their work “relationally” rather than in opposition to other faith traditions (GhaneaBassiri 2010). While the narrative of giving among American Muslims seems simple and there is also very little literature on this issue, my preliminary research points towards a complicated landscape of giving, which combines both local giving at the mosque level and giving at the international level to the Ummah (community) or brotherhood, through transnational humanitarian aid agencies such as Islamic Relief. I argue that giving practices are creating new forms of “relational communities” in America. This notion of “relationality” can be applied in philanthropy, and is evident in the global humanitarian aid movement, as I demonstrate. I ask whether this is forming a new “moral geography” that is more pluralistic and broader than the one that we are familiar, especially in the American context. A closer examination of this phenomenon offers us insights into how a community is imagined and created. This paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on FBOs, and also that on American philanthropy.

Agents, Armies, Allies: Semantics of Public-Private Partnerships in US Welfare Reform

Global competition and demographic change have put modern welfare states under pressure. To ensure budget consolidation without too harsh a retrenchment of benefits, privatization and competition have become white hopes in the social-political debate. As states are courting civil society to take over responsibility in the realm of social welfare, they create opportunity structures for religious communities to re-enter the public sphere. While it has become fashionable to announce the resurgence of religion in heroic diagnoses of the world order, little attention has been given to what is going on below on the meso-level of public-private collaboration between religious and non-religious organizations. In this article I will examine US welfare reform as a strong case of privatization and communalization of welfare responsibility, which involves an explicit invitation to religious communities to join in as public social service providers. I will argue for a religious studies perspective to religion and social politics that focuses on the semantic patterns of the political discourse and explore the guiding semantics of public-private partnerships from the initial Charitable Choice legislation under the Clinton government to George W. Bush’s Faith-based Initiative and finally to the New Era of Partnerships announced by Barack Obama.