The stock market’s slide has begun to affect a fast-growing type of giving.
Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund — which raises more than all but three other charities in the country according to The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 400 rankings — says contributions dipped by 8 percent in the first quarter of 2008 compared with the first quarter of 2007.
Fidelity, like numerous other financial institutions and community foundations, offers donor-advised funds — a sort of charity checking account that many donors set up with stock gifts.
And that’s why it’s not surprising, says Sarah Libbey, interim president of Fidelity’s Gift Fund, that her organization’s decline in giving mirrors the first-quarter stock-market declines of 7.6 percent on the Dow Jones and 9.9 percent for the Standard & Poor’s 500.
The Schwab Fund for Charitable Giving says giving dropped 10 percent, to $77-million, in the first three months of 2008, compared with the same quarter last year.
“After the fourth quarter of 2007, things came to a screeching halt,” says Susan Heldman, Schwab’s controller.
Still, a few financial institutions say their funds have not yet felt the effects of the stock-market turmoil.
At the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, gifts during the first quarter increased by 9 percent, to $131-million, over the same period last year. Benjamin Pierce, the fund’s executive director says that the growth has come mainly from donors giving from $1-million to $5-million, who are presumably more insulated than others from a softening economy.
