Giving Circles

Giving circles are growing in number in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere. They involve individuals pooling resources and deciding together where and how to give these away. They also include social, educational, and volunteer opportunities for members. Most work on giving circles to date has focused on the contributions they make to nonprofit organizations as a means to address community problems. This paper focuses on the dual purposes of giving circles to 1) serve members as self-help/mutual aid groups for wealthy and other philanthropists and 2) provide resources to the community. Based on data gathered through interviews, document analysis and secondary data, the paper asserts that giving circles provide their greatest value as self-help/mutual aid sources for members rather than as mechanisms for addressing community problems and this has important implications for the expectations of voluntary institutions in a new governance/risk environment.

A giving circle is an example of collective philanthropy where donors pool their financial capital to support a non-profit organisation. While giving circles have existed for decades, they are funding a fresh expression as individuals rediscover the advantages of giving together.
Our previous study on giving circles reviewed 35 circles, which we classified as either indigenous or affiliated to networks outside the region, in eight Asian countries. These giving circles demonstrate a wide variety of styles and models. Some circles are informal and volunteer managed; others are more structured and use professional staff. While all giving circles encourage their members to do more than make a donation, some utilise the skills and networks of their members to provide consulting expertise for the non-profits they support.
In this new study we list 66 known indigenous and transplanted giving circles in 10 Asian countries. We surveyed the members of 38 of these giving circles to understand how membership influences an individual’s knowledge of, and attitude towards, their community, social issues, nonprofits and philanthropy. The survey also explored how joining a giving circle changes the amount given and the ways in which people choose to give. A number of non-profits were asked about their experience of being supported by giving circles and how this contrasted with the support they received from more traditional donors.

Giving circles are groups of individuals who pool their resources and decide together where these resources should be distributed. They are becoming especially popular among non-traditional donors such as women, people of color, young professionals and youth. This study is one of the first to examine a youth giving circle; a case study of a giving circle made up of students from one high school in a mid-sized Midwestern town in the U.S. It examined the effect participating in a giving circle had on youth participants’ learning through connection to and awareness of community issues, sense of empowerment, and identities as leaders and philanthropists by gathering data through interviews and documentation.

Giving groups or circles represent a trend emerging across the UK in which groups of donors collaborate to support-through giving and sometimes volunteering-individuals, organizations, or projects. Members often conduct research on potential beneficiaries and make joint or coordinated decisions about the use of resources. More than 80 giving groups or networks of groups have been identified in the UK and new groups continue to be created and discovered.

This article reports on an exploratory study to understand the impact of the new philanthropy on funding recipients by asking nonprofit professionals about their experiences working with giving circles. Giving circles are growing in number across the United States. They are attractive to new philanthropy donors who pool their resources and then decide together where to give them away. They also frequently include social, educational, and volunteer engagement components. Giving circles seem to be an important source of new and expanded resources for nonprofit organizations, but there are both benefits and challenges to working with giving circles that reveal several problematic tensions for nonprofit funding recipients, the philanthropic relationship, and society more broadly.

Giving circles are growing in number in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere. They involve individuals pooling resources and deciding together where and how to give these away. They also include social, educational, and volunteer opportunities for members. Most work on giving circles to date has focused on the contributions they make to nonprofit organizations as a means to address community problems. This paper focuses on the dual purposes of giving circles to 1) serve members as self-help/mutual aid groups for wealthy and other philanthropists and 2) provide resources to the community. Based on data gathered through interviews, document analysis and secondary data, the paper asserts that giving circles provide their greatest value as self-help/mutual aid sources for members rather than as mechanisms for addressing community problems and this has important implications for the expectations of voluntary institutions in a new governance/risk environment.

There has been little discussion about the democratic impacts of new roles and expectations put on private philanthropy and voluntarism in an era of governance beyond the state. This article explores tensions philanthropic voluntary associations face in balancing their internal democratic effects of enhancing civic education and participation of members on the one hand with meeting needs and solving problems in the community on the other. This is brought into focus through an analysis of giving circles, groups that entail individuals pooling resources and then deciding together how and where to give these away. Giving circles highlight the trade-off between the grassroots independence and noncoercive collaborative action that enables voluntary associations to contribute to democratic governance and the ability for these institutions to adequately and comprehensively address community problems; a trade-off that becomes important if one is concerned with serving the public good in an era of government cutbacks and privatization.

The 20/20 Social Impact Leaders' Group comprises young Asian philanthropists who wanted a way to 'engage next-generation leaders through peer to peer learning for the purpose of collective action'.

The article is published in Philanthropy Impact Magazine, Issue 20, Autumn 2018 pp 18-20

@philanimpact

Ce travail porte sur la question de l’argent dans l’œuvre de Charles Fontaine durant la décennie 1550. Il montre de quelle façon s’exprime la tension entre tradition et modernité dans laquelle se trouve pris le poète parisien installé à Lyon. Ses textes témoignent en effet de logiques concurrentes, dont les équilibres sont en train de changer dans la société du temps. Certes, Fontaine, de façon traditionnelle, rejette parfois l’argent et valorise le cycle du don et du contre-don. Mais dans d’autres pièces, il n’hésite pas à rendre compte – parfois crûment – de sa fragile condition financière, voire à  s’inscrire dans la logique marchande qui tend à s’imposer en cette période de premier capitalisme. Tiré d’une communication qui a été prononcée lors du colloque de Lyon des 5 et 6 juin 2009, l’article est paru dans les actes du colloque.

To address these questions, we gathered data in two steps: First, we created a database of GCs based on secondary data from previous studies and a web-based search to document existing GCs. Then, we surveyed GCs using the database contacts. The survey included questions about operations, structure, and composition of GCs. A total of 358 GCs responded to the survey, giving us a response rate of 33 percent of active GCs in our database. A summary of our key findings is below.

Whilst philanthropy has long helped fund private initiatives for public good, governments are becoming more interested in expanding this income source as pressures on public spending increase. One outcome of multiple efforts to enhance philanthropy is the growth of giving circles, which involve individual donors collaborating to support causes of mutual interest. This research examines the degree to which giving circles are a good mechanism for enhancing philanthropy. Our overarching interest is to understand if giving circles in the UK and Ireland might serve to grow philanthropy as well as shift the logic of charity to meet the expectations of policy-makers.

Giving Circles are a significant part of the American philanthropy landscape and have been the subject of academic study since 2004.  They are important not only for raising funds for locally based, non-profit organisations, but also as a vehicle for donor education and socialisation.  We know that giving circles exist outside of the US and Canada but little has been written about them. We report on initiatives in collective philanthropy in 7 Asian countries, including India and China, and suggest an initial typology.  We profile examples of giving circles in 2 broad categories – models imported from the US and Europe; and indigenous models initiated within Asia.  Both categories exhibit a wide range of characteristics, e.g. circle size, organisational structure, strategic partnerships and level of personal engagement by members. We argue that giving circles will become an important phenomenon in the growth of philanthropy in Asia and make recommendations that would promote their number and quality of impact.
The paper is copyrighted and only available to subscribers of Foundation Review: http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/tfr/vol6/iss4/9

The purpose of this paper is to examine the types of organizations that benefit from giving circles in the U.S. and U.K. The research draws on data from interviews, surveys, observations, and documentation collected in both countries. The findings show some populations appear to be benefiting more from giving circles than seen in traditional philanthropy, such as women and girls and people from minority racial and ethnic groups; however, giving circles may do little to shift the norm that most philanthropy does not go to the poor and needy. Giving circles also tend to fund certain types of organizations—often small and locally-based; new or start-ups or that are reorganizing/transitioning; have a “business” orientation; and can engage members or show clearly benefits or outcomes, and/or significant impact in relation to the size of the organization.

Wealth is being created across Asia Pacific with unprecedented speed. There are now more high net worth individuals in Asia than in either North America or Europe. Economic development is creating huge middle classes in emerging economies like India, Indonesia, and Thailand. But half of Asia’s 1.63bn people live on less than US$2 a day.

Giving circles are groups of individuals who pool their resources and decide together where these resources should be distributed. They are becoming especially popular among non-traditional donors such as women, people of color, young professionals, and youth. This study is one of the first to examine a youth giving circle: a case study of a giving circle made up of students from one high school in a mid-sized Midwestern town in the United States. The study examined the effect participating in a giving circle had on youth participants’ learning through connection to and awareness of community issues, sense of empowerment, and identities as leaders and philanthropists by gathering data through interviews and documentation.

Giving to charity has never been a solitary activity in any culture. People have joined together to give for millennia. In Asia, clan associations, religious groups or just friends have enjoyed the benefits of giving as a group. But there appears to be a renaissance of collective giving with the advent of more organised, strategic and outcome-focused philanthropy. At the Asia Centre for Social Entrepreneurship and Philanthropy (ACSEP) where I am presently based, our research team’s curiosity about giving circles was first piqued when investigating the nature of innovation in Asian philanthropy in 2012. In that study, we reported several initiatives where individuals pooled their resources and jointly selected a non-profit organisation to fund. Since then, the number and variety of giving circle models have increased across the region, leading me to believe that giving circles will make a significant to the development of philanthropy in Asia over the coming decade.

This article was originally published in  Social Space Issue 8 (2016/7), and is reproduced with the kind permission of the Lien Centre for Social Innovation at Singapore Management University.

The purpose of this research was to better understand how charities and social enterprises in the UK are responding and adapting to tools of the "new philanthropy" environment, particularly to funding from "giving circles." Giving circles involve donors collaborating through giving (and sometimes volunteering) to support individuals, organisations, or projects of mutual interest. Members often conduct research on potential beneficiaries and make joint or coordinated decisions about the use of resources. Giving circles typically include a meaningful degree of social interaction and learning. 1 This research addressed the following questions:

Recent efforts to grow philanthropy in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland have focused on increasing the number of donors and size of donations, rather than on developing new methods of giving, despite this latter approach sharing the same objective. This article explores the rise of one such new vehicle – giving circles – defined as groups of individuals who donate money and/or time and have a say in the distribution of these resources. Scholarship on giving circles has largely focused on the United States (US), yet they are found increasingly in other parts of the world. This article focuses on how giving circles in the UK and Ireland are structured and administered; how and why they are formed; their key activities; typical characteristics of members; and why people join. It concludes by noting distinctive characteristics of giving circles in the UK and Ireland and setting out a future programme to further understanding in this area.