With so much negativity in the news of late, the Barna Group decided to embark on a quest to help the world remember “the reality of human kindness.”
“Stories of police brutality and violence against police, terrorist attacks and negative political rhetoric have filled the news cycle of late, making it easy to forget the reality of human kindness in the world,” reads a statement from Barna.
So, the polling firm decided to dive into mounds of data and release a top-50 ranking of the most generous cities in America, basing the report on data collected from 76,505 U.S. adults over the past 10 years.
The cities included in the list are ranked by the percentage of residents who reported donating money to charity, including to religious groups and churches.
Based on that measure, the most generous cities in the listing were El Paso, Texas, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, with 92 percent of respondents located there expressing such charitable inclinations.
While El Paso and Las Cruces came in first place, Lexington, Kentucky, (91 percent) was second followed by Memphis, Tennessee (90 percent); Charleston-Huntington, West Virginia (90 percent); and Milwaukee (89 percent).
Barna also found that “the most generous cities aren’t necessarily the most wealthy.” For instance, only 7 percent of adults in El Paso and Las Cruces had a household income over $75,000, with 13 percent having a household income of $20,000 or less.
The data also found that much of the giving in the top five cities was directed at churches, with 87 percent of adults giving to houses of worship in El Paso and Las Cruces.
