by Kevin Murphy
As 2015 came to a close, nonprofits were cheering a major legislative victory: Congress made permanent a tax law allowing people to more easily send money from their retirement accounts to charity, and it extended the incentives for making donations of food and of land that deserves environmental protection.
For a long time, nonprofits have been fighting at the end of every year to persuade Congress to pass these provisions — and then they’ve had to do it all over again.
I had a front-row seat onto all that lobbying when I served as chairman of the board of the Council on Foundations, and I applaud all the work that advocates have done to pull off that accomplishment. But as I stepped aside from that job (and as board member of the council) and have had time to reflect on what it takes to help nonprofits serve society better, I realize that what we’ve been doing is much too small.
Instead of focusing on narrow tax incentives, it’s time for charities and foundations to set national goals for increasing the amount that Americans give to nonprofit organizations.
For as long as records have been kept, charitable giving has remained stuck at about 2 percent of the gross domestic product. There may be a lot of reasons that we’ve never grown that number, but one surely is that we’ve never set a bigger national goal.
As we open a year of presidential elections — and much deliberation about the state of the country — it’s the right time for nonprofits to decide we will work together to increase charitable giving to at least 3 percent of our gross domestic product in the next three years.
Think about what goals do.
America built a space program in 10 years that landed astronauts on the moon.
We’ve led the world in eliminating polio and restoring our wildlands and saving endangered species. But those things happened only because we set goals.
