Time on Their Side

The good news, according to the authors of the report, which surveyed 2,300 members of Gay organizations in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, is that the typical Gay volunteer gives 62 percent more time - to both Gay and non-Gay organizations - than the average volunteer in the general population gives each year. And most Gay participants in the study indicated they donate their money as well as time.

M.V. Lee Badgett, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and co-author of the study, said the survey results help "chip away at the myth of Gay people as selfish hedonists" concerned only with the Gay community.

"What we found," said Badgett, "is that Gay people give as much to non-Gay organizations as to Gay organizations. I was surprised by this. I thought what we would see is Gay people ... giving most of [their time and money] to Gay and Lesbian organizations. ... The fact that Gay people are so invisible makes it hard to see the contributions that they make in both time and money to non-Gay organizations."

But Badgett and co-author Nancy Cunningham said the fact that those surveyed gave less than 1 percent of their incomes to Gay organizations posed danger as well as opportunity.

"Giving less than 1 percent of income to GLBT [Gay, Lesbian, bisexual and transgender] organizations," stated the survey report, "has not been sufficient to achieve the political, social and cultural progress that Gay people want and need."

"GLBT people and their allies must take greater individual responsibility for supporting and creating the organizations that constitute the infrastructure of the GLBT community."

Gay people in the three-city survey gave, on average, 2.1 percent of their personal incomes to all organizations, with 0.9 percent of income going to Gay groups. Half the respondents had personal incomes lower than $40,000.

Those respondents who gave money donated 2.5 percent of their personal income to all organizations. This was similar to the 2.2 percent that the average American donor reported giving in a 1996 survey. But the nationwide survey inquired about household income, not personal income, so the results are not directly comparable.

For Gay donors, the percentage of personal income going to Gay community groups was 1 percent. Of the money they contributed, 42 percent went to Gay organizations, 14 percent to AIDS-related organizations, and 44 percent to non-Gay organizations.

"What we found," said Lee Badgett, "is that Gay people give as much to non-Gay organizations as to Gay organizations. I was surprised by this."

Co-author Cunningham called the figures on monetary contributions to Gay groups "quite alarming."

"While we're really doing well in terms of volunteering," she said, "we're really not doing very well in terms of financial support. If we want to continue to develop our community organizations, it's critical that we start giving more and really pushing ourselves to give at a much higher level."

Badgett noted that the survey respondents, because they were contacted through Gay organizations, included people who were most active and likely to donate money. Even so, she said, 20 percent of respondents had never given money to a Gay group.

The Badgett study's results are similar to estimates made by the Blade in its biennial survey of national Gay and AIDS organizations. Those surveys take the number of people who donate money to the organizations and compare that to conservative estimates of the number of adult Gay persons in the United States. While the Blade's 1997 survey found that the number of people who gave money to the six largest of these organizations increased by 82 percent since 1995, the percentage of Gay people giving to any organization was still only 3.2 percent (up from 1.2 percent in 1993 and 1995).

Unlike Gay donors, Gay volunteers in the three-city survey were much more active than the typical volunteer in the United States. The average volunteer in the Gay study gave 29 hours in the previous month, compared to 18 hours per month for the typical volunteer.

Of the 29 hours, 45 percent went to Gay organizations, 40 percent to non-Gay organizations, and 15 percent to AIDS organizations.

"I think the extra volunteer time [GLBT] people give," Badgett said, "suggests they want to meet those needs that are Gay specific, but [they] want to do that without completely giving up their connection to other organizations in their community that aren't ... Gay-focused."

One of the striking findings from the three-city survey was that Gay political advocacy groups and political campaigns receive one in four hours volunteered and more than one of every three dollars donated to Gay organizations.

This pattern differs sharply from the general public's giving patterns, the survey notes: The average person in the United States gives only 2 percent of his or her charitable contributions to advocacy groups.

Cunningham said she expected to find a high level of Gay respondents' involvement in advocacy groups.

"It's not surprising," she said, "since...there's so many judicial and legislative areas we are working on."

Nearly half the survey respondents said they first became involved with Gay organizations to oppose an anti-Gay candidate or referendum, or because they felt threatened by anti-Gay rhetoric.

Other highlights from the study included the following:

Why do Gay people give? Why do Gay people give money and volunteer time to Gay organizations? According to a landmark study of Gay giving and volunteerism in three cities [see adjoining story], the answer is a mixture of activism, altruism, building community, and meeting people. In the study, which surveyed 2,300 members of Gay organizations in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, more than 85 percent of donors and volunteers cited the desire to contribute to social and political change for Gay people as a major motive for their giving. More than 85 percent of donors and volunteers also said helping other Gay people was an important motive. Knowing someone who benefited from a particular organization inspired more than 33 percent of the volunteers and nearly 25 percent of the donors. And meeting other Gay people was a major motive for nearly half the volunteers. Volunteers and donors said they look carefully at the organizations they support. Almost three in four donors said an organization's reputation for spending money wisely is important to them, while 61 percent said they are influenced if an organization provides direct services to people needing them. Some Lesbian donors - 40 percent - said they look at whether the organization primarily serves Lesbians. And race and gender diversity of an organization's board of directors is important to 42 percent of women (compared to 28 percent of men) and 52 percent of people of color (compared to 32 percent of white people). Tax deductibility is a factor for 24 percent of donors, especially those with incomes over $50,000. Respondents who had not given or volunteered for Gay organizations cited their lack of time and money as primary reasons. But almost 20 percent of the non-givers indicated that they had not contributed because they had never been asked to contribute. Rod MacNeil, a 41-year-old librarian who lives in Philadelphia and participant in the study, said he became active in the AIDS Information Network, which focuses on sexual health issues, because he "hoped to contribute to others … and also to serve as an example to other people." MacNeil said prospective volunteers should make sure their activity "will bring you some kind of pleasure or satisfaction." "If the time you're committing is too much, then it's not going to do that," MacNeil said. "You're just going to end up being frustrated." Cathy Barlow, president of the Philadelphia-based Delaware Valley Lesbian and Gay Fund, said Gay organizations can learn much from the report. "It seems that people do pay attention to what an organization actually does," Barlow said. "If you're accountable … about the bottom line of your organization, and you report back to the community what you're doing, then you're likely to get them more interested in both becoming donors and volunteering." Asked about her own motivation for Gay volunteer work, Barlow, a civil rights attorney, said, "I find the community civic work I do [is] a mechanism for improving the quality of Gay people's lives." -- Peter Freiberg

• Gay people who are open about their sexual orientation to family members and workplace supervisors volunteer more hours and contribute more money than those who are not out.
• When comparing Gay men and Lesbians with the same level of income and other characteristics, men volunteer two hours more per month and donate almost $245 more a year than women to Gay organizations. The gender difference on volunteering, the report said, appeared to result from men's greater volunteer time for AIDS-related groups. The researchers had no definitive answer to why men contribute more money, but speculated on several reasons, including that Lesbians are more likely to have financial demands from children.
• People who volunteer for Gay organizations donate more money than those who don't volunteer. The flip side was also true: Donors to Gay organizations give more volunteer hours than non-donors. This finding, the authors said, contradicts a widespread belief that people who don't have time to volunteer contribute money or that people who don't have money give time. "Giving and volunteering are complementary - people tended to do both," the authors said.
• Even holding income and other factors constant, older people donate more money to Gay organizations, roughly an additional $3 per year of age.
• Again comparing people with the same income and other characteristics, San Francisco Gays gave more money and volunteered more hours than those in Milwaukee and Philadelphia. "San Francisco might provide more opportunities for giving and volunteering," the authors say, "but the fact that greater opportunities exist is also likely the result of past levels of investment of time and money."
• People with HIV infection contributed less money to Gay organizations than people who were HIV-negative or did not know their HIV status. But people with HIV supported AIDS-related organizations with more hours and dollars than HIV-negative people and those of unknown status.
• There was no "consistent impact" of race or ethnicity on giving and volunteering for Gay organizations.

The Badgett study, the first to systematically examine Gay giving and volunteering, was conducted by the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, a nonprofit think tank founded by Badgett, and the Working Group on Funding Gay and Lesbian Issues. The Working Group is a national association, headed by Cunningham, that seeks more support of Gay issues from foundations and other philanthropies.

According to the authors, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Francisco were chosen as survey sites because they are located in different regions, each has racially diverse Gay organizations, and each has a local Gay community foundation that could help in enlisting the participation of local Gay groups.

Surveys were shipped to local Gay groups, which distributed them to their members. Robert Bailey, an openly Gay political science professor at Rutgers University, noted that this methodology is used in other areas, such as marketing, and that the results are valid "as long as you say up front where your sample is from and you sprinkle your conclusions with caveats and don't overstate them."

Badgett and Cunningham caution that since only three cities were surveyed, "it would not be appropriate to generalize to all GLBT people in the United States." Because respondents were people on organization mailing lists, they said, the study probably includes a higher proportion of people who are already donors and volunteers compared with the proportion of donors and volunteers in the community at large.

Nevertheless, the report notes that there were "remarkable similarities" in motivations and giving patterns across three very different cities. In an interview, Badgett said, "Our findings are likely to be applicable to people who live in large metropolitan areas who are active in organizations already."

Of the 2,300 participants, 52 percent were male, 47 female, and under 1 percent transgender. The respondents overwhelmingly identified as Gay, with only 7 percent calling themselves bisexual. Almost 87 percent were white, 5 percent African American, 3 percent Asian-American, 3 percent Latino, 1 percent Native American and 2 percent multiracial. The average age was 42.

Badgett said she hopes the report, which also inquired into the motives of givers [see adjoining story], will prod individuals to consider donating more time and money to Gay groups and prod these groups to devise innovative fundraising and volunteer recruitment techniques.

Cunningham said she hopes foundations and corporate giving programs will see from the report that while Gay people have put resources into building organizations, they need help in developing this infrastructure.

Currently, said Cunningham, less than .3 percent of annual foundation giving goes to Gay causes, although the number of such funders - and the amounts they give - has "increased significantly" in the last five years.

The $47,000 study was made possible by a grant from the Aspen Institute's Nonprofit Sector Research Fund, with additional financial support from the National Society of Fundraising Executives and promotional help from American Airlines. Pacific Bell provided production support.

See related article, Untapped Majority Stirs

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