Affluent Suburb Struggles to Make Residents See Need for Local Giving

This article was updated on January 13, 2015. See our editor’s note.

Residents of Howard County, Md., are used to superlatives.

The 300,000 people who live in this diverse suburban county between the Baltimore and Washington beltways enjoy the nation’s second-highest median income and Maryland’s top-rated public-school system. Twice in this decade, Money magazine named Columbia and nearby Ellicott City to its list of America’s 10 Best Places to Live.

“Our county is known for being the best—and that’s why we live here,” says Beverly White-Seals, chief executive of the Community Foundation of Howard County.

But as the leader of the county’s most prominent philanthropic organization, Ms. White-Seals says all is not perfect in her hometown. “There’s something we’re not known for,” she says. “Giving.”

The Chronicle’s analysis of giving in the United States finds that Howard County residents gave only about 2.7 percent of their adjusted gross income to charity in 2012—a figure that puts it in the bottom quarter of all counties in the study and well below the 3 percent given by their fellow Marylanders. Worse, its giving pales in comparison with neighboring Prince George’s County, which has a giving rate of 5.2 percent.

The numbers are sobering to a community that is known for its inclusive attitude and highly degreed population. So much so that Ms. White-Seals is leading an effort to motivate residents to open up their checkbooks and contribute more to charity.

Armed with the results of a How America Gives study published by The Chronicle two years ago, Ms. White-Seals convened a task force of nonprofit, government, and corporate leaders last summer to launch a high-profile public-awareness campaign about giving in Howard County.

“We want this to be a complete community effort,” she says. Giving “needs to get into the fabric of the community.”

Behind the Begonias

For that to happen, the task force needs to show Howard County residents that their home has many of the same issues that affect neighboring communities like Baltimore, says Michelle Ostroff, head of the Jewish Federation of Howard County.”
People don’t understand that there’s need,” says Ms. Ostroff, a member of the task force working to encourage giving in the county. Part of that disconnect stems from the origins of Howard County’s most populous community—Columbia.

James W. Rouse, a developer, founded Columbia in the late 1960s with the goal of creating a community with a mix of housing that was free of racial, ethnic, religious, and economic segregation.

More than four decades later, that vision has largely been achieved. Columbia’s population is diverse; slightly more than half of its residents are white and about one quarter are black. They are highly educated; nearly one-third have graduate degrees. And slightly more than 3 percent of the community’s residents live below the poverty line, well below the state and national averages of 9.4 percent and 14.9 percent, respectively.

But Mr. Rouse’s vision, which included ensuring that even the poorest neighborhoods abut more affluent ones and that all are properly landscaped with flowers and well-groomed lawns, obscures community needs.

“We have poverty. We have hunger. We have human sex trafficking. We have many of the same issues other communities do,” Ms. White-Seals says. “But they are hidden behind beautiful landscaping, manicured lawns, and begonias, literally.”

Shallow Roots

One of the reasons why Howard County doesn’t dig deep for charitable giving is because it’s full of people who moved there recently, says Shawn Gladden, executive director of the Howard County Historical Society. Many county residents are transplants, who moved there for the schools and who work in Washington or Baltimore.

“There aren’t a whole lot of rooted Columbia families,” Mr. Gladden says. “It’s a lot of middle-class families that are establishing themselves and are more transient.”

Many of those families are saving for their children’s’ college educations, paying mortgages on homes with an average value of more than $400,000, and paying high fees for youth sports leagues and other activities.

“If they are giving back, they’re giving back to the schools,” he says. “If you look at some of the schools in this county, they have big stadiums and scoreboards.”

But Howard County residents don’t support religious causes with the same fervor they do the schools, say local nonprofit leaders.

Ms. Ostroff says that while Howard County’s Jewish community numbers about 17,000, only about one in 10 of those actively gives to a synagogue.

“That goes back to the founding of the community,” she says. “People don’t want to be recognized as Jewish people here. They want to be seen as part of the larger community.”

These dynamics make it difficult for fundraisers to identify and connect with potential donors.

Mr. Gladden says his group expects to raise only $125,000 annually—a figure he said his peers in Baltimore or Washington can raise through a single corporate donation. “We have yet to do a major capital campaign because this is a tough community to do a capital campaign in,” he says. “It’s tough to find where the new money is here.”

In the bigger cities nearby, identifying potential wealthy donors is much easier, Ms. Ostroff says. “We’re missing those top donors,” she says. “I think they look at D.C. and Baltimore as the places where they drive their philanthropic giving. But we need to show them that there are plenty of opportunities to do that in the community where you live.”

That’s the message Ms. White-Seals says the task force will aim to deliver through marketing, at community events, and possibly through the creation of a Howard County giving day.

The initial goal is simple: Get Howard County residents to sign a pledge to give a certain percentage of their income to charity. The amount of that pledge isn’t as important as the act of making the commitment, she says.

“I want to ask them to give to the cause they want to, at the level they want to give,” Ms. White-Seals says.

In time, organizers hope that the simple act of giving will lead more of the county’s residents to bigger gifts.
“There is a lot of opportunity and a lot of potential for growth in this county,” Ms. Ostroff says. “We haven’t found the magic bullet yet. But the fact that we’re starting this effort is a great thing for the county.”

Editor’s Note: In this and other stories on How America Gives, we used ZIP-code data from the IRS to make comparisons between 2006 and 2012, the only years for which income and charitable donation data were available broken out by income and geography. However, to protect privacy, the IRS suppresses some ZIP-code data when there are fewer than 20 filers in a given income group. As a result, some figures are lower than what they’d otherwise be.

Since our original report, we’ve updated our interactive with county-level data for 2012, which do not have any data suppressed. Unfortunately, such data are not available for 2006.

Many of the figures used in this and other How America Gives stories are based on the original 2006 and 2012 ZIP-code data to make those year-over-year comparisons.

For the latest and most accurate 2012 data, see our interactive.