America's Most Livable City also tops the charts for charitable giving.
However wealth is defined, the Pittsburgh region is a rich one. It has highly valued arts institutions. It’s ethnically diverse, with an abundance of cultural traditions. Its natural setting, community spirit, intellect and innovation are intangible fortunes, shared by the people who live in or near the country’s most livable city.
Now, Pittsburgh is adding “most generous†to its lengthening list of laurels. In 2010, Charity Navigator, an independent online analyzer of nonprofit effectiveness, placed the city at the top of metro areas in nonprofit performance, based in part on its strong contributions record.
With median donations of $4.5 million to the area’s largest charities, our region surpassed Charity Navigator’s national average by nearly $1 million, all during a recession that placed stress on nonprofits as well as donors.
The 30-city national survey—in which Pittsburgh led Houston, Dallas, San Francisco and Kansas City—didn’t focus merely on fundraising in studying the factors that define nonprofits’ fiscal health. Overall, the Pittsburgh region’s 43 largest charities have a strong record, thanks to strong philanthropic support.
“Pittsburgh is home to an old, well-established nonprofit sector,†says Sandra Miniutti of Charity Navigator. “The city’s donors, charity executives and community leaders should be proud of their efforts in building and shepherding a very sophisticated network.â€
The city’s million-dollar giving advantage over other cities in the Charity Navigator rankings demonstrates that wealth that’s built here stays here. From the 19th-century onwards, Pittsburghers have given generously to sustain causes and institutions that enhance our quality of life.
Andrew Carnegie, who built and equipped the local museums and libraries that bear his name, didn’t only create his first charitable foundation in Pittsburgh—he also set a high standard for future philanthropy. By insisting that local authorities contribute to institutional support, he created an example for strong community collaborations that continue to serve the area.
Tycoons like Henry Clay Frick, Thomas Mellon, H.J. Heinz, Henry Buhl Jr. and Michael Benedum left legacies that continue to sustain the region’s charitable organizations. Major corporations with headquarters here, including Alcoa and PPG Industries, also distribute millions of dollars through their foundations worldwide.
In fact, there are 1,400-plus foundations registered in the Pittsburgh region, with total assets of more than $10.3 billion. In 2009, they gave away a total of $570 million, according to the Foundation Center, a source of worldwide philanthropic data.
These foundations range in size and organization from corporate foundations to private philanthropies to small funds directed by individual donors. Working with a surprising degree of unanimity, they have helped create and sustain the amenities that have led to Pittsburgh’s 21st-century rebirth, as well as supporting public education, health research and social-service agencies.
Where do foundation funds work? Education garnered the lion’s share of the region’s foundation giving in 2009, constituting 28 percent of all grants. Arts and culture, human services and public-affairs/societal-benefit projects received roughly 15 percent each. Smaller amounts were directed to environmental, animal welfare and health concerns.
Local foundations take the long view, aiming to effect lasting improvements in the community. “We would be squandering trust if we didn’t look at how best to spend funds to benefit the community, not just immediately but 20 years from now,†explains Robert “Bobby†Vagt, president of the Heinz Endowments since January 2008.
Three ambitious, big-ticket projects, jointly supported by city foundations, have gained national attention: Early childhood education, the revitalization of the city’s waterfront and the downtown Cultural District.
Heinz Hall and the Benedum Center were once islands on forgotten and run-down Penn Avenue. Now, thanks to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's heavy investment in the area, two million patrons attend shows in the Cultural District each year.
PNC Foundation, the giving arm of PNC Financial Services, began years of work by asking its employees to choose a direction for grant-making that could have a lasting influence.
“Our employees said, ‘Focus on children and education,’†reports Eva Blum, chairwoman and president of the foundation. “We sought a newly emerging issue, and we wanted to be able to measure our impact over time. We found that early-childhood education was not being emphasized.†Parents, particularly those placing their children in day care, were looking for guidance on which settings gave pre-schoolers the best start.
Local independent foundations, particularly the Heinz Endowments and the Grable Foundation, had already underwritten millions of dollars of spadework on the issue during the 1990s. Researchers who evaluated foundation-funded projects were proving that high-quality early-childhood care could give children under 5 a better chance at school success.
“The experts said, ‘We know the solutions, but we can’t get anyone to pay attention,’†Blum explains. “A big corporation can open doors.â€
In 2004, PNC launched its Grow Up Great campaign, benefiting from the strategies and advice of foundation leaders. It also advocated for Pennsylvania to support Head Start and the Pre-K Counts programs to create effective statewide standards for early education. Those efforts have been copied around the country—in Colorado, Michigan and other states.
To date, PNC has invested $40 million in its early-learning effort in its 15-state market. As the foundation supports effective pre-school curricula in the arts, math and science, it also enlists employees to get involved. More than 800 PNC volunteers have built six community playgrounds with KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit.
At the turn of the millennium, as the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Heinz Field and PNC Park rose along the Allegheny River, the Riverlife Task Force proposed a facelift for the downtown waterfront.
Riverlife planners proposed orienting the stadiums so spectators could enjoy the waterfront scene while bikers and boaters play nearby. The organization’s vision became a much-honored master plan that has been realized in three other projects along the downtown waterfront. Now simply called Riverlife, it has been working on developing Three Rivers Park, a 13-mile interconnected loop of riverfront parks and trails; to date, 80 percent of the loop is complete. Foundation commitments of $22 million, along with major private investments on the North Shore and South Side, made the concept a reality.
Among the key components of the Riverlife plan are the Convention Center’s Riverfront Plaza, a promenade that links the Strip District to the Golden Triangle; the ongoing renovations of Point State Park; and the Hot Metal Bridge over the Monongahela River. The former steel mill bridge is now a multiuse artery for cars, bikes and pedestrians.
The vision to reclaim a declining and somewhat seedy Penn Avenue into a cultural destination originated with the late H.J. “Jack†Heinz II, chairman of the H.J. Heinz Co., in the 1980s. After directing the revitalization of Heinz Hall, he convened other civic leaders to plan a new art neighborhood around that cornerstone.
The Heinz Endowments, the R.K. Mellon Foundation, the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and many others contributed more than $200 million to fund the work of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a unique nonprofit arts and development agency. Founded in 1984, the trust patiently renovated old theaters and built new ones, opened art galleries and attracted world-class artists to create public artwork.
A quarter-century later, the downtown arts scene attracts two million patrons per year to performances and events at 14 cultural facilities. But local foundations also step up to solve immediate issues. As the recession reached western Pennsylvania in 2008, social-services agencies were swamped with requests for aid. The Pittsburgh Foundation’s emergency Neighbor-Aid Fund, through a partnership with the United Way of Allegheny County, funneled more than $1 million to nonprofit organizations serving individuals and families.
When Duquesne University decided to sell WDUQ-FM in 2010, foundations provided the funds that froze the bidding rights while local parties organized their offers.
After a nonprofit partnership between local station WYEP and Public Media Co. acquired the station license, more help followed.
Foundations including R.K. Mellon, The Pittsburgh Foundation, Heinz Endowments and the Fisher Family Fund have provided nearly $4 million to put the new station on the air, says Marco Cardamone, who chairs the new nonprofit, Essential Public Media. The station gives Pittsburgh its first 24-hour NPR News & Information station and a high-definition jazz channel.
“We have worked with over 200 public broadcasting operations,†says Susan Harmon, managing director of Public Radio Capital. “In our projects, we’ve never seen anything like Pittsburgh’s response. There’s such strong communication among foundations—they can get to new ideas so quickly.â€
As nonprofits struggle through a lingering recession in a slow-growth city with constrained public revenue, charitable giving has never been more important. Responding to a survey by Grantmakers of Western Pennsylvania, local foundations said that funding requests from human-services organizations alone were anticipated to increase by 75 percent this year.
Bob Nelkin, president of the United Way of Allegheny County, calls the effect “the triple whammy.†As he explains, “There’s increased need. Meanwhile, charitable contributions to human-service agencies are down 20 percent nationwide since 2007. And government is now contracting.â€
Moreover, while Pittsburgh’s United Way campaign outperforms its peers nationally, raising nearly $32 million last year, Nelkin says more communication about the long-term effect of human-service programs is necessary. The Pittsburgh Foundation has helped fund an advocacy project to retain those public investments: Last year’s Why Cut What Works campaign urged legislators to retain budgets for human services.
Growing need—plus some battering of their endowments by the gyrating stock markets—has led foundations to encourage more individual giving. “We do a lot of matches—as a piece of incentive,†says the Heinz Endowments’ Vagt. “If people scoff—if they say, ‘Why would I give? They’ll never raise a million’—well, if we give $750,000, that other $250,000 is a possibility.â€
The Pittsburgh Foundation is also trying to boost grass-roots donations. “Our experience is that this is a tremendously generous town,†says Grant Oliphant, president and CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation. But he acknowledges that the region’s Charity Navigator ranking is “both accurate and potentially misleading, in the sense that on some measures, there’s a low level of individual giving.
Nonprofits automatically go to where the pot is biggest, so historically, it was easier to go to bigger [foundations] than to go after individual donors. We have a treasure trove of nonprofits in everything from the arts to feeding the hungry. But building a broader giving base in really important. If you can spread the cost of an organization over 10,000 people, it begins to be not too expensive.â€
That’s why local charities and foundations are working together to make giving easier and more meaningful for a new generation of donors.
On Oct. 4 at 12:01 a.m., The Pittsburgh Foundation will once again host an online Day of Giving through PittsburghGives online program, which offers matching funds for every contribution made during the 24-hour challenge. A click and a card number send a donation to the donor’s choice of approximately 650 registered nonprofit organizations, from A+ Schools (a nonprofit advocate for Pittsburgh Public Schools) to local YMCAs. The Pittsburgh Foundation is anticipating to add $750,000 to the match pool; the WestmorelandGives campaign will make a $100,000 match in that county. All of the charities on the PittsburghGives site will be eligible to receive contributions from donors, and this in turn will qualify them for equal pro-rated shares of matching funds.
“Methods of raising money from individuals, like phone banks and direct mail, have been difficult and expensive,†Oliphant points out. “Technology has already changed that. These days, you can make a $1 gift to anywhere around the world.â€
The Day of Giving events make it as simple to support a local organization as an international one. The idea, adopted from Columbus and Minneapolis and then tweaked as time went on, was almost an immediate success. In fact, the Day of Giving servers were so overwhelmed by the response to the first 24-hour campaign in 2009, that the system crashed. The event still managed to generate $1.5 million; in 2010, bolstered by online improvements, it more than doubled that take. Over the span of two years, giving events have raised $7 million for local nonprofits. A separate Day of Arts Giving in May raised $1.9 million, including matching funds.
Pittsburgh Social Venture Partners offers nonprofits not only cash but also expertise. Some of the 46 partners (a mix of individuals, spouses and associates) commit two years and $4,000 apiece to organizations that serve children; included in the group are eight associates who pay $1,000 per year. The Pittsburgh Social Venture Partners, chaired by John Denny of the Hillman Co., attracts individual philanthropists.
“Some of them are recently retired entrepreneurs looking for a different kind of meaning to their work,†says Denny, one of PSVP’s founding partners. “Others are experienced, successful women under 40 who are currently stay-at-home moms.†Since 2001, PSVP has donated $900,000 to grantees, who “pitch†their ideas to the partners at three annual events.
“Writing a check feels good, but PSVP offers a way to have more depth,†says Tessa Nicholson, a longtime member from Point Breeze. “It offered me the possibility of leveraging money with time and talent.â€
Other local grant-makers shine a spotlight on specific communities. The Poise Foundation supports projects that address the needs of the local African-American community, particularly in education. The Women and Girls Foundation advocates for gender-related changes in corporate and public policy, pooling funds from donors across the community.
“Anyone can invest, from a dollar to a million dollars,†says Heather Arnet, CEO of the community-based foundation. The group has highlighted disparities in economic issues such as wage parity across the state. Arnet says its efforts in school sports funding and reproductive rights have resulted in measurable progress. Support from “several hundred†donors has changed 12 government regulations and has substantially increased the number of women serving on local boards of directors. Two types of funds—donor advised and donor designated—allow givers to tailor giving to specific programs; they can form giving circles to boost support of common causes.
Even smaller neighborhood groups can pool resources for fundraiser. A group of nine South Hills women meets once a month for “dinner, drinks and donations,†dubbing itself D3. Mt. Lebanon’s Michelle Pagano Heck, senior consultant at nonprofit consulting firm Dewey & Kaye, founded a local “giving circle†in 2009. Members pool their monthly contributions and identify charities worth their support. Last year, D3 made a donation of $5,000 to Lydia’s Place, which supports incarcerated mothers and their children.
More casual alliances of donors combine socializing and philanthropy. Party With a Purpose creates networking events for young professionals: The Oct. 22 event at East Liberty’s Shadow Lounge will benefit GTECH Strategies, a nonprofit devoted to “green†economic development. Since Carnegie Mellon graate students founded PPP in 2006, the group has raised $30,000, benefiting 16 organizations in the region.
“We wanted to provide young professionals a chance to network and to get to know other non-profits,†says Vanessa Veltre. The 30-year-old co-director of the group states its mission simply: “It’s an excuse to have fun and contribute at the same time,†she says.
However wealth is defined, the Pittsburgh region is a rich one. It has highly valued arts institutions. It’s ethnically diverse, with an abundance of cultural traditions. Its natural setting, community spirit, intellect and innovation are intangible fortunes, shared by the people who live in or near the country’s most livable city.
Now, Pittsburgh is adding “most generous†to its lengthening list of laurels. In 2010, Charity Navigator, an independent online analyzer of nonprofit effectiveness, placed the city at the top of metro areas in nonprofit performance, based in part on its strong contributions record.
With median donations of $4.5 million to the area’s largest charities, our region surpassed Charity Navigator’s national average by nearly $1 million, all during a recession that placed stress on nonprofits as well as donors.
The 30-city national survey—in which Pittsburgh led Houston, Dallas, San Francisco and Kansas City—didn’t focus merely on fundraising in studying the factors that define nonprofits’ fiscal health. Overall, the Pittsburgh region’s 43 largest charities have a strong record, thanks to strong philanthropic support.
“Pittsburgh is home to an old, well-established nonprofit sector,†says Sandra Miniutti of Charity Navigator. “The city’s donors, charity executives and community leaders should be proud of their efforts in building and shepherding a very sophisticated network.â€
The city’s million-dollar giving advantage over other cities in the Charity Navigator rankings demonstrates that wealth that’s built here stays here. From the 19th-century onwards, Pittsburghers have given generously to sustain causes and institutions that enhance our quality of life.
Andrew Carnegie, who built and equipped the local museums and libraries that bear his name, didn’t only create his first charitable foundation in Pittsburgh—he also set a high standard for future philanthropy. By insisting that local authorities contribute to institutional support, he created an example for strong community collaborations that continue to serve the area.
Tycoons like Henry Clay Frick, Thomas Mellon, H.J. Heinz, Henry Buhl Jr. and Michael Benedum left legacies that continue to sustain the region’s charitable organizations. Major corporations with headquarters here, including Alcoa and PPG Industries, also distribute millions of dollars through their foundations worldwide.
In fact, there are 1,400-plus foundations registered in the Pittsburgh region, with total assets of more than $10.3 billion. In 2009, they gave away a total of $570 million, according to the Foundation Center, a source of worldwide philanthropic data.
These foundations range in size and organization from corporate foundations to private philanthropies to small funds directed by individual donors. Working with a surprising degree of unanimity, they have helped create and sustain the amenities that have led to Pittsburgh’s 21st-century rebirth, as well as supporting public education, health research and social-service agencies.
Where do foundation funds work? Education garnered the lion’s share of the region’s foundation giving in 2009, constituting 28 percent of all grants. Arts and culture, human services and public-affairs/societal-benefit projects received roughly 15 percent each. Smaller amounts were directed to environmental, animal welfare and health concerns.
Local foundations take the long view, aiming to effect lasting improvements in the community. “We would be squandering trust if we didn’t look at how best to spend funds to benefit the community, not just immediately but 20 years from now,†explains Robert “Bobby†Vagt, president of the Heinz Endowments since January 2008.
Three ambitious, big-ticket projects, jointly supported by city foundations, have gained national attention: Early childhood education, the revitalization of the city’s waterfront and the downtown Cultural District.
Heinz Hall and the Benedum Center were once islands on forgotten and run-down Penn Avenue. Now, thanks to the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's heavy investment in the area, two million patrons attend shows in the Cultural District each year.
PNC Foundation, the giving arm of PNC Financial Services, began years of work by asking its employees to choose a direction for grant-making that could have a lasting influence.
“Our employees said, ‘Focus on children and education,’†reports Eva Blum, chairwoman and president of the foundation. “We sought a newly emerging issue, and we wanted to be able to measure our impact over time. We found that early-childhood education was not being emphasized.†Parents, particularly those placing their children in day care, were looking for guidance on which settings gave pre-schoolers the best start.
Local independent foundations, particularly the Heinz Endowments and the Grable Foundation, had already underwritten millions of dollars of spadework on the issue during the 1990s. Researchers who evaluated foundation-funded projects were proving that high-quality early-childhood care could give children under 5 a better chance at school success.
“The experts said, ‘We know the solutions, but we can’t get anyone to pay attention,’†Blum explains. “A big corporation can open doors.â€
In 2004, PNC launched its Grow Up Great campaign, benefiting from the strategies and advice of foundation leaders. It also advocated for Pennsylvania to support Head Start and the Pre-K Counts programs to create effective statewide standards for early education. Those efforts have been copied around the country—in Colorado, Michigan and other states.
To date, PNC has invested $40 million in its early-learning effort in its 15-state market. As the foundation supports effective pre-school curricula in the arts, math and science, it also enlists employees to get involved. More than 800 PNC volunteers have built six community playgrounds with KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit.
At the turn of the millennium, as the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Heinz Field and PNC Park rose along the Allegheny River, the Riverlife Task Force proposed a facelift for the downtown waterfront.
Riverlife planners proposed orienting the stadiums so spectators could enjoy the waterfront scene while bikers and boaters play nearby. The organization’s vision became a much-honored master plan that has been realized in three other projects along the downtown waterfront. Now simply called Riverlife, it has been working on developing Three Rivers Park, a 13-mile interconnected loop of riverfront parks and trails; to date, 80 percent of the loop is complete. Foundation commitments of $22 million, along with major private investments on the North Shore and South Side, made the concept a reality.
Among the key components of the Riverlife plan are the Convention Center’s Riverfront Plaza, a promenade that links the Strip District to the Golden Triangle; the ongoing renovations of Point State Park; and the Hot Metal Bridge over the Monongahela River. The former steel mill bridge is now a multiuse artery for cars, bikes and pedestrians.
The vision to reclaim a declining and somewhat seedy Penn Avenue into a cultural destination originated with the late H.J. “Jack†Heinz II, chairman of the H.J. Heinz Co., in the 1980s. After directing the revitalization of Heinz Hall, he convened other civic leaders to plan a new art neighborhood around that cornerstone.
The Heinz Endowments, the R.K. Mellon Foundation, the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and many others contributed more than $200 million to fund the work of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, a unique nonprofit arts and development agency. Founded in 1984, the trust patiently renovated old theaters and built new ones, opened art galleries and attracted world-class artists to create public artwork.
A quarter-century later, the downtown arts scene attracts two million patrons per year to performances and events at 14 cultural facilities. But local foundations also step up to solve immediate issues. As the recession reached western Pennsylvania in 2008, social-services agencies were swamped with requests for aid. The Pittsburgh Foundation’s emergency Neighbor-Aid Fund, through a partnership with the United Way of Allegheny County, funneled more than $1 million to nonprofit organizations serving individuals and families.
When Duquesne University decided to sell WDUQ-FM in 2010, foundations provided the funds that froze the bidding rights while local parties organized their offers.
After a nonprofit partnership between local station WYEP and Public Media Co. acquired the station license, more help followed.
Foundations including R.K. Mellon, The Pittsburgh Foundation, Heinz Endowments and the Fisher Family Fund have provided nearly $4 million to put the new station on the air, says Marco Cardamone, who chairs the new nonprofit, Essential Public Media. The station gives Pittsburgh its first 24-hour NPR News & Information station and a high-definition jazz channel.
“We have worked with over 200 public broadcasting operations,†says Susan Harmon, managing director of Public Radio Capital. “In our projects, we’ve never seen anything like Pittsburgh’s response. There’s such strong communication among foundations—they can get to new ideas so quickly.â€
As nonprofits struggle through a lingering recession in a slow-growth city with constrained public revenue, charitable giving has never been more important. Responding to a survey by Grantmakers of Western Pennsylvania, local foundations said that funding requests from human-services organizations alone were anticipated to increase by 75 percent this year.
Bob Nelkin, president of the United Way of Allegheny County, calls the effect “the triple whammy.†As he explains, “There’s increased need. Meanwhile, charitable contributions to human-service agencies are down 20 percent nationwide since 2007. And government is now contracting.â€
Moreover, while Pittsburgh’s United Way campaign outperforms its peers nationally, raising nearly $32 million last year, Nelkin says more communication about the long-term effect of human-service programs is necessary. The Pittsburgh Foundation has helped fund an advocacy project to retain those public investments: Last year’s Why Cut What Works campaign urged legislators to retain budgets for human services.
Growing need—plus some battering of their endowments by the gyrating stock markets—has led foundations to encourage more individual giving. “We do a lot of matches—as a piece of incentive,†says the Heinz Endowments’ Vagt. “If people scoff—if they say, ‘Why would I give? They’ll never raise a million’—well, if we give $750,000, that other $250,000 is a possibility.â€
The Pittsburgh Foundation is also trying to boost grass-roots donations. “Our experience is that this is a tremendously generous town,†says Grant Oliphant, president and CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation. But he acknowledges that the region’s Charity Navigator ranking is “both accurate and potentially misleading, in the sense that on some measures, there’s a low level of individual giving.
Nonprofits automatically go to where the pot is biggest, so historically, it was easier to go to bigger [foundations] than to go after individual donors. We have a treasure trove of nonprofits in everything from the arts to feeding the hungry. But building a broader giving base in really important. If you can spread the cost of an organization over 10,000 people, it begins to be not too expensive.â€
That’s why local charities and foundations are working together to make giving easier and more meaningful for a new generation of donors.
On Oct. 4 at 12:01 a.m., The Pittsburgh Foundation will once again host an online Day of Giving through PittsburghGives online program, which offers matching funds for every contribution made during the 24-hour challenge. A click and a card number send a donation to the donor’s choice of approximately 650 registered nonprofit organizations, from A+ Schools (a nonprofit advocate for Pittsburgh Public Schools) to local YMCAs. The Pittsburgh Foundation is anticipating to add $750,000 to the match pool; the WestmorelandGives campaign will make a $100,000 match in that county. All of the charities on the PittsburghGives site will be eligible to receive contributions from donors, and this in turn will qualify them for equal pro-rated shares of matching funds.
“Methods of raising money from individuals, like phone banks and direct mail, have been difficult and expensive,†Oliphant points out. “Technology has already changed that. These days, you can make a $1 gift to anywhere around the world.â€
The Day of Giving events make it as simple to support a local organization as an international one. The idea, adopted from Columbus and Minneapolis and then tweaked as time went on, was almost an immediate success. In fact, the Day of Giving servers were so overwhelmed by the response to the first 24-hour campaign in 2009, that the system crashed. The event still managed to generate $1.5 million; in 2010, bolstered by online improvements, it more than doubled that take. Over the span of two years, giving events have raised $7 million for local nonprofits. A separate Day of Arts Giving in May raised $1.9 million, including matching funds.
Pittsburgh Social Venture Partners offers nonprofits not only cash but also expertise. Some of the 46 partners (a mix of individuals, spouses and associates) commit two years and $4,000 apiece to organizations that serve children; included in the group are eight associates who pay $1,000 per year. The Pittsburgh Social Venture Partners, chaired by John Denny of the Hillman Co., attracts individual philanthropists.
“Some of them are recently retired entrepreneurs looking for a different kind of meaning to their work,†says Denny, one of PSVP’s founding partners. “Others are experienced, successful women under 40 who are currently stay-at-home moms.†Since 2001, PSVP has donated $900,000 to grantees, who “pitch†their ideas to the partners at three annual events.
“Writing a check feels good, but PSVP offers a way to have more depth,†says Tessa Nicholson, a longtime member from Point Breeze. “It offered me the possibility of leveraging money with time and talent.â€
Other local grant-makers shine a spotlight on specific communities. The Poise Foundation supports projects that address the needs of the local African-American community, particularly in education. The Women and Girls Foundation advocates for gender-related changes in corporate and public policy, pooling funds from donors across the community.
“Anyone can invest, from a dollar to a million dollars,†says Heather Arnet, CEO of the community-based foundation. The group has highlighted disparities in economic issues such as wage parity across the state. Arnet says its efforts in school sports funding and reproductive rights have resulted in measurable progress. Support from “several hundred†donors has changed 12 government regulations and has substantially increased the number of women serving on local boards of directors. Two types of funds—donor advised and donor designated—allow givers to tailor giving to specific programs; they can form giving circles to boost support of common causes.
Even smaller neighborhood groups can pool resources for fundraiser. A group of nine South Hills women meets once a month for “dinner, drinks and donations,†dubbing itself D3. Mt. Lebanon’s Michelle Pagano Heck, senior consultant at nonprofit consulting firm Dewey & Kaye, founded a local “giving circle†in 2009. Members pool their monthly contributions and identify charities worth their support. Last year, D3 made a donation of $5,000 to Lydia’s Place, which supports incarcerated mothers and their children.
More casual alliances of donors combine socializing and philanthropy. Party With a Purpose creates networking events for young professionals: The Oct. 22 event at East Liberty’s Shadow Lounge will benefit GTECH Strategies, a nonprofit devoted to “green†economic development. Since Carnegie Mellon graate students founded PPP in 2006, the group has raised $30,000, benefiting 16 organizations in the region.
“We wanted to provide young professionals a chance to network and to get to know other non-profits,†says Vanessa Veltre. The 30-year-old co-director of the group states its mission simply: “It’s an excuse to have fun and contribute at the same time,†she says.
