NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP, vol. 16, no. 4, Summer 2006 © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 501Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/nml.124

Volunteerism andCharitable Giving

Donald MorganGifts of Time and Money: The Role of Charity in America’sCommunities, by Arthur C. Brooks (ed.). Lanham, Md.:Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. 224 pp., $75.00 cloth, $24.95paper.

THE FIELD of nonprofit management and leadership has becomeincreasingly interested in the development of cross-sectoralrelationships at the local level. The devolution of public sector

participation in community-level problem solving has spawned arecent body of research that offers insight into the challenges faced atthe local and national levels as a result of new governance approaches.Understanding these phenomena requires repositioning focus beyondthe way organizations function in isolation and toward the partner-ships developed between public, private, and philanthropic organi-zations, the volunteers and money they provide, and the communitiesthey serve.

Gifts of Time and Money: The Role of Charity in America’s Com-munities, edited by Arthur C. Brooks, is a collection of studies thatinform our understanding of the growing role of social-sector part-nerships in community-level problem solving. Brooks endeavors toexpand on the limited body of research that emphasizes the demandside of charity and philanthropy, presenting findings that advanceour knowledge of the impact of volunteering in communities as wellas the community factors that influence charitable giving. The resultis a collection that offers relevant research questions, interestinghypotheses, new approaches to studying the field empirically, andanalyses to guide future research.

The book reads much like a conference panel. Brooks divides thevolume into two sections, each comprising works presented at sym-posia hosted by the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. The firstsection presents four studies that explore community volunteering,and the second offers three studies and one practitioner piece focusedon charitable giving. Each section concludes with a discussant-likesummary chapter to suggest common threads, critique findings, andpropose future research.

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Much of the existing research on volunteerism has been preoc-cupied with motives, incentives, benefits, and rewards. Newer workhas begun to move toward understanding the effects of volunteerismon recipient organizations and the communities they serve. This hasproduced several interesting findings about the capacity of nonprofitorganizations to handle the influx of volunteers urged by programslike the National Freedom Corps. Authors contributing to the firsthalf of Gifts of Time and Money advance these findings by exploringthe influences on the effectiveness of volunteering in improvingcommunities.

Devolution and budget constraints have changed the nature ofpublic sector participation but have not extinguished the potential fora meaningful public agency role in community development. LeslieLenkowsky presents findings on the effectiveness of government-lednational service programs in coordinating volunteer efforts.Lenkowsky calls on the AmeriCorps example to demonstrate thecapacity of a public agency to work with local nonprofit organizationsto build community.

Jeffrey Brudney also looks at public sector participation in hisstudy of the Volunteer Center National Network. Brudney’s chronol-ogy of the Volunteer Center from its inception to its current manifes-tation provides a snapshot of the way volunteer efforts have beencoordinated over time, while his empirical method offers a uniqueapproach to examining the ability of volunteer centers to accomplishtheir goals. Both chapters present evidence of the public sector’s abilityto transition into a facilitator of community empowerment.

The private sector has long been a source of volunteers in thecommunities that house its corporations. Corporate volunteer pro-grams have achieved mixed results. The demands placed on the pri-vate sector to assume a more significant role in new governancestructures have pushed corporations to examine the impact of com-munity participation. Peter Frumkin and Lazar Treschan look at thepotential for productive collaboration by analyzing how partnershipsbetween corporations, volunteers, and service agencies may be struc-tured. They explore the different drivers for each sector through anempirical study of several City Year sites and the corporate partnerswho use their services.

Mary Tschirhart and Lynda St. Clair consider how the capacityof communities to address local problems is affected by corporatecommunity involvement. Their chapter offers a set of questions toassist readers in considering the benefits and liabilities of corporateparticipation. Each chapter offers a framework for exploring corpo-rate volunteer models, the realities of their effectiveness, and theneed for greater communication with communities to improveparticipation.

Budget cuts, block grants, and shifts in funding streams havemoved scholars to work toward discovering indicators that improvethe ability to predict charitable behavior. Much of the pioneering

The first halfof Gifts of Timeand Money . . .[explore] theinfluences on

the effectivenessof volunteeringin improvingcommunities.

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work on charitable giving has tested the links between variables suchas income, age, race, and education on giving. The second half ofGifts and Time and Money suggests three new approaches to under-standing the causes of charitable giving.

Wolfgang Bielefeld, Patrick Rooney, and Kathy Steinberg suggestthat macrolevel factors such as state-level poverty, income gap, pub-lic expenditures, and political culture may influence giving levels.The authors argue that consideration of these factors contributes toassessment of giving levels in different communities. Members of thenonprofit community and local leaders may in turn use this infor-mation to encourage enhanced giving.

The overrepresentation of faith-based organizations in civil soci-ety has inspired many to consider the effects of religion on charita-ble giving. Peter Dobkin Hall contributes to this body of work bydelineating giving and volunteering across religious differences. Hallpresents evidence of variation not only among congregations but alsobetween liberal and conservative faith communities. His analysis sug-gests that religious institutions, developed out of unique historicalexperiences, do affect giving and civil society.

Eleanor Brown extends research on the effects of education ongiving by defining links between education and associational socialcapital. Brown’s chapter challenges assumptions about the influenceof education on giving. Although many have pointed to higher earn-ing achievement and class similarities among graduates, Brown sug-gests that college may introduce students to the concept of“network-based social capital.”

Gifts of Time and Money may not offer groundbreaking advancesin research, but each of the authors presents theoretical or method-ological (or both) contributions to the field. The breadth of topicscovered offers a nice overview of the state of nonprofit research.While not a primer for volunteering and giving, the volume effec-tively serves to stimulate ideas for future studies by encouragingscholars to look more broadly at the relationships between giving,volunteering, and the communities they serve.

DONALD MORGAN is a doctoral candidate in the School of Policy,Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California.

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The second half . . .suggests three new

approachesto understanding

the causes ofcharitable giving.