Session 4. 6.

The central mission of a community foundation involves mobilizing place-based giving and coordinating collective action to benefit the community. To this end, community foundations as institutional vehicles can play an important role in sustaining philanthropic commons. In this chapter, I posit that community foundations, as community leaders, can mitigate the tragedy of the commons by counteracting social dilemmas and collective action challenges. Drawing on the IAD framework, I explore four collective action problems within the action arena of community philanthropy. I argue that community leadership can catalyze collective action by initiating meaningful dialogues among stakeholders, cultivating a deep understanding of community needs, stakeholders, and policy contexts, and aligning philanthropic resources with strategic goals for the community. By asserting leadership roles, these foundations amplify philanthropic impact and foster self-governance within a "philanthropic community," where foundations, donors, nonprofits, community members, and public and private stakeholders collectively share responsibility for the renewal, management, and governance of community philanthropy over the long term.

Turning to the empirical data, I examine the scope of leadership practices and the perspectives of foundation leaders. The survey results revealed that community foundations excel in building partnerships, prioritizing community needs, investing in capacity building, convening stakeholders, and sharing knowledge. Yet, policy engagement remains limited. Based on the open-ended responses, foundation leaders reported several perceived benefits of acting as community leaders, including fostering greater trust, initiating crucial dialogues, increasing community participation, attracting resources, and achieving greater impact. Despite the merits, limited resources, political considerations, and lack of expertise are some of the key perceived challenges of practicing leadership in their communities.

In conclusion, this study underscores the vital role of philanthropic institutions and self-governing practices in community leadership to address and mitigate collective action challenges in community philanthropy. Collective action in this context involves donors, nonprofits, and communities working together to manage resources and amplify impact through pooled efforts and collaboration. Community foundations, as institutional vehicles, play a key leadership role in facilitating collective action and reducing power imbalances among stakeholders.

Continuing a current line of research on philanthropic giving as a type of common-pool resource (Bushouse, Christensen, and Never, forthcoming), this paper will examine (a) the prospective impacts on the so-called “demographic cliff” on giving to higher education institutions in the US and (b) how those institutions might try to mitigate or offset the impacts. In previous work (Blomquist and Shaker, forthcoming) we have focused on the “provision side” challenges of the philanthropic commons using the terminology introduced by Gardner, Ostrom, and Walker (1990). As in our previous work, we propose here that attention to the provision side of a commons dilemma helps to illuminate the nature of the problem and identify how it could be addressed. In this paper we extend that provision-side focus to the challenges presented by declining enrollments and thus a diminishing stream of future alumni. We combine the most recent data on enrollment trends (National Student Clearinghouse Research Center 2024) with the most recent data on philanthropic giving to higher education in the US (TIAA Institute 2024) for a joint assessment of both trends. Our previous work did not incorporate the enrollment dimension of the current US higher education landscape, which is a vital consideration. Additionally, we will review how giving trends and enrollment trends vary across institutional type (e.g. public and private institutions, 2-year and 4-year institutions), which sheds additional light on the future challenges and opportunities for meeting them.

There is increasing interest in the concept that philanthropy, the giving of money and time, can be considered a commons: a resource system that can be self-reinforcing and additive. Historically, philanthropy has been place-based whether channeled through faith institutions or community agencies. In the American context, philanthropy grew steadily over the course of decades to represent a major force in prosocial community action, yet in recent years this trend has substantially changed: the average donor gives less, while the wealthy donor gives much more. This paper asks the question: what are the implications for the philanthropy commons as giving becomes more concentrated across socioeconomic strata, with particular concern for the geography of this giving?

Using data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) Core Files, we document the increasing geographic concentration of nonprofit contributions across American metro areas. Measured by two means – a Gini coefficient and a Moran’s i statistic – there is a statistically significant increasing concentration in nonprofit contributions as the population of a metropolitan area increases. In effect, as the size of a city increases, the nonprofits who receive the sources of philanthropy become more geographically concentrated.

The paper considers how philanthropy might be better construed as a club good in large American cities, where the ‘haves’ of philanthropy are able to crowd out of a geographic neighborhood the ‘have nots’ in the nonprofit sector. At the same time, smaller municipalities have been able to maintain a philanthropic resource system that better fits with the definition of a common pool resource. Conclusions are drawn as to the impact of this concentration effect on the ability of diverse communities to be represented in large American cities as compared to their smaller metro areas.