A flurry of natural disasters, a booming stock market and strong economy, and more mega gifts all contributed to another record year for charitable giving in 2017.

Charitable giving in the United States hit another record, cracking the $400 billion level for the first time ever. Giving totaled more than $410 billion, an increase of more than 5 percent over 2016. The gains were seen virtually across the board, from arts and religion to education and human services, with only one subsector experiencing a decline.

The Giving USA Foundation today released its initial estimates on overall giving for 2017, as well as revision to the 2016 estimates from a year ago. Aggie Sweeney, chair of the Giving USA Foundation and senior counsel for Campbell & Co., and Una Osili, Ph.D., associate dean for research and international programs at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, talk about some of the details in the report, the good news and bad news, what nonprofits should do with that information, and what 2018 might hold for charities.

For more information on “Giving USA 2018: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the year 2017,” visit givingusa.org

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Diversity has been a hot topic in the nonprofit sector for many years. Yet, only one in five CEO positions among nonprofits is held by a person of color. So, has anything really changed?

Frances Kunreuther and Sean Thomas Breitfeld are co-directors of the Building Movement Project (BMP) and together authored “Race To Lead: Confronting the Nonprofit Racial Leadership Gap.” Among more than 4,000 respondents who work in the nonprofit sector, only 9 percent disagreed with the statement that one of the big problems is that nonprofit leadership doesn’t represent racial and ethnic diversity in the U.S. “What we found really stunned us, at least it stunned me,” Kunreuther said.

To download a copy of the entire 26-page study, go to racetolead.org.

For more episodes of Fresh Research, click here.

Source From Non Profit Times