“If any man ask, Why is it so necessary to do good?
I must say, it sounds not like the question of a good man.”
—Cotton Mather, Bonifacius, or An Essay To Do Good, 1710
We define Human Services following ordinary meanings of the words, as “what people do for each other” — this as distinct from what they do for the environment (Nature), or what they think, make or grow (Culture). Within that broad category we then distinguish between various more specialized subfields, defined by population served, or type of service.
In 2003-04, Massachusetts had about 1,348 human services charities of general philanthropic interest with budgets below $3 million — roughly 52% of Massachusetts charities that size, with a total income of just over $1 billion — 60% of the total income for all charities that size, which comprise 93% of all charities.
The Catalogue has listed 372, or 28%, of the 1,348. For donors’ interest and convenience, we have subdivided these into four main subfields:
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Our coverage of these subfields is clearly larger in Children and Youth, and Girls and Women, which are the two smallest Human Services fields in Massachusetts. This was unintentional — no one knew the total numbers until we discovered them last year; we were following roughly the proportions of applications we received for listing, and what we understood donor interests to be, based on informal feedback from Catalogue readers.
The field of Human Services is, like environmental philanthropy, also in the process of coming together for strategic development, a unified voice in advocacy, and greater influence on public policy. Government grants and contracts provide a large portion of funding for this field. But politics can disrupt revenue streams, so these charities would benefit by increasing their reliance on philanthropy, which tend to be more stable over time, and more capable of substantial increases in funding.
About 70% of the Girls and Women charities in Massachusetts, and almost 60% of the Catalogue Girls and Women charities, are concerned with Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse. The Catalogue has covered about 72% of this important subfield. They, too, are increasingly working together for capacity-building purposes to address more adequately the scope and complexity of these issues. They, too, would benefit by adding to their action agendas the promotion of philanthropy to their field.
