Response to The Boston Foundation Report

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Introduction and Summary 

The purpose of community foundations is to build and enhance, not divide and diminish, the communities they exist to serve.  Their proper role with respect to controversies is to help communities address them as constructive conveners of the contending groups.  To fulfill that role they must be strictly nonpartisan, lovers of truth, and models of philanthropy in its noblest sense.  

We know of no other instance, anywhere, in which a large community foundation has attacked the good-faith work of a small charity in its service area—certainly not when the attack is based on and disseminates undocumented and false information about, and a misunderstanding of, that charity’s work; and most especially when that work is promoting philanthropy—surely our common interest, for our common wealth. 

Scholars, for their part, are trained to think on the basis of evidence.  All their assertions should be supported by evidence, otherwise they are not valid scholarship or science. 

When this Report project was first announced in the summer of 2004, even though the public announcement was framed as a critique of the Generosity Index, we responded in print by welcoming it “with great interest and grateful enthusiasm” (Catalogue for Philanthropy, Massachusetts, 2004, p. 5. [link]) Though we had been deeply engaged for nine years in studying, reporting, and promoting charitable giving in Massachusetts and beyond, we were not consulted by the project, and only received the Report the day it was released, with a notice that we would be called by a Boston Globe reporter to comment on it (which happened immediately).  This was political, not scholarly nor philanthropic, behavior. 

The purpose of our formal response to all this is still constructive: to defend our work, and to suggest a better way.  What the Report finds objectionable and attributes to the Generosity Index (GI) is not the GI, but the media’s interpretation of it—a distinction of which the Report is evidently unaware.  This fundamental error would have been prevented simply by the discipline of documentation or the courtesy of consultation.  As we have said many hundreds of times (cf. the 2005 Catalogue, p. 6 and on this website [link]) the GI does not claim to measure or compare the philanthropic generosity of people in various states; we have no interest in that, and in any case believe it cannot validly be done, because it is too complex a subject and existing data is inadequate.  The Report attempts to do it, and shows by its own example that assertions on this subject are only estimates, not facts. 

The “better way” is for us all to work together constructively as colleagues in civil discourse.  The GI and the Report each have serious but diverse, interests, purposes, methods, and data.  There is no need, nor any public value or benefit, in attacking one another.  In philanthropy we are all on the same team, and in this case it is the home team.  Accordingly, we call upon The Boston Foundation as a matter of professional courtesy to correct the factual errors about the Generosity Index in its next installment of this Report.  We welcome civil conversation and even criticism, but we believe it should be done constructively.

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For more information:
- Generosity Index website
- How the Generosity Index Works
- Catalogue Welcomes Study
- The Boston Foundation's letter in response, 3/27/06