GLOBE EDITORIAL

November 27, 2006

Buffett, Gates, and you

IT'S THE HOLIDAY season, and mailboxes are filling with solicitations from worthy charities that bravely compete against the landslide of retail catalogs. Maybe a charity's envelope gets plucked from the mail heap. Maybe a check gets written. And maybe it wards off the guilt of free-flowing holiday spending.

Fortunately, there's a better way. Our advice: Don't wait for the charities to show up at home; go out and find an exciting problem.

Children get this. Teach them about litter or pollution and they become fanatics, slamming down the environmental data to their parents and anyone else who listens. But with a basic education, all can tap this passion.

Giving seems robust whenever Warren Buffett and Bill Gates announce mega-gifts. But there's room for more donors. In 2004, 1.3 million tax returns nationwide put filers in the exclusive club of those whose incomes are in the top 1 percent, earning more than $328,000 that year, according to the Tax Foundation in Washington.

"Even in America, the most generous nation on earth, giving has been flat for the past half-century, at about 2 percent of GDP and income," notes the Catalogue for Philanthropy, which promotes small charities.

Still, some with high incomes worry about having enough money, and some distrust charities, according to a survey done by the Luxury Institute, a New York research firm, which found that 11 percent of respondents have no plans to donate to charity, and another 15 percent were uncertain. That survey queried more than 900 people with average earnings of $330,000 and an average net worth of $2.4 million.

The quest to find an exciting problem can start with workplace campaigns run by United Way or Community Works. It can lead down the street, across the ocean, or into the ocean to help the nonprofit Cape Cod Stranding Network free trapped marine mammals.

Compelling advice can be found in a booklet published by The NewTithing Group, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that promotes charitable giving.

"Many of us have unfulfilled dreams. One way to realize an unfulfilled dream is to help others achieve that same goal." Did you shelve your hopes of becoming a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, for example? Then consider giving money to a science program for disadvantaged youths, the booklet says.

It's heady counsel: Use money to revive a secret or seemingly dashed dreams. Pass the baton to a talented 10-year-old.

So if Henry David Thoreau is right that, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," then that's a deep well of unfulfilled dreams that could enrich philanthropy. Even $10 could help, and that's a legacy that almost anyone can afford.