Baltimore Women’s Giving Circle

Anne Donahue had always enjoyed philanthropy, but once she joined a giving circle, she learned the power of giving with a purpose.

“I love giving money away,” said the Maryland assistant attorney general and deputy chief of the educational affairs division. “Giving money away in an informed way is very satisfying.”

Donahue recently finished a two-year stint as co-chair of the Baltimore Women’s Giving Circle, but before that she toiled on the grants committee, learning about philanthropy.

“Over the years, I’ve written many checks, but this was the first time I was able to understand just where my money was going,” Donahue said.

A giving circle is traditionally a group of people who pool their money for philanthropic causes. Many — but not all — groups decide collectively where they will give their money. Fitting all giving circles into a tidy definition is not easy, because they have different missions.

There are 12 known giving circles throughout Maryland. All operate through local charities or community foundations.

Women play a key role in the creation of giving circles, some say because of the nurturing aspect of collaborative philanthropy. In Maryland, eight of the 12 giving circles are dedicated to donating money to women’s causes.

Lynn Sassin, who co-chaired the Baltimore Women’s Giving Circle with Donahue, said she found out just how empowering shared giving groups can be with women at their helm.

“I have learned that women can be a very powerful force in effecting change in the community,” Sassin said. “It’s something I knew, but just [needed] to see it in action.”

Giving circles started sprouting up around the state in 2000, and every year more seem to form.

Nationally, the majority of giving circles originated in the 1990s and 2000s, but Melissa Brown, associate director of research at The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, said giving circles have been around in some form for decades.

“It’s not a new phenomenon,” Brown said. “In the Jewish and African-American communities in particular, something that we would call a giving circle today has been around since the 1950s.”

Since 2000, giving circles in Maryland have raised approximately $8.5 million in new philanthropic dollars and brought 4,000 new donors to the process.

“That’s huge,” said Tanya Terrell, chief operating officer of the Associated Black Charities.

“If all of us were doing our own thing, you would never know the collective impact of our giving,” she said.

The Women’s Giving Circle at the Associated Black Charities and the Change Fund — where Terrell is a founding member — both support initiatives in Baltimore City.

The women’s group focuses on giving money to programs that improve the economic status of women. The Change Fund, made up of young African-American professionals, supports youth leadership and education programs.

A study conducted by the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers, a national philanthropic network, found that there were more than 400 giving circles in the country in 2006.

“They have caught the imagination of people now, much as book clubs and dinner clubs have by bringing people together to share common interests,” Brown said. “I think that part of what’s happening in our society is we’re social beings. We’re looking for something to get together around.”

Nationally and locally, women have spurred interest in the idea of shared giving.

“I think that women are beginning to find their philanthropic voices. For a long time, decisions related to money were given to men,” said Dorothy Whitcomb, chairwoman of the communications committee at the Women and Girls Fund of the Mid-Shore.

“The needs of women and girls have really come up on the short end of the stick with traditional philanthropic dollars,” she said. “There’s a real lack, and so I think women are stepping up and saying, OK, let’s change that. We’re trying to show women that their philanthropy matters, their dollars matter.”

What started in 2002 as a small group of women pooling their dollars has turned into an organization of more than 375 members in Talbot, Kent, Queen Anne’s, Dorchester and Caroline counties.

Donations to the Mid-Shore fund have ranged from $12 to $25,000, and the contributions come from women and men.

“We encourage donations from everybody, even men,” Whitcomb said. “We have some very strong male supporters. Any fund that we grant that strengthens the lives of women and girls also strengthens families and communities.”

To date, the group has granted more than $152,000, and has a permanent endowment of more than $400,000.

“Every donation that comes in doesn’t go out the same year,” Whitcomb said. “We want the Women and Girls Fund to be around long after we’re gone.”

At the Women’s Giving Foundation at THE ASSOCIATED: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, each of its 85 members gives $1,000 annually so everyone has an equal say in where the money will go.

“There’s a lot of healthy debate,” said Alyson Meister, external relations liaison for the foundation.

“Some people feel strongly about giving to grassroots organizations; some people feel strongly about giving to groups with a known track record,” she said. “The needs of the group are as different as the group itself.”

With so many different giving circles in the region, Meister is looking into collaborating with them.

“If our mission statements are similar, why not join together and donate to make more of an impact?” she said.

Buffy Beaudoin-Schwartz is helping to strengthen relationships among the state’s giving circles.

As communications director for the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers, Beaudoin-Schwartz is firmly entrenched in the giving community. Over the last 10 years, ABAG has published information about giving circles and helped groups get organized.

“I was the point person for all that for all these years,” she said. “What I was finding was that all of my colleagues in giving circles would call me and say they heard about what was happening in Frederick or Howard County and wanted to know how they could do something similar.”

In the tradition of giving circles, ABAG decided to pool the area’s resources by holding an annual Giving Circle Connector Workshop. The second annual meeting was Wednesday.

Members of Anne Arundel Women Giving Together attended the workshop both years, and its president, Gloria Martin-Pressman, said the groups seemed more established this year.

“Last year, there were newer groups and there was so much energy and excitement,” she said. “The needs and questions in the group were different this year, more mature.”

None of the giving circle members who spoke to The Daily Record said they had seen a dip in membership or donations, even in the current tight economy. But Martin-Pressman said her goal of adding 70 new members to the 132 in her group this year “may have been overreaching.”

According to Giving USA, a publication released Monday by the Giving USA Foundation, a philanthropic advocacy organization, donations to American nonprofits and charities in 2007 increased 3.9 percent.

Giving USA attributed the strength of giving last year to the performance of the stock market in the first half of 2007 and increases in corporate and personal income. Survey participants were most concerned about a lagging economy and the health of the stock market affecting donations in 2008.

But the women at Wednesday’s workshop were focused less on the economy than on mentoring one another. Terrell, of the Associated Black Charities, said her group would be looking to grow by using ideas from other giving circles in the area.

“That’s so core to the strength of women’s giving circles,” she said. “They exist to leverage other people’s time, talent and money.”