Private funding for the humanities takes myriad forms. Using previously published data, this section describes trends
in foundation, corporate, and individual giving for humanities activities in the United States. It also presents a new
analysis of data obtained by the Humanities Indicators from the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics. These data describe the number and revenues of private
not-for-profit humanities organizations, which are entities that use monies derived from various sources to promote
the humanities or engage in humanistic activities. The general picture that emerges from both sources of information is
one of considerable growth in private support for humanities initiatives, particularly over the last two decades.
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Indicator IV-7
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Charitable Giving for Humanities Activities
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For the past 40 years, Giving USA, a publication of the
Giving USA Foundation,
a research organization that publishes data on trends in charitable giving, has documented charitable support for arts and cultural activities.
Giving USA captures donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations, but because it is not yet possible to distinguish among these types of donors
(Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy
is currently preparing such an analysis), the data presented here describe total giving. These data encompass certain activities (e.g., "arts and cultural" activities include the performing arts)
that are not within the
scope of the humanities as that term is used for the purposes of the Humanities
Indicators(see Statement on
the Scope of the Humanities for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators).
These data also exclude other
key humanities activities (e.g., those for humanities education; Giving USA tallies education giving separately
and does not distinguish among the types of activities funded by such donations). Nonetheless, data from Giving USA provide the closest approximation that is currently available of the extent
of charitable giving for humanities-related projects.
The most striking feature of the four-decade trend is the marked growth in giving between the mid-1990s and early 2000s
(Figure IV-7). Between 1994 and 2001, donations to arts and cultural organizations doubled, rising from approximately
$6.5 billion to almost $13 billion. Thereafter, giving leveled off, ranging between $11.8 and $12.5 billion over the 2002–2006 period.
While the absolute amount of giving for arts and cultural activities increased dramatically, so did charitable giving overall.
Thus, arts and cultural organizations' share of all gifts was quite stable over the last four decades. Between 1966 and 2006, giving to
such organizations ranged between 3.1% and approximately 5.5% of all charitable donations.
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Indicator IV-8
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Foundation Funding
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See the
Note on the Types of Foundation Grants Analyzed.
Between the early 1980s and 2001, the Foundation Center, an information provider
to the philanthropic community that maintains a comprehensive database on U.S. grant makers, analyzed foundation support of
humanities activities using a definition of the humanities that is more narrow in scope than that employed by the Humanities
Indicators. (See Statement of the Scope of the “Humanities”).
In order to more fully capture the extent of foundation
commitment to the humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences convened an advisory committee in 2002 to review the
Center’s humanities coding practices and to identify additional disciplines for inclusion. The Academy then
commissioned the Foundation Center to examine funding trends over the preceding decade using this broadened definition.
(See pages 13-14 of the Foundation Center report,
Foundation Funding for the Humanities,
for the original definition employed by the Center and a description of how it was expanded for this analysis.) The Center
analyzed all grants of over $10,000 awarded by approximately 1,000 of the largest U.S. foundations. These grants represented
more than half of total grant dollars awarded by independent, corporate, and community foundations in the United
States. (See page 3 of Foundation
Funding for the Humanities for details of the Center’s sampling base; for an overview of
the kinds of foundations studied by the Center and included in this indicator, see
also the Note on the Types of Foundation Grants Analyzed.)
The Foundation Center report estimates that private foundation funding for the humanities totaled approximately $335
million in 2002 (Figure IV-8a; this amount includes grants for humanities-related activities in the social sciences).
Almost half of this funding went for “historical” and “humanities-related museum” activities (24% each).
Historical activities, as defined by the Foundation Center, included historical societies, preservation activities,
memorials, and commemorations. Museum activities excluded those performed by or within arts museums, unless the museum
specialized in ethnic or folk art or the funding went specifically to fund an activity related to a
humanities discipline. (In contrast, the Humanities Indicators Project treats art museums, and thus all activities
that occur within them, as humanities-oriented—for the types of entities treated as humanities organizations for the purposes
of the Indicators, see Indicator IV-9,
Revenues of Not-For-Profit Humanities Organizations,
and the accompanying inventory of humanities organization types.)
Grants for scholarship and programs in history (including archeology) represented the greatest share of funding (15%) going
to a particular discipline.
By contrast, grants for languages and art history activities constituted just 1% per discipline of the total funding, and about 3% of grant
monies went to literature and philosophy each (the latter included a number of programs in applied and medical ethics). What
the Foundation Center classified as “humanities-related arts, culture, and media” activities absorbed approximately 10% of
funding, while support for “humanities-related social science” activities (among which the Foundation Center included ethnic
and gender studies activities) represented 7% of all humanities grant dollars.
Although foundation funding for humanities activities and projects grew substantially between 1992 and 2002, this growth lagged
behind total foundation giving (Figure IV-8b). While such overall giving increased approximately 50% between 1992 and 1997,
humanities giving grew by 37%, and, while overall giving during the 1997 to 2002 period doubled, the figure for the humanities,
83%, was again smaller. The persistent disparity resulted in a decline over the ten-year period, from 2.5% to 2.1%, in the share
of all foundation funding going to the humanities (Figure IV-8c).
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Indicator IV-9
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Revenues of Not-For-Profit Humanities Organizations
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See the
Note on the Definition of Not-for-Profit Organizations and the
Note on the Definition of Humanities Organizations.
Whereas Indicator IV-8, Foundation Funding,
deals with foundations that give at least a portion of their monies for humanities activities, this indicator focuses on the many
other private, not-for-profit entities that together with such foundations constitute the humanities not-for-profit sector in the
United States. Using funding from either governmental or private sources (usually both) either to engage in or to promote humanistic
endeavors, these organizations are extremely diverse in both their focus and size, ranging from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
to the nation’s 56 state humanities councils. (For more detailed revenue data for the councils, see Indicator IV-3,
State Humanities Council Revenues). They also include
many small “friends of” associations, such as those that help libraries around the country maintain their collections or that provide
summer reading programs for neighborhood children.
The data presented here were compiled by the Urban Institute’s
National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) from the IRS’s Form 990
Return Transaction Files. Form 990, which must be completed annually by every tax-exempt public charity with revenues normally in
excess of $25,000, describes these organizations’ financial condition, activities, and key personnel. In analyzing this information,
the NCCS employs the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), a widely used
categorization scheme developed by NCCS, to distinguish among the various kinds of organizations on the basis of their primary mission.
While the NTEE includes a category for the humanities, other types of organizations that the Humanities Indicators consider to fall
within this category, such as museums and libraries, are classified separately within the NTEE. At the request of
the Humanities Indicators’ data analysis team, the NCCS assembled information on all tax-exempt humanities organizations that fall
within the Humanities Indicators’ purview at five-year intervals going back as many years as the NCCS database permitted. This yielded
data for a 15-year period extending from 1989 to 2004.
(For an inventory of the kinds of institutions and groups considered "humanities
organizations" for the purposes of this indicator, and examples of the types of
organizations included in each of the broad categories of humanities organizations
described below, see the
Note on the Definition of Humanities Organizations;
the humanities not-for-profit sector as defined here does not include private not-for-profit
educational programs or institutions.)
The Humanities Indicators’ preliminary analysis of these data, which is presented here, focused on the number and revenues of these
organizations, the characteristics of major organizational subsectors (e.g., historical organizations or libraries), and the
distribution of revenue dollars among these subsectors. Any subsequent editions of the Indicators will delve further into the
data to investigate the human resources of these organizations, as well as their sources of funding.
The preliminary analysis found that between 1989 and 2004, both the number of not-for-profit humanities organizations and their
total revenues grew substantially (Figure IV-9a), with most of the growth taking place between 1994 and 1999. During that five-year period,
the number of humanities organizations increased by 44%, while the increase in reported revenues was approximately 60%. The picture
for the entire 15-year period, however, is different: the number of organizations grew faster, more than doubling between 1989 and 2004.
The fact that the number of organizations grew more quickly than their resources is evident from the decrease
in their typical1 revenues over the time period (Figure IV-9b). In 1989, humanities organizations
typically reported revenues ranging from $78,000 to $443,000, with median revenues amounting to $163,000. By 2004, humanities
organizations typically reported revenues ranging from $42,000 to $264,000, with median revenues of $88,000. Thus by the end of the 15-year period, the universe
of humanities not-for-profits was much larger, but populated by more modestly financed organizations. (Had data on the many small
humanities organizations with revenues less than $25,000 been available, the median revenue level for the entire period would have
been even lower.)
As Figure IV-9b also demonstrates, there was a considerable range in the amount of revenue reported by individual humanities
organizations. In 2004, the minimum revenue was a deficit of over $5 million, while the maximum revenue was in excess of $300 million
(the figure is not to scale with respect to the minimum and maximum revenues). But throughout the period, the vast majority of
not-for-profit humanities organizations—90%—reported revenues that were hundreds of millions of dollars lower than the maximum.
In each year, a handful of organizations, mostly large
museums,2 had budgets that
dwarfed those of all other humanities organizations. This can be seen in Figure IV-9c,
which demonstrates the large share of revenues commanded by museums in 2004.
Although they represented only 20% of humanities organizations, museums had close to
half of all revenues (for more details on the numbers and revenues of museums from 1989
to 2004, see Figure IV-9d). The inverse was true of historical
organizations,3 which
amounted to 36% of all humanities organizations but garnered only 18% of all revenues
(see also Figure IV-9e; these data do not include the substantial number of museums and
historical institutions that are not private not-for-profit organizations but are instead
operated by the government and by colleges and universities). Ethnic and cultural
awareness organizations (profiled in Figure IV-9f) were similar to historical ones, having
a revenue share that was less than half of their share of the total number of humanities
organizations. Organizational counts and revenue totals, as well as detailed information
on 2004 revenues, for the other types of humanities organizations are provided in Figure
IV-9g (Humanities and Arts Councils), Figure IV-9h (Reading Promotion
Organizations), Figure IV-9i (Library Organizations), and Figure IV-9j (other humanities
organizations).
Notes
1
The range of “typical” or “usual” values exhibited by a population of persons or objects is described through the use of a
statistic referred to as the interquartile range, which is designed to exclude the most extreme values of a sample distribution.
Quartiles are statistics that divide the observations of a numeric sample into several groups, each of which contains 25% of the
data. The lower, middle, and upper quartiles are computed by ordering the values for a particular variable (in this case
organizational revenues) from smallest to largest and then finding the values below which fall 25%, 50%, and 75% of the data.
The lower quartile and the upper quartile are the two values that define the interquartile range. The middle quartile is also
known as the median. Figure IV-9b presents both the median and the interquartile range for humanities organization revenues at five-year
intervals from 1989 to 2004.
2
For the purposes of the Humanities Indicators, the term "museum" includes: art
museums, history museums, ethnic heritage museums, multidisciplinary museums, the
support organizations for the museums previously listed, and museum associations. (See the
Note on the Definition of Humanities Organizations.)
3
For the purposes of the Humanities Indicators, the term "historical organization"
includes: historical societies, historical preservation groups, the support organizations for
historical societies and historical preservation groups, professional societies and
associations, and other organizations with a historical focus. (See the
Note on the Definition of Humanities Organizations.)
Note on the Types of Foundation Grants Analyzed
The Foundation Center’s 2002 study of foundation giving to the humanities focused largely on grants from private
(independent and corporate) foundations. Community foundations were the source of a very small proportion of the grants
examined by the Center. Although both private foundations and community foundations are types of not-for-profit
organizations eligible for tax exemptions under section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code, they are viewed differently
by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Private foundations receive almost all of their income from a narrow group of persons,
such as single individuals, families, or corporations, while community foundations receive funds from a wide variety of
donors and thus are considered by the IRS to be “public charities” (they must also meet the other criteria specified in
section 509(a) of the tax code to be eligible for tax-exempt status).
See Indicator IV-9, Revenues of Not-for-Profit
Humanities Organizations, for information concerning not-for-profit humanities organizations that are classified as
public charities.
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Note on the Definition of Not-for-Profit Organizations
“Not-for-profit” organization, as the term is used by the Humanities Indicators, refers to entities that are classified
as tax-exempt public charities by the Internal Revenue Service. Public charities are a subset of 501(c)(3)
organizations (tax-exempt entities) that meet additional criteria specified in Section 509(a) of the tax code. This
section specifies two types of public charities: Section 509(a)(1) organizations, which are not-for-profit organizations
that receive their public support primarily from gifts, grants, and contributions from a broad group of people; and
Section 509(a)(2) organizations, which obtain their revenues from these sources, as well as in the form of fees for
their services.
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