Published: 29 March 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The mega-donor trend was quantified in the study of American Jewish philanthropy published March 8 by the Avi Chai Foundation and written by Jewish historian Jack Wertheimer.
The study found that as the total amount of money donated to Jewish causes has declined in recent decades, the number of donors is plummeting.
Jewish federations, for example, receive only 30 to 40 percent of the number of donations they got in the early 1970s while relying on a small pool of deep-pocketed donors. The study refers to the “rule of 80/20 or even 90/10: between 80 and 90 percent of the funds they raise come from a small minority of their donors.”
This growing reliance on big donors means that Jewish organizations are not as accountable to rank-and-file Jews as they once were, Wertheimer told JTA, and that smaller donors can claim less of a stake in those institutions than they once did.
“The Jewish community is becoming even less of a representative democracy than it ever was,” said Wertheimer, an American Jewish history professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
“Jewish organisations are going to be far more beholden to a smaller number of donors. This consensus-driven approach to Jewish communal life is endangered by that because these larger donors want what they want.”
FULL STORY Mega-donors are taking over Jewish philanthropy, study says (Times of Israel)
Photo: Historian Jack Wertheimer (Times of Israel)
