It’s that time of year again. Mailboxes and e-mail inboxes are full of sentimental appeals for donations to help America’s most needy. Here’s a fact they usually don’t tell you. Tax attorneys who set up many of these charities charge $650 an hour and often make over a million dollars a year. Their rates and administrative costs are so high, the amount of dollars that actually pay for charitable work is small in comparison.
Fortunately, Prince William and Duchess Catherine have taken a lot of the guesswork out of charitable giving. Their staff reviewed 20,000 Southern California charities to select the most worthy for a royal visit during the couple’s July 2011 stay in our area. The staff’s selection of the Inner City Arts education program highlighted important reasons that this and other art education programs offer the best value in charitable giving:
1. Track record. Inner City Arts participants have a 100% high-school graduation rate in a school district where most students do not even graduate.
2. Widely shared benefits. The 150,000 individual students that Inner City Arts has educated share their knowledge with classmates, teachers, family members and community members.
3. Parent involvement. The way to minimize the amount of your donation that is spent for legal and administrative costs is actually quite simple. Programs with parent involvement get both valuable volunteer assistance and a watchful eye on expenses.
4. Future employment and tax revenue. Art education programs like Inner City Arts train people with skills they can use at work or to pay for college while working as an artist. Over time, these programs pay for themselves with the tax revenues this generates. Toy drives may look like more fun, but they don’t achieve this important benefit. And when you see how much fun the students in art programs have, toys start to look like kid stuff.
Today, the Inner City Arts Board announced the appointment of Joseph A. Collins as its new President and Chief Executive Officer. Seasoned leadership can add to the confidence of donors that even small gifts can have a big impact.
Southern California is blessed with many worthy art education programs. Here are a few more with links for your list:
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