Donors affect charity's mission
Donations to United Way of Greater Los Angeles feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, but they also pad the bottom line of the city's premier opera, major museums and the exclusive Harvard-Westlake School.
That's just fine with a large number of United Way contributors, because they're the folks setting many of the spending priorities.
Now, however, the Los Angeles group and other local affiliates of United Way of America have found that the choices made by donors are leaving one of the $4-billion charity's fundamental missions -- to help meet basic human needs -- with a smaller piece of the pie.
In recent years, United Way benefactors nationwide have been directing about 25% of their gifts to their favorite causes, instead of allowing the organization to distribute the money to its roster of service providers, such as Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army, officials say. That percentage has generally climbed since the early 1990s.
In Los Angeles, about two-thirds of the $47 million that United Way gave away last fiscal year went to nonprofits selected by contributors, one of the highest ratios in the country. Most of the donor-designated cash ends up in the arts and education, mainly with big institutions that do not specialize in aiding the poor or target problems such as low school graduation rates.
Among the top 10 recipients of earmarked donations last year were the Autry National Center, parent of the Museum of the American West; the Los Angeles Opera; the county Museum of Art; and Harvard-Westlake, a college preparatory school that charges $23,850 in annual tuition.
In previous years, Disney Hall and UCLA also made the list.
"Disney Hall is great, but we need to care about the people who live in the shadows of the buildings down the street from it," said L.A. United Way President Elise Buik. "It's not good for any of us if we have too many people living here in poverty."
But philanthropy experts said that it would not be easy to persuade givers to devote less of their money to concert arenas and alma maters and more to skid row medical clinics and after-school programs for the disadvantaged.
Donors have come to prize the alternatives United Way has granted them, especially on the West Coast, where they tend to be more freethinking about what their contributions should fund, experts said.
