COLUMN ONE : Charities Find L.A. Is a Challenge : Raising money is tough, nonprofits say. Besides the recession, they cite urban sprawl, rootless newcomers and lack of ‘old money.’ They hope to work with growing numbers who give in non-traditional ways.

Riots, fires, floods and earthquakes. And now, a plague of stinginess?

There it is in black and white, a list: 50 areas ranked in order of charitable giving per capita. At the top, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio. And way down at the bottom--well, two from the bottom, at No. 48--is Los Angeles.

We’ve got more rich people than any region except New York. But we give less per capita than areas with far less wealth, according to a recent survey by the Chronicle of Philanthropy. On average, people here gave $7 each to United Way in 1992, compared to $32 in Columbus.

The study, the first conducted by the Washington, D.C.-based biweekly, focused on donations in 1992 and 1993 to 10 major nonprofit organizations including the Boy Scouts, YMCA and Red Cross, plus charitable contributions to a broad range of nonprofits by local foundations and corporations.

In the survey, the Los Angeles metropolitan area included all of Los Angeles County except Long Beach.

Are we really a metropolis of Scrooges?

To be sure, like any best and worst list, the survey is a subjective thing, just one of many possible arrangements of statistics--and open to challenge.

Indeed, local philanthropists say the rankings do not reflect the real generosity here. Angelenos, they say, tend to give to small, specialized organizations not included in the Chronicle’s study. And they say burgeoning immigrant communities tend to give in ways the survey does not include--such as contributing to churches or to needy relatives.

But the same local experts say the study reflects a stark reality: It’s hard to raise money here.

And they say things are getting worse: pledges to the local United Way dropped 25% last year to $64 million. The same problem afflicts other nonprofit organizations across the region.

The recession is cited as a major cause. The dilemma for fund-raisers is that as people lose their jobs, they are transformed from donors to recipients of charity, swelling demand as funding shrinks.

At the same time, private philanthropy is taking on a bigger share of the burden of providing essential social services because of government cutbacks.

But the roots of the problem, say fund-raising veterans, go far deeper than the economic climate.

Leaders of local nonprofit organizations offer a number of other reasons for the charity shortfall:

No sense of community. Geographic sprawl. A crazy quilt of ethnic diversity. Lots of rootless newcomers. Too much new money, too little old. Corporate downsizing and the end of the Cold War.

In other words, all the usual suspects cited by those who say L.A. is going to hell. Philanthropy imitates life.

“We are a city where people come to , a growing, dynamic city. We’re young, we’re poor, we’re dreamers, we’re entrepreneurs. That is a wonderful, dynamic stew for a city, but it’s a death knell for philanthropy,” said Jack Shakely, president of the California Community Foundation, which manages money left to charity by wealthy individuals.

“People coming from the East and Midwest are from cities with a strong philanthropic tradition and yet when they come out here it’s easy not to be (involved),” said John Fishel, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. Although his organization raised about $40 million in the Los Angeles area last year, on a per capita basis, Jews give far less to the local Jewish fund than their counterparts in Tulsa, Okla., or Cleveland, according to the Chronicle survey.

This curse of newness may explain why California cities in general did poorly in the study. San Diego, facing many of the same problems as Los Angeles, ranked 40th. The Chronicle broke out Long Beach, which ranked 49th, from Los Angeles even though it is an integral part of the region’s fund-raising efforts. Fresno came in last. (Orange and Ventura counties were not included because none of their cities were among the nation’s 50 largest.)

Only San Francisco--old, prideful and established--did well, coming in 12th. Experts say it has a cadre of old families and corporate leaders who help nurture a sense of community.

Some people point out that Los Angeles’ large low-income population may dampen overall giving. But studies show that the poor almost always give a bigger part of their income to charity than the rich, and local experts say that is probably true here as well.

Instead, managers of many nonprofits put much of the onus on the habits of the rich. In many cities, there is enormous peer pressure among social lions to make their mark in philanthropy. But here, there is no single, cohesive elite. The barons of the very separate entertainment, Downtown business, aerospace and real estate industries rarely hang out together, and the guest lists of society events on the Westside or in Pasadena still have limited overlap. Thus, overwhelming social pressure to give rarely comes to bear.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Los Angeles was a smaller place where one person could sometimes overcome these differences.

Dorothy Chandler, wife of the late Times Publisher Norman Chandler, was famed for her ability to corral a variety of people to raise funds for the Music Center, emblem of a united Los Angeles: “Mrs. Chandler used to figure out the shortfall and call up her . . . friends,” said Alice Coulombe, a founder of the Los Angeles Opera League.

In those days, it was considered an achievement to meld Jewish and Gentile social circles. Today, things are far more complicated. Nobody has brought together the wealthy Taiwanese immigrants of San Marino, the Mexican Americans of Hacienda Heights and the African Americans of Baldwin Hills who will be philanthropic movers and shakers of the future.

Coulombe wants to reach everyone. The handwritten appeals for funds cluttering the dining room table in her Arroyo Seco home are going out to a gradually diversifying audience--such as a new group called Hispanics for L.A. Opera. But Coulombe admits she and other fund-raisers still deal mainly with a relatively narrow slice of the population.

Who is the Dorothy Chandler of today? “That may be a type that’s gone,” Coulombe said.

Without strong personalities cracking the whip, giving may flag.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was embarrassed by a report it commissioned last year that said its trustees gave only a fraction of what their peers in other cities gave to museums in their communities.

To be sure, there are many giving individuals among the region’s wealthy. Lillian Disney, widow of Walt Disney, gave $50 million toward the new Frank O. Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall in Downtown. Music mogul David Geffen is well known for his generosity to many causes, including a $1-million gift to AIDS Project Los Angeles. Developer Stuart Ketchum gave millions to build the sleek Downtown YMCA. Many other donors, both famous and unsung, contribute large amounts to charities and civic institutions.

“There are some cities you go to, that if you don’t become part of the giving scene, you’re not accepted,” said Lodwrick Cook, the Louisiana-born chairman of Arco. “That doesn’t happen here.”

Cook led fund raising for the renovation of the Central Library, and won praise for taking on the widely shunned job of chairman of Rebuild L.A. Arco was recently rated No. 1 among American corporations in its donations to minority organizations by the Washington-based National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.

And yet, big corporations like Arco have less money to give than they used to. Like most large companies, Arco has reduced its work force as profits have slipped, and its charitable contributions are declining as well, from $17 million in 1993 to a projected $12.5 million in 1994.

In the Los Angeles area, small companies, not large ones, will drive future economic growth. That is bad news for fund-raisers. It is far more labor-intensive to raise a million dollars by pounding the pavement among 50 little start-ups than by knocking on one oak door at a corporate headquarters.

The experiences of the Los Angeles Festival show vividly the nature of this change to a more diverse--and less efficient--donor base. In 1984, when the festival began as the Olympic Arts Festival, it was bankrolled simply: by two $5-million checks from the Olympic Organizing Committee and Times Mirror Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times, said Laurie Dowling, the festival’s former director of development.

Each of the next three festivals had to work harder and harder for smaller donations. Last year, it took about 500 checks, plus wads of $1 bills that came in the mail.

Festival director Peter Sellars spent the year trotting from Korean American Rotary Club meetings to elegant Iranian cocktail parties to meet potential donors. It was great for building interest in the festival. But it was not an efficient way to raise money. The festival has had to cut its staff--including Dowling--and is refashioning itself as a more modest event.

If the big Downtown and defense companies are diminishing sources of funds, Hollywood money remains an unattainable goal for many local nonprofits. Although the entertainment industry attracts a lot of attention for its star-studded fund-raisers for national and international causes, the industry has a reputation among many grass-roots organizers for seeming to ignore its own back yard.

Curtis Owens, executive director of the African American Unity Center in South-Central Los Angeles says his group enjoyed an outpouring of support from Downtown corporations after the 1992 riots. But aside from donations by music mogul Berry Gordy Jr. and by Mann Theaters, the response from the entertainment industry has been “very little,” Owens said.

At the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, a national civil rights organization based in Los Angeles, President Antonia Hernandez says she has not been able to get any support from the entertainment industry outside of a few Latino actors. Despite the fact that Latinos will soon be a majority of the population here, “the interest within the entertainment industry for the Latino community has been nil,” she said. MALDEF must go to East Coast foundations for most of its funding, raising less than 10% of its $5.4-million budget in Southern California.

Lisa Paulsen, president of the Permanent Charities Committee of the Entertainment Industries, disagrees with the criticism. “Our industry is extraordinarily benevolent,” she said. The reason that the industry’s generosity may not be recognized, she said, is that “a lot of people with a lot of money do it very quietly.”

In addition to the splintered nature of Los Angeles’ business community, the fragmentation of its population and the phenomenal pace of demographic change also hurt charitable giving.

On the one hand, experts say, the older, largely white population may be reluctant to give because they feel that their donations will go to an area that looks completely different from the one they have known, full of people speaking languages they cannot understand.

On the other hand, many would-be donors from the newer groups are not giving more because they feel the mainstream charities are not adequately serving their communities.

Many times they do not give simply because they are not asked.

Nobody called Roger Huibonhoa, for example. He had to go out looking for places to give.

A Hong Kong-born high-tech venture capitalist and longtime Pacific Palisades resident, he has money, time and a deep interest in helping the city. So several years ago he phoned a man he had happened to see in a magazine article--Stewart Kwoh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Fund. Huibonhoa now heads the organization’s fund-raising drive.

“I don’t want to just give blindly,” he said. “I don’t mind giving to the Music Center, but I don’t know them, and they don’t know me. But (at the legal center) I can know the founder personally.”

Huibonhoa does not believe that people should retreat into helping only their own ethnic groups, and his family gives to causes from Nebraska to Africa. But he believes that philanthropic habits have to be nurtured close to home--especially among immigrants unfamiliar with the American style of giving.

Some nonprofit managers say it is easier to foster the habit of philanthropy with small, local organizations than with big, mainstream organizations unable to change fast enough to accommodate new groups.

For example, many of the scores of organizations that have sprung up in the last two decades to serve people who speak Spanish, Chinese or Armenian cannot get on the membership rolls of the United Way. Why, say people from these communities, should we give to an umbrella organization that appears to leave us out in the rain?

“United Way did not have a good reputation in ethnic communities,” said Herbert Carter, president of the United Way of Greater Los Angeles. “They had little decision-making power in United Way.”

Although United Way statistics show that the “mainstream” nonprofits it funds serve a largely minority population, the perception among many people was that those nonprofits were run by people outside their communities.

Carter, who is African-American, says he is working hard to diversify United Way’s management and distribution of funds. Even critics praise him for his efforts, which include setting up ethnic advisory boards.

But few believe that he has succeeded in turning around a huge organization burdened with entrenched interests, from the corporate heads who lead its workplace fund-raising drives to the traditional recipients of its largess who are reluctant to share their fast-shrinking pie with new agencies. The number of member agencies funded by United Way has shrunk 10% in five years, at a time when community activists say the roster should be broadening.

Asian American organizations received 0.6% of total United Way donations in the county, while the Asian population is 10% of the county, according to a 1990 study by a consortium of nonprofit groups. When potential donors in the Asian American community see trends like this, they are less willing to give, said Deborah Ching, executive director of the Chinatown Service Center.

“You have to show people you’re doing something they care about before you ask them for money,” said Ching, whose organization assists poor immigrants.

Because many service agencies feel they cannot get the support they need from United Way and major foundations, they are turning to specialized funds. In addition to the 25-year-old Black United Fund, the Women’s Fund, United Latino Fund, Asian Pacific Community Fund and Earth Share (an environmental fund) have sprung up.

“We don’t want to redistribute existing giving but increase giving,” said Mary Rapoport, development director of the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation, which distributed about $300,000 to 30 ethnically diverse agencies last year. “We do know that some women, when they see a women’s foundation, are going to give when they didn’t give before.”

Providing employees with more choices about where they give significantly increases overall giving through payroll deductions, without cannibalizing United Way campaigns, studies show. Retail giant Carter Hawley Hale saw its employee donations more than double last year when it allowed an employee committee to expand the slate of charities beyond United Way.

People--including people in Los Angeles--are very generous to causes they feel connected to, fund-raisers say. But community activists are still struggling to arouse that sense of connection.

“How do you make people part of and responsible for a community?” asks Carter of the United Way. “How do you get people to understand that the things they wish for themselves can’t be secured if other people don’t have a basic quality of life?”

Where the Region Ranks

Compared to people in the 49 other largest metropolitan areas in the United States, people here give relatively little per capita to major charities. Here is how the Los Angeles area ranked compared to other areas in 1992 and 1993. Overall: 48th United Way: 47th Jewish Federations*: 42nd American Red Cross: 48th American Cancer Society: 38th YMCA: 33rd Boy Scouts: 49th Girl Scouts: 50th Goodwill Industries: 35th Disabled American Veterans: 48th Habitat for Humanity: 46th Grants by independent foundations: 25th Grants by community foundations: 33rd Gifts to community foundations: 31st Grants by corporate foundations: 36th * Dollars raised divided by Jewish population in each area.

Source: Chronicle of Philanthropy

Finding Solutions

Many organizations are devising new strategies and enlisting old traditions to increase community involvement. They include:

* L.A. Works, founded by actor Richard Dreyfuss, provides easy, “just show up” volunteer activities for individuals and groups. Examples include matching ready hands with homeless shelters that need painting or community garden plots that need clearing.

* Hispanics for L.A. Opera has been established by Latino opera fans to encourage attendance and financial support.

* The United Latino Fund, the Asian Pacific Community Fund, the Los Angeles Women’s Foundation, and Earth Share have recently joined forces to mount payroll deduction campaigns with public employers. They are following the lead of the Brotherhood Crusade Black United Fund. The groups are trying to gain access to employees of private corporations as well.

* The United Way allows donors to designate individual charities instead of just the umbrella fund.

* Many Jewish preschools and Mommy and Me toddler classes pass a traditional tzedakah box daily or weekly for children to put coins in to encourage the habit of charity early in life. Tzedakah means justice, and the donations go to food banks, homeless shelters, etc.

* Private foundations are increasingly requiring community organizations to form collaborative projects when they apply for funds to reduce redundancies and build coalitions. The result: an increase in multiethnic projects.