Charitable Donations Up 13%, Report Says

America’s leading charities raised more than $38 billion last year, an increase of 13% over 1998, a philanthropy journal reported. The Salvation Army led the 1999 survey of the top 400 charities for the eighth straight year, receiving $1.4 billion in cash and donated goods, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the weekly “newspaper of the nonprofit world,” which began compiling contribution statistics in 1991. The top 400 accounted last year for about a fifth of charitable giving nationwide. “Giving flows and grows with the economy,” Eugene R. Tempel, director of Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, told the Chronicle.