Generosity Plus Wisdom Can Tackle All Problems

I’m a bit long in the tooth to play the wide-eyed kid, but let me ask you this: How can we have any unsolved problems in this country?

A couple of stories on the Times front page Monday rekindled a long-held fascination of mine: the amount of money in private hands.

One story told of investor Warren Buffett’s decision to turn over more than $30 billion in stock to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Another told of Los Angeles real estate mogul Donald Sterling’s ongoing plans to pour tens of millions into the homeless situation in downtown L.A.

But when I talk about my amazement at private wealth, I’m not talking just of well-known titans. I’m talking about the seemingly endless stream of projects from one end of the country to the other, all taking in millions of dollars.

Pick a city. Pick an organization. Somewhere, someone is raising millions of dollars for something -- either at the moment or the recent past or the near future.

Sometimes, all of the above.

The Orange County Performing Arts Center is trying to raise tens of millions of dollars. So are any number of symphonies around the country. In Orange, they recently raised $41 million to build a film school. A short hop through Times archives will inform you of a Laguna Woods couple pledging $60 million to a single hospital. Or of the generosity of the Samueli family, or Donald Bren, or even Tiger Woods, for that matter. And those are just Orange County-based names I think you’ve heard of. It doesn’t begin to tap the well of lesser-known donors around here. The causes don’t even have to be projects you’ve heard of. Our clip files say that Bren once gave $1 million to endow two chairs at Marine Corps University.

A million here. Fifty million there. Eighty million somewhere else.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” says Frances Rozner, the Orange County chapter president of the Assn. of Fundraising Professionals. Then, she said an amazing thing: “We know there’s money out there. We know it could be more for the community. I don’t think people know how to be connected to know how to give it.”

In other words, despite my amazement -- and hers -- at how much is already given locally and around the country, Rozner says there are still sources to tap. She says traditional sources like hospitals and universities and religious outlets (dominated in Orange County by the Trinity Broadcasting Network, she says) tend to get many of the donated dollars.

A stumbling block, Rozner says, is that people don’t know whom to give to. She suggests they ask themselves a simple question: If you want to change things and make something better, what is it you want to make better?

To prove I’m not imagining things, Americans gave $260 billion to charity in 2005, according to Giving USA, a foundation that released figures researched by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. “That’ll fund an awful lot of projects,” says Leslie Lenkowski, a professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at the school.

“We’re a very wealthy society,” he says. “We’re wealthy because we’ve been very successful at producing goods and services that people around the world want to buy. But the interesting point is that we tend to give a lot of this wealth to all sorts of worthy causes. By far, the U.S. is the most generous in private philanthropy than any country in the world.”

And while he lauds the benefits of such beneficence, he takes my point about why we have so many problems left to solve. He suggests two possible fixes: first, that Americans give thought to “acting in their own backyards” when it comes to charity. Second, he thinks more foundations should return to an earlier emphasis on developing and applying knowledge to solve specific social problems.

What have we learned today?

I can speak only for myself.

First, that there’s a ton of money out there that should be able to solve just about anything that money could buy.

And that if we put a bit more thought into where some of that $260 billion goes, we could be generous and smart at the same time.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.