Susan Goldberg

TEN TRENDS IN PHILANTHROPY

Just like skirt lengths, hair styles and new automobile models, philanthropy — the charitable donations of time, money, and goods — has its trends as well. Several recent books track those trends and provide valuable insight to librarians seeking assistance in raising funds for their institutions. While many of us are despairing of the recession and current economic conditions which are causing funding problems for libraries, we ought to be encouraged by the news from these studies of philanthropic activities in the past several years. Reading about philanthropy can stimulate ideas to pursue and leads to follow in finding private support for library projects. Additional information about the trends that I list below can be found in the following books. I have coded the books so that it will be easy to find the original sources of the trends cited below.

CARGILL CARES: A Library/Corporate Partnership Program

In early 1992, the American Library Association announced a new partnership with Cargill, a worldwide company based in Minneapolis that is a major merchandiser, processor, and transporter of agricultural and other commodities with 800 locations in 55 countries. The Cargill/ALA program was created to develop and implement family literacy projects around the world and is Cargills third “Cargill Cares” international community service program. The focus of this project is on meeting the needs of educationally disadvantaged families and the development of community partnerships among the hundreds of Cargill locations, public libraries, literacy providers, and other community‐based agencies.