GIVING SCORES

Our new philanthropy rankings are based on “out the door” donations.

Hundreds of billions of dollars sit in Forbes 400 members’ private charitable foundations. But because the IRS effectively requires them to pay out only a tiny fraction each year, just a sliver of that sum is deployed annually to causes and communities in need. To shine a light on those putting their philanthropic dollars to work, we’ve changed the methodology for The Forbes 400 philanthropy score. Instead of counting the dollars that list members have parked in their foundations over a lifetime, we tallied the grants made by those foundations (technically, “adjusted qualifying distributions”), plus direct gifts we could track, to estimate how much The Forbes 400 has actually given away. We did not count gifts to donor-advised funds, except when list members shared details about grants paid by such funds. We reached out to every list member for feedback. Some cooperated, providing specific details about donations and recipients. Others declined to comment. This year’s scoring was produced with research assistance from advocacy group Global Citizen and its “Give While You Live” initiative.