Should foundations have to give more?

NEW YORK » The viral pandemic wiped out jobs and businesses and left many U.S. families unable to afford food. It also caused a crisis for charities: Too much need, too little funding.

And now it’s sparking debate over a divisive question: Should philanthropic groups donate more money to charities? Should they be forced to?

Ask someone like Chuck Collins, and you’ll get a resounding yes.

Collins, director of the Inequality and the Common Good program at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank, believes the government should compel foundations and donor-advised funds to step up their contributions. Philanthropic groups enjoy tax-favored status, the thinking goes, and many of them have watched their assets multiply from stock market gains and other investments.

“We’re in the middle of an emergency,” Collins said. “The pandemic is a serious thing that we need to do something about right now.”

Collins and others are pushing a proposal for Congress to require foundations and donor-advised funds to contribute at least 10% of their investment assets each year for three years.

If passed, it would be the first significant change in laws governing nonprofit funding since the Tax Reform Act of 1969. That law set a rule by which foundations must donate at least 5% of their assets annually to maintain their tax-exempt status. Donoradvised funds, which are akin to charitable investment accounts, aren’t now required to make any donations in any one year.

The payoff, advocates say, would be an additional $200 billion for charities that serve families suffering hardships from the pandemic. The proposal has the backing of some leading philanthropists, including Scott Wallace of the Wallace Global Fund and Abigail Disney.

Still, it remains far from clear that his proposal can gain enough political support to make it through Congress. Even within the philanthropy community, some leading figures favor far more modest steps to increase donations. Others prefer to keep the status quo.

Philanthropist John Arnold, co-founder of Arnold Ventures, for one, is skeptical of any government mandate to compel foundations to increase their payouts. Arnold argues that the same goal can be achieved in other ways — by, for example, reducing loopholes that let foundations count donations in dubious ways or allow them to consider compensation paid to family members as part of their annual payouts.