December 5, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
The number of charities will shrink, but the ranks of socially-driven businesses will swell. Charitable giving will drop, but at least 30 percent of the year’s biggest gifts will come from people outside the United States. And, new corporate structures, such as “B Corporations” and L3Cs, will be written into the law.
So predicts Lucy Bernholz in a blog post on the outlook for philanthropy in 2009.
In the post, Ms. Bernholz also looks back at her predictions from last year. Among them: one of the philanthropic prizes will solve a social problem (she says she was wrong on that one); half the magazines dedicated to philanthropy that were created in the past few years will fold (she was right); and at least one-third, if not one-half of the 10 biggest donations will come from non-Americans (she says we don’t have the data to assess whether she was correct).
Ms. Bernholz also says that in 2009, young people and people of retirement age will help energize the nonprofit field, and that the federal government will start an office devoted to supporting social causes.
Let us know if you agree with these predictions — and share some of your own — by clicking on the comment box below.
