Philanthropy researchers receive $300,000 grant

IU professors on both the Bloomington and IUPUI campuses were awarded a three-year, $300,000 grant for an initiative on philanthropy in China.

Scott Kennedy, director of the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at IU Bloomington, and Angela Bies, director of international programs at the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IUPUI, will lead the project.

The grant will support summer internships in China for two IU students per year, as well as research projects, workshops and conferences. Kennedy and Bies will jointly teach a course in Bloomington and Indianapolis which will focus on philanthropy and civil society in China.

“The depth and extent of this project is far beyond what is the norm — to have a teaching component, to have a service component and a policy component all in one project,” Bies said in the release.

Today, there are more than 3,000 registered foundations in China, and overall philanthropic giving accounts for 1.5 to 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

“We’re in very early days in terms of the emergence of China’s philanthropic sector,” Kennedy said in the release. “China is among the more developed countries in terms of the overall amount of giving and philanthropic activity, but from the perspective of people who look at China, it looks like a very immature sector. It’s grown quickly, but it’s not very well developed.”

Bies said the developing regulatory environment in China has led universities there to play more of a leading role in conducting research in the philanthropic sector than has been seen in other emerging philanthropic sectors. She said she believes this research will have applications in similar sectors in other parts of the world.

“The growth of and changing role of philanthropy is a global phenomenon,” Bies said. “This is an important issue as NGO sectors merge and change, as they emerge and as democratic institutions evolve in various parts of the world.”

— Tori Fater