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How to be Resilient? Local Philanthropy as a Collective Response to Natural Disasters

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Abstract

When communities are struck by natural disasters, human service organizations play an important role in supplementing governmental aids and catering to immediate humanitarian needs. Social capital is one of many factors affecting resource mobilization directed toward human service organizations as a proxy for local philanthropy. This study analyzed the effect of social capital on local philanthropy in communities affected by natural disasters and compared it to the effect of corporate philanthropy. In addition, this study examined how the relationships among social capital, corporate philanthropy, and local philanthropy were moderated by racial diversity to answer a long-standing argument regarding the effect of racial diversity on philanthropy. To this end, a panel dataset covering three given years and 3121 US counties was analyzed using GEE models. The results suggest that social capital does not always facilitate local philanthropy and its influence on local philanthropy is catalyzed by racial diversity. Also, corporate philanthropy positively influences resource mobilization toward human service organizations, more noticeably in communities affected by natural disasters.

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Notes

  1. For a more comprehensive description of how Social Capital Index is constructed, see https://aese.psu.edu/nercrd/community/social-capital-resources/social-capital-variables-for-2014/data-dictionary-social-capital-variables (Accessed, Jan 15, 2019).

  2. There are multiple causes to endogeneity, including unobserved and omitted variables. Endogeneity occurs when independent and control variables are correlated with the error term in the model. Our robustness check for endogeneity indicates that the error term in the model is zero-correlated with all of the main and control variables, which alleviates the issue of endogeneity with unobserved and omitted variables (Bascle 2008).

  3. There are 821 counties that experienced one natural disaster either hurricane, flood, or storm in 2005, 2009, and 2014. There are 1076 counties that experienced two or more natural disasters in 2005, 2009, and 2014.

  4. This information can be accessed at https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/analysis?ID=3EECE4D1-4B49-4DBA-9C3F-37A541769799.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank editors and reviewers for their helpful remarks. The authors would also like to thank participants of the paper session about inequality and civic engagement at ARNOVA 2019, Kijin Seong and Hannah Holmberg. Lastly, this research was initially motivated by Dr. Kyujin Jung’s publications. We believe that Dr. Kyujin Jung’s studies will be remembered and continue to inspire people in academia.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

    Hyunseok Hwang

  2. Department of Health and Human Performance, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, USA

    Dongoh Joo

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  1. Hyunseok Hwang
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Correspondence to Hyunseok Hwang.

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Hwang, H., Joo, D. How to be Resilient? Local Philanthropy as a Collective Response to Natural Disasters. Voluntas 32, 430–447 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-020-00239-0

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