A study just came out* showing that affluent people in Southern California are twice as generous as affluent
people in Northern California. California income tax data show that people in Los Angeles who earn at least
$200,000 a year commonly give $5,000 or more to charity annually, while people in the San Francisco Bay Area
earning just as much give less than half that amount each year. Commenting on the study, a Bay Area
philanthropy professional speculated that we don’t give as generously up here in Northern California because
we’re younger and more newly affluent than people in Southern California.
Quite apart from whatever is going on philanthropically, or not going on, in Southern California and Northern
California, we in Pleasanton and the surrounding communities of the Tri-Valley Region have our own
philanthropic muse to follow – a powerful, historic example of American philanthropy in the person of
Phoebe Apperson Hearst to guide us and to live up to. We are not too young or too newly affluent to do this.
The time is now.
*"Affluent Southern Californians Donate Nearly Twice as Much as Affluent in Northern California," Philanthropy News Digest,
December 28, 2006.
**Alexandra M. Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson’s Hearst’s ‘Gospel of Wealth,’ 1883-1901,” Pacific Historical Review, 71 (2002), p. 575.
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Northern California Philanthropy Goes South?
| From the President's Laptop: The TVCF Perspective Winter 2007 |
Whatever our median age, or however recent our good forturne, the Tri-Valley
Region certainly does not lack a history and traditon of philanthropy. One
hundred years ago, Pleasanton was home to an American philanthropic icon, a
woman referred to as “the complementary equal of … [Andrew] Carnegie.” The
woman, of course, is Phoebe Apperson Hearst. In a recent biographical piece
published by her beloved University of California, Hearst is introduced in this way:
"In 1901 U.S. Senator Jonathan Prentiss Dolliver of Iowa wrote a brief article in the
celebrity magazine Success titled ‘Phoebe Apperson Hearst and the New Gospel of
Wealth’ in which he linked Hearst and Andrew Carnegie as exemplars of American
philanthropy. Dolliver declared that Hearst was ‘[a] new kind of millionaire,’
interested in ‘good words and works of charity in the community in which she
lived [Pleasanton], and throughout all the cities of California.’”**
Region certainly does not lack a history and traditon of philanthropy. One
hundred years ago, Pleasanton was home to an American philanthropic icon, a
woman referred to as “the complementary equal of … [Andrew] Carnegie.” The
woman, of course, is Phoebe Apperson Hearst. In a recent biographical piece
published by her beloved University of California, Hearst is introduced in this way:
"In 1901 U.S. Senator Jonathan Prentiss Dolliver of Iowa wrote a brief article in the
celebrity magazine Success titled ‘Phoebe Apperson Hearst and the New Gospel of
Wealth’ in which he linked Hearst and Andrew Carnegie as exemplars of American
philanthropy. Dolliver declared that Hearst was ‘[a] new kind of millionaire,’
interested in ‘good words and works of charity in the community in which she
lived [Pleasanton], and throughout all the cities of California.’”**
Phoebe Apperson Hearst with
her grandchildren
her grandchildren
Phoebe Hearst's Pleasanton estate,
Hacienda del Pozo de Verona,
designed by architect Julia Morgan
Hacienda del Pozo de Verona,
designed by architect Julia Morgan