Communities that give

Charity: Study attempts to identify factors that make some communities more generous than others | Rusty Leonard and Warren Cole Smith

Alabama Gov. Bob Riley as a Salvation Army volunteer

Birmingham and Memphis have it. Pittsburgh and San Antonio don't. Or, at least, they don't have as much.

"It" is generosity. A new study, sponsored by the Albuquerque-based Tijeras Foundation (TF), attempts to establish a benchmark for generosity and to identify factors that make some communities more generous than others—with the hope of transforming less generous communities into more generous ones.

TF president Virgil Dugan said the 60-city study is a first step toward giving local communities the training and motivation to help residents become more generous. The initiative, called Generous Communities, originated at the Chattanooga-based Maclellan Foundation and is a partnership between Maclellan-affiliated Generous Giving, the National Christian Foundation, and two financial planning groups, Crown Financial Concepts and Kingdom Advisors.