Social Work Faculty Member Awarded Grand Prize In Korean Paper Competition

Sung-Ju Kim, an assistant professor of social work at NC State, was recently honored as the grand prize winner of the 2019 Best Paper Competition, sponsored by the Nanum Research Center on Philanthropy at the Community Chest of Korea. 

His paper, entitled, “Crowding-out effect: Relationship between government grants and private giving among Korean, Chinese, and Japanese nonprofit organizations in the U.S.,” is an analysis of giving patterns of East-Asian Americans living in the New York/New Jersey metro area.

Kim and Lewis Lee, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Alabama, found that the relationship between government grants and private giving was different for each East Asian-American nonprofit organization. Particularly, donors of Chinese and Japanese-American nonprofit organizations were willing to donate more money when their charities received more government grants.

In contrast, donors for Korean nonprofit organizations were less likely to donate to their charity when the organization received more government funds, but the result was not significant. The estimated crowding-in effects of government grants on private giving by each of the East Asian countries were explicated based on each country’s social, political and cultural background.

The findings highlight that each ethnic nonprofit organization in the U.S. would need to establish different strategies to utilize such information (i.e., receiving government grants) to help their donors shape giving patterns.

The Community Chest of Korea, the largest welfare institution in Korea, is modeled after the United Way of America.