Money may not be able to you happiness, but the public is rejoicing over the latest report stating that Americans gave $390 billion to charity in 2016 – a 4% increase from the $379.89 billion donated in 2015.

Detailed in the publication Giving USA 2017: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2016, this is only the sixth time in the last four decades that has reflected improvement across all nine sectors of philanthropy: religion; education; human services; giving to foundations; health; public-society benefit; arts, culture and humanities; international affairs; and environment and animals.

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Amongst individuals, corporations, estate donations, and foundations, individual Americans were shown to improve the most by donating 4% more than the previous year. Corporations and foundations also showed improvement, while estate donations fell slightly.

“This report tells us that Americans remained generous in 2016, despite it being a year punctuated by economic and political uncertainty,” said Aggie Sweeney, chair of the Giving USA Foundation. “We saw growth in every major sector, indicating the resilience of philanthropy and diverse motivations of donors.”

“Individual giving continued its remarkable role in American philanthropy in a year that included a turbulent election season that reflected a globally resurgent populism,” said Amir Pasic, Ph.D., the Eugene R. Tempel Dean of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. “In this context, the absence of a dramatic change in giving is perhaps remarkable, but it also demonstrates the need for us to better understand the multitude of individual and collective decisions that comprise our record of national giving.”

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