How Sarasota's Philanthropic Community Shapes the City
Per capita, Sarasota is among the most philanthropically generous cities in America. Understanding how that giving is organized reveals a great deal about how the city actually functions.
By Edit Sarasota
Sarasota is a wealthy city, and its wealth has, over many decades, been channeled into cultural and civic institutions at a per-capita rate that astonishes observers from larger metropolitan areas.
The reasons are partly historical. The community of winter residents who began arriving in significant numbers after World War II were, in many cases, the sort of people who had built or inherited substantial wealth and who took seriously the obligations that came with it. They were accustomed to giving in their home cities — Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, New York — and they brought those habits to Sarasota.
The Community Foundation of Sarasota County, which manages over $400 million in assets, serves as the organizing backbone of much of this activity. Its annual Inspiration Awards, now in their third decade, have become one of the city's most significant social events precisely because they celebrate civic generosity across the full range of Sarasota's needs — from arts institutions to affordable housing organizations to youth programs.
The arts institutions — Ringling, Sarasota Opera, Sarasota Ballet, Asolo Repertory Theatre, and the rest — depend on this culture of giving in ways that their counterparts in larger cities do not. A city of Sarasota's size should not, by demographic logic alone, be able to sustain the cultural infrastructure it has. That it does is a function of organized, intentional philanthropy by a relatively small group of people who take their responsibilities seriously.
The next generation of Sarasota philanthropy faces a different challenge. The population is changing — younger, more diverse, arriving with different relationships to traditional cultural institutions. How the giving culture adapts to serve the full community, not just its most established institutions, will determine what kind of city Sarasota becomes.