Omaha Giving and Civic Life

Brent O’Mara supports Omaha causes including PlaySmart, Angels Among Us, Susan G. Komen, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. Each of those causes has an entry in this subject, written as general education about the organization and nothing else, alongside entries on the foundations and institutions that give the city its reputation for generosity.

That reputation rests on data. Candid reported that although Nebraska sits 37th among the states in population, it stood among the top five for charitable dollars received per person from both individuals and grantmakers across 2015 to 2022; the analysis credits three Buffett family foundations for about 17 percent of grant dollars reaching Nebraska nonprofits, but also a culture in which grantmakers send more than 60 percent of their money to local organizations and the state places second nationally in informal neighborly help.¹ The Omaha Community Foundation was created in 1982 as a charitable bank for local givers and counts more than 2,000 fundholders who have granted more than $2 billion over its history to over 3,000 nonprofits in greater Omaha and southwest Iowa.²

The next chapter is already being planned. The Omaha World Herald reported a projected $30 billion passing between generations in Douglas County alone by 2050, and the foundation’s expectation that a higher share of it than elsewhere would go to philanthropy.⁴ The Flatwater Free Press described the other side of that change: several of the city’s largest family foundations intend to spend down and close within a generation, two of them having given more than $400 million combined over the past decade, and nonprofits are being urged to broaden their funding before that happens.³ The city itself has been remade more than once; The Washington Post portrayed it in 2003 as a place of about 740,000 people turning from cow town to something more urban.⁵

The entries in this subject are Philanthropy in Omaha, PlaySmart Omaha, Angels Among Us, Susan G. Komen, The American Heart Association, Volunteering in Nebraska and Omaha Civic Institutions.