By Frank Greve - McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - When Jody Richards saw a homeless man begging outside a McDonald's here recently, he bought the man a cheeseburger. There's nothing unusual about that, except that Richards is homeless, too, and the 99-cent cheeseburger was a good chunk of the $9.50 he'd earned that day from panhandling.

 
The generosity of poor people, however, isn't so much rare as rarely noticed. In fact, America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What's more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity of richer givers does.

 
"The lowest-income fifth [of the population] always give at more than their capacity," said Virginia Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a Washington association of major nonprofit agencies. "The next two-fifths give at capacity, and those above that are capable of giving two or three times more than they give."