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Child's Play Approaches Half a Million Dollars
SecureTheNet writes "Created by Penny Arcade, the Child's Play Charity gives all toy and monetary donations directly to hospitals for distribution to sick kids. There are NO administration fees taken. As the holidays approach, the donations are approaching half a million dollars!"
As a token of gratitude for such fine charitable work, I think it'd be nice to put a link to Penny Arcade itself in the story. :-)
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
No load charity is a wonderful thing. The current model of huge organizations with powerful overheads taxes donations. If you consider the actions of the administrators of charity, they're much like a program in numerous ways. I'm not saying that eliminating administration can be perfected (you need audits, and program adjustments along the way), but a higher efficiency model would be welcomed. Bureaucracies tend to grow until they suck away the intent of charitable organizations. Some are far more efficient than others.... but in a future world perhaps more of contributions gets to the need, rather than the machine that services the need.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
why on earth would they give any of the money they raised for their charity to another charity?
if someone wants to donate money that will help give kids video games who otherwise couldn't afford them (i don't know the ins and outs of their charity) they can donate through PA.
if they want to donate money that will help a different cause, they can go through that other cause. people want to know where their money is going when they donate it.
-- lol pwned
Dumping 500.000$ at once at an organisation that is not used to handling that kind of money isn't efficient .
If you'd actually read about the project, you'd see that the donations are split up among many different hospitals, and a large part of the donations are actually in the form of items bought through Amazon....So there is not going to be just a giant lump sum dumped on the charity or any of the receiving organizations.
Considering that donations go directly to hospitals, you could also say that it puts an extra burden on the hospital workers themselves. Last year PA tried to do all they could to help organize the huge flow of donations that came in, this year each hospital has to do it themselves. I'm not saying this is entirely a bad thing, but there is after all a reason "administrative fees" exist: that labor has to come from somewhere. Now, people living full-time off the mere organization of supposed "charity" work is one thing, but bringing a couple people in to move boxes around so that the people you're donating to don't have to do extra non-sick-children work, that's worth a bit of an administration fee.
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Fifty-Million-Penny Arcade!
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You can (and many people have) volunteer to help the individual hospitals deal with the deliveries. Also, children's hospitals are very used to getting large quantities of toys delivered since there are quite a few charities that do this sort of thing.
Does that figure include "Jack Thompson's" donation?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Not unusual at all.
c e/charity-watchdogs-1205.htm
If you look around, there's a lot of charaties that perform similar functions. Sometimes they target the same demographic group, sometimes they are bound by the same activity, sometimes they are tied to the same organization.
For example, there's more than one charity that caters to childern in hospitals. Toys for Tots, Child's Play, Get Well Gamers, Candlelight Foundation, Make A Wish Foundation, and The Shriner's Organization. Apologies to those I've missed, as I can not even begin to list them all.
There's more than one charity that appeals to a particular activity. Runners can attest to every race being tied to one charity or another, the organization coordinating the race basically survives and coordinates the race by taking a small cut from the charity proceeds. It's not illegal or unethical, as few runners will pony up charity money un-prompted but most will not gripe about an entrance fee if a portion is going to promote public goodwill. Bingo is a simliar activity driven revenue source for charities, with bingo parlors happily donating a protion of the earnings to charaties to offset ill will towards gambling in the community, and the players love it as they can soothe their losses by knowing that some of the money went to a good cause. I know of bingo parlors in Texas where every game donates to a different charity.
Organizations are another binding agent in the distribution of charity money. If you donate to your alma mater or local college / university, you often can put stipulations on the donation which effictvely makes the organization a multi-charity. One example is to specify that the dontated money is to only be spent on the library, or the departement of Biology, etc. The US Goverment also accepts charity money under such circumstances, and have a departement to distribute charity funds to the correct recipients. I have known a few people who have placed clauses in their wills to have their assets forwarded to paying off the national debt.
So it's not a great travisty to have identical, or near-identical charities competeing in their various arenas. Without competition, even in charaties, they would soon fall prey to the problems inherit with any monopoly. For charaties, that would spell beaurocratic processes for donation, department-based "kingdom building", excessive administration, and less of the donation arriving to its intended recipient.
Be glad you have a choice, one day you may find that a charity is very inefficent in distributing funds, and you might consider changing charities to another that still fulfills your wishes, but is ran by someone else. Consumer reports did a published study of charity comparison, and it was shocking to see how some squandered over 60% of the funds in (mis-)management of the distribution of such funds.
There's an excellent description of the problem at http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/personal-finan
And if you want to donate, http://www.charitywatch.org/ is useful in separating out the dogs from the winners.