Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Most Efficient, Worthwhile Charity?
New submitter yanom writes "I'm thinking about making a holiday donation to a charity, but I'm not sure where to give it. I've looked at organizations such as the Red Cross and Village Reach that promote disaster relief and health in the developing world. I want my money to have the biggest possible impact, so where should I send it?"
Charity Navigator
I've been profoundly disappointed by all charities I gave to or came in contact with professionally.
Give your time to something close to you, not your money.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
What I like about the Salvation Army is they operate under the principle that people will always donate and they spend the money as it is donated.
The Red Cross and others seem to want to build a war chest so that when a big disaster hits they will be prepared. They take money from big events and hold some of it over for other operations. What bothers me about this is it seems like they don't trust people to donate when something happens.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
More like 3.9%.
Wikipedia might be a nice option too, the knowledge they provide to everyone free of charge makes it a good charity in my opinion.
http://www.childsplaycharity.org/
All donations go to children's hospitals around the world. You can even donate toys instead of money if you don't trust how your donation will be spent.
100% efficiency. No administrative overhead. Complete certainty that your gift wasn't squandered.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
http://www.shelterboxusa.org/
Basically, after any kind of disaster, natural or otherwise, they deploy a team out with plastic tubs filled with just about anything a family would need to start getting back on their feet like a tent, some basic food and water purification type things, along with some tools to improve what they have available. They are also constantly tweaking the box as better items become available, or in some instances they tailor the contents to where the boxes are being sent.
Decent charity that I found out from a friend. I've started to donate to them yearly now, along with some other charities for more personal reasons.
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
Excuse me, but what does one person retiring with "a very good pension" say about how high the administrative costs are vs program costs? Charity Navigator says ARC has a 3.9% administrative cost. The parent post claims 49% administrative cost (which is insanely high). If you believe Charity Navigator, he's only off by an order of magnitude.
AccountKiller
No, give it to ME. I have zero overhead - I can guarantee that 100% of the net you give me will go to the intended recipient.
I even accept chocolate!
Seriously though, if you don't know what to give or where, go ask at:
1. your local police or fire station. They get to see human misery every day, and they know about those "pockets of need" ...
2. your local hospital or clinic. Same thing.
3. your local animal shelter. Pets are people too, and they're going to need a lot of help dealing with the annual post-christmas "pet dump".
4. your local schools. The teachers know that there's always some kid who need a winter coat, warm boots, or something.
5. your local library. It's probably under-funded, and you can make a "donation" by buying old books from them so they can buy new books.
6. your local church, synagogue or temple - even if you're an atheist, these organizations are still good points of contact for the needy
7. your local homeless shelter. Obvious reasons
8. your local media - tv, radio, print
9. your local city counselor, alderman, mayor, or whatever
10. your friends and neighbors.
What all these things have in common is that they're all local, they're all just an email or a phone call or a click away, and that they'll have an immediate impact - within days - and they all benefit your community. Charity begins at home.
+4 insightful?
It must be the Christmas eggnog.
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=3277
*shakes head sadly*
Living in the US, I think it's a gross injustice that people in my immediate area don't have enough food to eat. As such, I have decided most of my charity contributions will go to the local community food bank. It's super easy to see how the money is being used (volunteer and meet the people involved, go down and talk to the admins), it improves the lives of people who live near you, and you get a tax deduction.
National and international organizations are nice, especially for medical causes, but for me local food bank seemed best.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
I was centrally involved with relief for the Haiti earthquake and observed the Red Cross and many other such organizations in action. Or rather inaction. Their lack of logistical expertise and disaster planning is shocking.
But one outfit that did seem to have their act together was Doctors without Borders/Medecins sans Frontieres. They just hop on planes and start helping people, no BS. They also seem to have relatively low overhead, which is where the lion's share of every donated dollar goes at most charities. Maybe someone else on /. knows differently, but at least from the outside as a colleague they seemed effective and well deserving of support.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I know that God is not popular on Slashdot, but even from a rational humanist perspective these charities are very effective. The administrative costs are usually born by regular tithing so any funds given to the charity can be spent 100% on the core mission of the charity. Especially, in the area of disaster relief, these charities also have strong connections with the local congregations who can quickly put resources to use where it is most needed. This in contrast to groups like the Red Cross usually have to spend time "getting in" to places.
I know there will be some objections voiced that the money will be used to evangelize victims rather then aid them. I cannot speak for other sectors of the religious sphere, but charities associated with Mainline Protestant Christian churches operate in perpetual fear of this accusation and copiously avoid any activity that might be mistaken for proselytizing.
I will end by plugging the charity of my own Episcopal Church: Episcopal Relief and Development.
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
I give to Charity: Water. They've got a great proposition where 100% of your donations go directly to the field to fund water projects. They're also a tech saavy group of folks and try to prove that by providing GPS signals and photos of the project you funded. Administrative costs are covered separately by a group of benefactors (who understand they are solely paying for administrative costs).
Citizens who wish to make a general donation to the U.S. government may send contributions to a specific account called "Gifts to the United States." This account was established in 1843 to accept gifts, such as bequests, from individuals wishing to express their patriotism to the United States. Money deposited into this account is for general use by the federal government and can be available for budget needs. These contributions are considered an unconditional gift to the government. Financial gifts can be made by check or money order payable to the United States Treasury and mailed to the address below.
Gifts to the United States
U.S. Department of the Treasury
Credit Accounting Branch
3700 East-West Highway, Room 622D
Hyattsville, MD 20782
Any tax-related questions regarding these contributions should be directed to the Internal Revenue ServiceExit the FMS Web site at (800) 829-1040.
Giving your time may make you feel better - but when $10 can feed a family for 4 for a day or two, with soups, breads etc., your time is inherently useless. Go use your time to earn money and then pass it on. Barter was fundamentally inefficient - and hence money came to be. Why go backwards ?
A quote from the comments section on Charity Navigator:
I have worked for the ARC for over 11 years now as both a volunteer and a paid staff member. The organization is very top heavy with mostly overpaid executives at the National Headquarters in Washington DC. Generally the volunteers and staff "in the field" are the ones who go to great lengths to serve clients. Many positions in the field have been eliminated in recent years as the executives in the "ivory tower" protect their own salaries and positions. Our Service Members and their families are now served mostly by call centers empoyees who are inexperienced instead of caring employees working alongside our military throughout the world.
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
If I may suggest an alternative, give micro loans through kiva.org instead. You can just keep recycling the money into new loans as you get paid back. The good gets multiplied many times over and communities get built up.
I want to help Hawa Akther Jui, a Bangladeshi woman whose husband disfigured her right hand when she dared to pursue higher education against his wishes. She's determined to continue learning by training her left hand to write, and I admire her persistence. Anyone who wants to join me is more than welcome, details in my linked blog post.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I can confirm this, even on the "local" level charities. I have worked with several "charity" groups doing IT work (NO - I won't name them). Several times it was recovering their financial data files after being corrupted for various reasons. Every time, I about shit myself when I looked at the actual data (had to confirm the data was valid with accountants). The worst I saw was one group that used 5% of their donations for actual recipients, the rest went to "administrative" costs (salaries in the 6 figure range, pension, rent, etc.).
I've since quit taking any work from charity organizations, and I refuse to donate any money to them.
Go to your local soup kitchen and ask what they need. Then buy it and give them the goods.
Also don't just do it because it is Christmas. Ask what they need all year around and give food or whatever they need monthly or even on a weekly basis.
Time is also something that they can use. Take time to talk to lonely elderly people. The downside is that you won't get rid of your money and get back more then you give away.
Do not buy yourself a good conscience. Earn it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It charged because the Army told it to. C'mon, a 5-digit Slashdotter should know about Snopes.
It never gets better utilized than local. A local church or community center or health service. Direct to the service you like best, even.
You don't need a middle-man.
Pretty much as efficient as you can get: 100% of the proceeds go to help those in need. The LDS Church doesn't even deduct the cost of administering the donations, so literally *everything* you donate ends up helping the needy.
http://www.ldsphilanthropies.org/ldsp/about/
If you donate online, just enter the amount in the "humanitarian services" field - that goes to disaster relief and other efforts. If you call them you can have it applied more specifically. For example there is a program they are doing to supply wheelchairs to those in need, to help dig water wells to villages in Africa, etc. and you can ask that your money go specifically to one of those programs if you want.
If everyone who gave to charity gave to the one who deserves it the most, then all causes in the world except for the most worthy one would receive no money, until that most worthy cause was completely paid for, in which case the second most worthy cause would receive all the money, etc.
So I'd think a bit before giving to the most worthwhile. If it was me I'd give to groups that did things I knew about even if they weren't the most worthy groups in the world, which would include geeky groups like the EFF, or maybe local organizations.
I also agree with others that volunteering your time is a bad idea. Use your time to earn money and donate the money. We have division of labor for a reason. People like volunteering because it's more personal, but "more personal" and "helps people more" aren't necessarily the same thing.
Child's Play seems to be a good one, they help kids with severe problems suffer less and recover faster.
Twinstiq, game news
Give work to someone who needs it. It's probably the most efficient use of your money that I can think of.
Mind the frickin' laser...
I've spent the better part of my career as a nonprofit tech warrior, from serving in the Peace Corps to a variety of domestic and internationally focused NGOs and non-profits, small and large, contract, full-time and pro-bono.
I hate the constant drive that non-profits feel towards minimizing anything that could be counted as "overhead." It's misleading, and eventually kills efficiency. Not having someone to answer phones, not having a budget to roll out a website, penny-pinching on every single thing that's not directly program-related does a variety of things. It burns staff out at an alarming rate, as they spend their often-unreported and uncompensated overtime to balance the lack of budget to hire additional staff or contractors. Second, it causes cost-cutting in ways that often lead to waste or additional in the long run. It suppresses wages and pushes good staff out of the sector entirely. Finally, it causes a donor-driven view of accounting, where every dollar must be accountable to some chunk of some program, instead of being broadly useful to the health of the organization and its mission.
This hurts the organizations, obviously - but as a donor, that's less important - you (like those working at the organization) care about the cause. And year-end campaigns are a huge benefit to organizations - providing them with unrestricted funds that they can use for the health of the organization, instead of funds driven by grant projects.
So give - as others have noted, find a local cause you're familiar with. Use CharityNavigator to weed out suspicious/dubious causes, but please - do not be turned off by high overheads. They're healthy. They mean the organization has a longer-term view on its role in making change.
Even better - find a social enterprise - an organization that has a double or triple bottom line, creating a profit or self-sustaining funding situation by selling products or services which also help them lift up a community through employment, skills training, and so on.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Engineers without borders might be interesting:
http://www.ewb-usa.org/
I like the fact that they have established a way of dealing with their charity faliures , which makes them a respectable charity in my book. ... And adds some credibility to the profession of engineering, imho.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca