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Ask Slashdot: With Grants Drying Up, How Is a Tech Non-Profit To Survive?
helios17 writes "Non-Profits like this have traditionally gotten started from the money grants provide. Most grants award vehicles, computers, and even pay for organization rental and utility costs. The problem fledgling and even established non-profits are encountering is the dwindling number of grants allowing for Operating or General Support costs. What good is a vehicle received via grant if you can't afford to put fuel in it? With the number of Operating or General Support grants shrinking and those available funds competed for heavily, should we be looking on line for help? Can efforts like this be a better way to approach it?"
Lobbying is obsolete.
Why are the grants drying up? Despite the much-hyped "austerity", in reality the government has spent more money in each of the recent years than ever before.
So where is all the damned money going???
Create a product, something that people want and fills a need. Sell it at a reasonable profit. Stop stealing money from society. The gravy train is ending, don't wait for it to jump the tracks. People are wising up to these criminals taking all our hard earned cash and pocketing it.
Donors and grant-givers are increasingly more careful about who they give money to. Even ignoring the scams, they want to know that they are having the greatest effect for their money. Of course it is not always true, but larger organizations tend to have less overhead and better accountability in showing what is being delivered for the money they receive. Then of course there's the elephant in the room: Are you really sure you are helping? Perhaps you should be doing something else that the community you are serving needs more.
You never hear about the government laying people off unless they misbehave, and government salaries and benefits are way higher than the private sector.
Selling stuff that does not relate to your exempt purpose is considered unrelated business income and subject to tax (in the U.S.)
http://www.irs.gov/Charities-&-Non-Profits/Unrelated-Business-Income-Defined
New Economic Perspectives
I worked for The Seattle Foundation for a while (a while ago) and they serve as sort-of an intermediary between people wanting to donate and non-profits seeking funding. Donors vastly prefer to fund capital acquisitions over operating costs - it's just sexier and feels cooler to people who think in terms of growing things (money, power) by default. "Hey, I got them this new truck," sounds better than "I paid for gas and an oil change for this old truck they've had for a decade." You will find donors who believe in a cause and fund both, but they also want to have the freedom to say no and not be taken for granted.
I have to wonder if some of this is the changing values of our population and culture.
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
Think hearts and minds funding:
Step 1. Find any US gov funded anthropologist. Chat with them about US gov funding, regions of the world with the US is handing out big aid grants.
Step 2. Sell, present your tech skills in a new light. Your helping sell brand USA to the world, diverting impressionable young people to good US projects.
Allowing US tech, methods, Universities, hardware, software to filter down to places where its been seen as too expensive, distant or difficult.
Step 3. Find some history project in need of interesting OCR/scanning tech. ie scan torn-up documents, old books, allow locals to create open source fonts, put their past together using US help.
Think brand name US tech and the 'free' code/software they help write with your expert skills over time.
Local empowerment, respect and great media/branding long term.
The wonderful art, culture they can present back in the USA that you helped uncover, save and gift to the world.
Cross discipline with a strong local element. The U.S. Department of State is the best friend you can have long term, as with other gov groups that will notice you over time.
If any part of the US gov asks for any small favour, always say yes, long term you might be well funded for all costs if you "help".
Get a list of your congress critters and other parties congress critters charities - get to know the faith or medical ie the international projects they like to be seen with.
Write a letter, frame what you get back and keep talking to their staff long term, work both sides, with your 'tech skills' and how inspiring their projects where/are.
Drop that political name depending on the right or left blog/press if interviewed - a few lines of good news spreads fast.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The mistake I see with so many non-profits is that they are run without trying to make a profit. Go make a profit, make as much as you can (just don't pay dividends). They are businesses at the core, even if non profit businesses. Forget that at your peril.
Learn to love Alaska
Spoken like a true fucktard with not a hint of social responsibility, completely oblivious to the debt that you owe to your society and to the civilization that has given you your education and the underpinnings of everything that you know and possess.
Just sayin', you know.
I have worked for a variety of non-profits and written grants for them. I'm surprised that there ever was money for operating expenses available for tech-based non-profits since every foundation I've petitioned for grant money has specifically said that they do not provide operating costs. Instead, I write grants with a specific project in mind. This could be "build a new wing to the university library", "Fund staff to inventory the museum collection in storage," or "run a week-long day camp for inner-city youth that teaches non-violent conflict resolution methods."
Unless you have some kind of revenue stream, you are going to be relying on donations and volunteers just like a community clothes closet for the homeless. Sounds like now that the gravy train of easy money is drying up these tech non-profits are being forced to demonstrate how they benefit the public good. I'm sure that there are many worthy causes, but now their in the wild competing for the same dollars and mind-share as food pantries, elder advocacy groups, and animal shelters.
"non-profit" doesnt mean you cant support your expenses, it simply means that your company isnt out for profit.
(most of this stuff should be obvious, but the laser pointer is included to help you pass the time making dinosaurs chase after the little red light while you wait to be rescued)
It's kind of funny - before clicking the link to even see what kind of non-profit it is, I thought of a non-profit know that collects old computers, images them, and sells them. That was before I read that the link had anything to do with that. Basic desktops really haven't advanced that much in the last few years, so there are a lot of "old" computers being given away or sold for garage sale prices that are perfectly usable. A sizeable portion of the time, people are replacing computers and the only thing "wrong" with them is a bunch of malware.
So you want to fund giving away refurbished computers? Sell the best ones. Selling one for $250 will fund reimaging / reconfiguring 10 others. Sell one for $125, that will probably cover your costs of five giveaways.
Earn your money, then buy a kid a computer... Would be better for both of you.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
He's not the one running a non-profit, asking for free money. He's an author who's giving away two of his books for free, and asking people to make small donations to Reglue, which is a non-profit in the Texas area I think.
It seems you didn't actually read anything on his site, like you claim.
Why should your non-profit survive when compared to any of the others? The overwhelming majority are staffed with good people with good intentions who work for very little money. The problem is one over-saturation for the market and a donation fatigue from a public that is burned out. There are hundreds of thousands of non-profits in the US alone and every single one of them thinks that /they/ are the most important.
When a business starts to think that they 'deserve' our money we accuse them of entitlement (e.g. Circuit City) and vilify them. A non-profit really isn't any different in that they serve a function that costs money and in order to survive need to take in money. Like a business they can merge, be bought or go bankrupt.
Frankly if more non-profits started to merge it would enable greater economies of scale and efficiencies, just like a business. It would also enable them to spend more money on their mission and less money on overhead. Services from secretarial to bandwidth to phone banks could be shared at greater efficiency across more organizations.
Perhaps my answer seems callous, but the bottom line is that no organization is entitled to survive. Non-profits need to embrace what the business world has done and go through a series of mergers for the greater good. Are your clients better served by your merging with another organization because you are stretched so thin that you are no longer effective?
People typically start and run non-profits because their ego tells them that they can do better than the person already running a like kind service. Society as a whole would benefit enormously if non-profits put their missions before their egos. These warm hearted organizations need some cold blooded business acumen.
Have you considered making a social network for cats instead? Ms. Naemeka will understand.
Yeah he asked Slashdot for advice on fundraising for a non-profit technical entity. He didn't ask us for money, just advice. You act like he stuck his hand in your pocket and grabbed your wallet while kissing your wife.
They are doing something. They are gathering information on what their next fiscal move should be. Instead of just asking random idiots like you for money, they foolishly assume that you might be worth more than a couple of bucks.
Ok, fine linux is politics, blah blah blah. You gonna buy those shiny Windows licenses for them? Neither is anyone else.
Also, did you read the book? Do you know its crap? Do you even have half a decent reason for attacking an author who is, literally, just trying to help? Didja stop and think "wait....maybe..THIS...is what that pesky marketing crap I keep hearing about is. Oh well, i don't have time to worry about that I have to update NoScript and AdblockPlus++ cause advertising is for suckers!" Nah, you just bash everyone involved cause you're butthurt about this week's episode of Game of Thrones. If you'd read a book you might have seen that coming btw...
They are doing something. They are providing computers for disadvantaged kids. They are not brand new, they do not run the latest Windows and have all the shiny games installed. But that's cause they are tools, not toys. They are making the most of what they can get, and doing actual, tangible good for the children of their communities. I didn't half their webpages but I got that from the front page on both. If you did not, you need to calm down, take a deep breath, and go read them again. They need money for running their day to day operations. Utility bills, gas, insurance, etc. All those things cost money. A car really is useless without insurance and gas to run it, money to get regular service on it to make it last as long as possible and stretch that donated vehicle's life out as long as possible.
Lots of investors/donators no longer want to foot that bill cause they don't see it as "helping" is the point of the submission. You didn't address that at all and went on some rant about how you think they should be running their business, a business which you admit you have no idea what it actually is.
On the actual topic, yes Submitter, if you cannot get grants to run your non-profit general expenses, then you have to turn to fundraising for it. I feel that giving away a product and hoping for donations is probably less effective than actually either selling items directly or partnering with another for-profit organization and getting a cut of sales for a limited time. you'll get your agreed cut, they get to call that whole thing a charitable contribution on their bottom line, and their customers get to feel good knowing they did something to help while getting something they wanted anyways.
Huh??? The idea of grants being served by the "inteligencia in government" -- honestly, it sickens me. What is the inteligence level of a typical person in civil service relative to the typical startup employee or entrepreneur? Oh help me please... I've worked for civil service in the past, and I know the real story.
Honestly, we all know that the "Inteligencia" in government cannot fight out their way out of a paper bag. So, how does it serve the public good for these designers of waste, these perfect jewels of the moric, and even criminaly graphic behaviour, to decide that even one charity deserves funding in the interest of society?
If a tech non-profit cannot sustain itself by garnering public support through donations for it's work in the public interest... dude... it doesn't deserve to survive.
example:
old slogan: we give used computers to poor people
new slogan: by recruiting young people into the Infosec milieu, we help america defend against the goddam commie chinese hackers and the motherfucking russians who are trying to make our power system go offline so they can invade our country, kill our leaders, and convert us to non-americanism.
i have seen people get layed off and fired all the time in the government.
This would be the definition of irony.
You give away computer for free, and you can't afford computers of your own. So you want someone else to buy you a computer, in order to help manage your give-away-free-computers business. Ptysician, heal thyself?
Perhaps, just maybe, you should select a mission that you can actually achieve; you know, on your own: with your own skills, and your own money.
And deficits will still rise. This "austerity" thing should be called corruption.
Seriously now: Handheld cellular-networked supercomputers are this short of being sold in newspaperstands and gumball machines for less than a days worth of MC Donalds burger-flipper wages. What do you need such a non-profit for?
I don't want to rain on the GPs parade, but this seems more like a pet project/hobby to me than anything else. If it really is a charity, well then, call it a charity and do charity work.
No one needs an organization that hands out free leftover computers anymore. Not with brand new Nexus 7s being sold for 179,- Euros in the bargain bin at the tech store just around the corner from where I work right now. That's my humble opinion anyway.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
"Non-Profit" is just a tax status. And yes, I know of some folks who became millionaires operating non-profits.
They also had a good culture that did not engage in much territorial expansion, like the Europeans did.
China's history is chock full of territorial expansion. That's how it was created in the first place and how most subsequent empires became established, for example. And it has modern military adventures such as the conquest of Tibet or the overthrow of French Indochina.
The big dispute was over Chinese trade with foreigners.
For a few brief decades. China has had many other disputes over the millennia.
The big question, is who won the Cultural Revolution?
The Culturan Revolution wasn't a "dispute", but rather the stamping of ants, 1984-style, to show who was in charge. The ants lost. The ones doing the stamping won.
Don't confuse "culture" with "capability". China in the past didn't have the capability to project its power very far. It was able to win wars in Sri Lanka for example at extraordinary cost. Today it like every other major country has global reach. I believe it will be different and the culture will turn out to be not all that different after all.
I fail to see how him complaining about people who feel entitled to be in his pocket makes him a "true fucktard."
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
You may wish to familiarize yourself with Rolex (the corporation, you can't afford the watch) before stating such silly things. They are operated by a foundation which has charitable obligations but they're very much for profit and very much tax payers.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
You want money to combat the influence of money? Hmm... I think not.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Anyone who thinks grants have anything more than a minimal role in nonprofit sustainability does not understand how noprofit businesses work, unless they are supported by a unit of government as an agent for the provision of human services, like Chicago Area Project which gets the bulk of its revenue from state grants.
Nonprofits generally earn the preponderance of their revenue on a continuing basis from donations by individuals and/or organizations/businesses. They work to develop large networks of interested donors by having a properly constituted board of directors- meaning that board members designated as 'money people', whose primary purpose on the board is to assist in fundraising, must meet annual donation requirements- either directly from that board member's pocket, or through the network of pockets that board member is able to access. The combination of a good set of 'money' board members, a savvy development director, events, charged services, grants, and systematic/consistently applied overhead costs all lead to sustainability. Schools and hospitals have an additional tool- they can actually earn the bulk of their revenue from investment income, which other nonprofits are not allowed to do.
Just Kickstart it, there are enough bleeding hearts out there willing to separate themselves from from a few hundred dollars on a 'scause for applause, just offer them an orange wristband as a reward.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I worked for The Seattle Foundation for a while (a while ago) and they serve as sort-of an intermediary between people wanting to donate and non-profits seeking funding. Donors vastly prefer to fund capital acquisitions over operating costs - it's just sexier and feels cooler to people who think in terms of growing things (money, power) by default. "Hey, I got them this new truck," sounds better than "I paid for gas and an oil change for this old truck they've had for a decade." You will find donors who believe in a cause and fund both, but they also want to have the freedom to say no and not be taken for granted.
I have to wonder if some of this is the changing values of our population and culture.
That's the same problem we have in government with keeping stuff working. Everyone wants a new bridge or aircraft carrier named after them, but no one wants to fund the million bucks a year to keep the bridge or aircraft carrier painted. Of course, it's the same in the life of an individual. We will brag to each other about buying a new car or a new house, but we won't brag to each other about buying a new transmission or a new water heater for an already-existing 'used' car or house.
Nothing has changed. same old same old
What emes said.
The vast majority of non-profits in the United States rely on individual donations. Giving USA estimated that $298 billion was donated in 2011, and individuals were responsible for $217 billion, 73% of all philanthropic giving in the U.S.
Donors want their contributions to make a difference in addressing the cause they care about. That is why giving in the last decade has focused more and more on restricted, project-specific funding.
Non-profits must cultivate individual donors who believe in the organization's mission and want to address the same issue. And, while doing so, they must also communicate with their donors and stakeholders that general operating costs are essential to the sustainability of the organization.
Like someone above already mentioned, it is really hard to achieve your goals and accomplish your mission if your organization cannot afford to keep the lights on.
Non-profit orgs ( 501c3 in general) are also allowed to have subsidiaries corporation that are for-profit. So technically the non-profit can hold shares of the for-profit and receive dividends to sustain its operation. (That is assuming the for-profit subsidiary is actually making money and giving dividend to its share holders.)
New Economic Perspectives
That makes more sense.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Reglue, as it is organized today, cannot succeed or sustain itself much longer.
How is it organized? Who runs it?
When did it begin operations? How was it founded?
Who is on the board of directors? Who is on the board of advisors?
Your website sort of addresses some of these questions, but it is not clear when the organization was necessarily founded nor who currently runs Reglue.
If you are in the process of applying for 501(c)(3) status, where are you in that process and when do you anticipate receiving your determination letter? Which organization is currently serving as your fiscal agent in order to allow you to accept charitable gifts?
Also, Reglue must get a 501(c)(3) designation if you want it to survive and grow. If I was an institutional funder, I would be suspicious of the fact you have been operating since 2005 and still need an outside organization to be your fiscal agent. For one or two, possibly, three years, that is okay but eight years? That length of time creates questions about the management of the organization and its competence.
In my view, Chinese culture is indeed less violent, as the Mandate of Heaven can be revoked from the ruling emperor based on performance.
Look at the estimated body counts for such Chinese revolutions. They are among the bloodiest conflicts in history.
In other words, there's a greater separation of church (culture) and state.
The Communist party controls China. That's the religion of China today. So there isn't a separation of church and state.
Of course, the state can always try to be its own religion so it doesn't have to share with the church.
An approach that China is currently employing.
Good point on the gift economy. Part of this in the USA may befrom a feminist movement that pushed women into the exchange economy and out of the gift economy for a variety of reasons? Maybe tech non-profits can't survive drying up grants, but there are still other ways to do tech in the gift economy or planned economy or subsistence economy, Maybe we'll even see a "basic income" which would help more free software developers have the time to do great stuff.
From my website:
========
In brief, there have always been five interwoven "economies" based on five different types of economic transactions (illustrated in the picture above). The balance of them changes with technological changes and cultural changes. They are:
* A subsistence economy. This involves production directly for ones own group, like gardening or hunting and gathering. For example, "There's some lovely berries over here."
* A gift economy. This involves voluntary contributions to individuals or a community, like volunteering at a hospital. For example, "The meat from this deer I hunted is going to spoil; I'll share it with the tribe, and others will share their hunting results some other time as they have in the past."
* A planned economy. This involves a group deciding to do something together, with failure to participate as told by the group generally met with some penalty (whether shunning, exclusion, imprisonment, or violence). For example, "Let's put the longhouse here. I'll cut the trees, you level the ground, you over there will put up the walls, and you over there will cook us some food while we are busy with these other tasks; if you don't help, you can't live in it and no one will ever talk to you again or have anything to do with you socially."
* An exchange economy. This involves purchasing something for money or bartering something for something else. One complex but current example is "purchasing" a Smartphone at a website that can store all the music you could listen to in a lifetime in exchange for flipping a few bits in a banking computer that somehow relate to a specific amount of pieces of paper with fancy printing on them which for some reason we all agree means something. For a simpler example, "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. I'll trade you some of my extra berries for some of your extra deer meat."
* A theft (or conquest) economy. This involves someone breaking the social norms for the above other types of transactions and taking what they want against the wishes of someone else. This can also be thought of, to a lesser extent, as someone "stealing" from the future, by staking out a formal claim to something on the logic of "finders-keepers", when other people who come later might want to share same resource but will be denied access based on claims related to ancient history backed by some form of "defense". For example, "What's yours is now mine because I'm stronger, cleverer, sneakier, faster, older, or can afford better lawyers, so hand over your digital watch or there will be trouble."
It is rare that any transaction is purely of one sort, in the same way that one color of paint may be a mix of other colors. For example, an exchange transaction might have some gift component of good will about a merchant who gives back to the community voluntarily. Subsistence production is generally based on a claim to physical resources like who gets to a berry bush first, and knowledge of how to make things may be a gift from the past. A country with a planned economy may have taken the land from indigenous people who had a gift economy and may ration things using some form of currency. And so on. And it is common that a transaction has "externalities" where other individuals are helped or harmed who are not party to the transaction (one reason governments get involved in exchange transactions is to regulate such externalities such as pollution). So, these "cartoonish" ideas are to help people think better about economics as far as what is possible as far as alternatives, not as clearly-defined a
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I think this begs the question who the hell was supposed to be watching the watchers?
The Watchtower, of course. But who watches the Watchtower?
i made 100k off the derivatives market in the past week.
So should people be shorting the integrals market?
Do you read your links or not bother paying attention? Rolex pays plenty of taxes... Really, it's okay to be wrong. Hell, here's a quote from YOUR link:
Founded in London at the start of last century by a German watchmaker named Hans Wilsdorf, along with his English brother-in-law Alfred Davis, Rolex started with Swiss movements and English components. It moved to Switzerland during World War 1 to avoid British taxes. In 1944 Wilsdorf established the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation, which is reported to be treated in Swiss law as a charitable foundation, and thus saves on Swiss taxes. It continues to hold the shares of the company; Wilsdorf himself died in 1960.
Emphasis mine.
Don't you think that if they paid ZERO taxes (I note you've now moved the goal posts to "corporate taxes" instead of "tax-free money" which is *all* money) that would be mentioned? Notice how it isn't? The Foundation owns the company, the foundation is a non-profit, the company is FOR profit though, the Foundation makes charitable donations (a great deal of them) as is required, and thus your amended statement that they pay no CORPORATE tax is correct BUT they still pay plenty of taxes. They just don't pay the corporate tax. You don't think that's the only tax do you?
Note your first statement:
Declare yourself a non-profit. Make a product. Sell it for a ton of money. Do what you want with your tax-free money.
Note your second statement:
Rolex does not pay corporate tax [businessinsider.com] as it is privately held by the registered charity Hans Wilsdorf Foundation.
Note the difference? The second one is quite correct. The first one is not. They still pay other taxes and still have to spend money via charities (instead of taxation) in order to keep the non-profit status. I'm not sure but I recall reading that they burden is actually HIGHER this way as they must make contributions greater than what their tax rate would have been. I'm not able to confirm that and no longer have the magazine that it was in so don't take that part as gospel. On top of that, they STILL must pay quite a variety of other taxes that vary depending on the country they're doing business in.
The first statement is that they pay no taxes. It is, according to their statement, tax-free money. That statement is incorrect.
The second statement is that they pay no CORPORATE TAXES which is very much correct but has no bearing on the conversation as that's not what was asserted.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The context was about China's overall history, not just the recent few decades.
Any context that ignores what the Chinese society, culture, and government actually does now, is not a particularly useful or relevant context.
Missing the forest for the trees. Those bloody conflicts were revolutions. The tree of liberty has to be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and martyrs. That doesn't make the culture violent.
Actually, yes, it does. For example, democracies as a rule don't require a bloody revolt in order to change the form of government.
But if you want to talk about Communist/today's China, it's worth noting that Communist started as an invention of Europe.
No, I don't think it's worth mentioning.
Mao might not have risen to power without help from Stalin. You could even say Stalin/USSR was the Big Brother (pun intended) in the relationship.
After the Long March, Stalin wasn't. Mao established sole leadership over the Chinese Communists after this point and Soviet influence in the Chinese civil war was greatly curtailed. And I would imagine that any competent military leader whether relatively peaceful or not will figure out how to obtain allies in a conflict.
So it's not particularly interesting that Mao had allies even European ones. Attila the Hun had European allies too. So did Gandhi.
what's that got to do with United Way?? You're posting about the interday price of yo-yo's on the chinese market.
EduCap is an on-profit student loan company made of t three organizations: EduCap, Loan to Learn and a charitable fund operating as the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation
Of course, this ignores how just trying to establish a democracy is difficult without violence.
If you have to resort to violence, killing hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of people (to look at estimated body counts in Chinese revolutions) in the process, in order to change your society, then it is inherently a violent society (due both to the violent response to any desire for change and the obvious need behind such desires that caused revolutionaries to resort to such bloodshed).
For example, consider this quote from Wikipedia on a hairstyle known as the "queue".
The queue was a specific male hairstyle worn by the Manchus from central Manchuria and later imposed on the Han Chinese during the Qing dynasty.[1][2][3] The hairstyle consisted of the hair on the front of the head being shaved off above the temples every ten days and the rest of the hair braided into a long pigtail.
The hairstyle was compulsory on all males and the penalty for not having it was execution as it was considered treason. In the early 1910s, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese no longer had to wear it. Some, such as Zhang Xun, still did as a tradition, but most of them abandoned it after the last Emperor of China, Puyi, cut his queue in 1922.
This is the sort of law peaceful Chinese cultures came up with in the absence of nasty European ideas .
Sure, and the allies they have available at the time were the Soviets/Europeans (the US was still trying to stay out of it at the time, this was before Pearl Harbor), who gave them European ideas, such as communism. So even if it wasn't Mao who ended up in power, the same violent influence from Europe would have crept into China.
What violent influence? There's no cause and effect. Even if Communism wasn't present, you'd still have a bitter and bloody struggle between warlords with extensive banditry in the background. This is a common pattern throughout Chinese history: brutal empires punctuated by periods of warring kingdoms.
And why didn't that work the same way with Gandhi in India? He was exposed to the same violent ideas and as I noted, he had European allies as well.
Well, I think it is. I think anyone who *ahem* ignores it are not particularly useful or relevant to talk to, so this will be my last response to you unless you demonstrate some other incentive for me to reply.
I think you'd be better served by understanding the flaw in implying an idea is violent because it is European. The flush toilet is as European an idea as Communism. It didn't result in the deaths of hundreds of millions.