Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Making Donations Count
An anonymous reader writes: As a recent college graduate I now have a job and enough money to actually buy things and donate to causes. Up until now I really haven't been paying attention to which groups are best to donate and which are scams. For example, Goodwill seems like a great organization until you dig deeper and discover they hire under privileged and disabled people only to exploit the related government handouts instead of doing it to benefit those people. What are some quality organizations to donate to? Who do you donate to and why? I'm looking for improving the poor, supporting constitutional rights, and supporting issues many Slashdotters can agree on such as net neutrality and anything against the media companies. I don't care what political group the money ends up going to. The specific case is more important than some arbitrary label. I'm also in the USA, so foreign recommendations are probably less helpful.
Don't donate to any organized cause. Even the best run, most efficient ones still have part of your dollar go to administrative or marketing costs.
As you move through life, you will meet plenty of people that need help. Give that pan handler on the side of the road a hamburger. Help your single-working-mother neighbor by paying for a baby sitter so she can have a night out. Buy groceries for the person in line at the store behind you that is using food stamps.
Or, donate your time. Join Habitat for Humanity and build a house for someone.
While all these options take more time/effort than just entering your credit card into a website, those donations of money/time will be completely dedicated to the person in need.
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes
I'd skip sending money to ISIS or the Taliban. It's probably not tax-deductible and may result in unpleasant imprisonment.
With the current administration, the same could be said for anything that they dislike. They've not only used the IRS to target groups that oppose them, but also put out a list of attributes that they are using to classify domestic terrorist which include things like having more than a month's worth of food & owning a gun.
As someone else pointed out, I significantly underestimated the size of the UofC and Harvard endownments. Rather than $1 bil and $2 bil respectively, it's more like $8 bil and $36 bil.
I suppose I was still thinking about how rich the endowments were back when I first realized the size of the scam some years ago.
It also tells you how fast these endowments are growing.
You are welcome on my lawn.