Giving...giving well

Giving...giving well

   The holiday season is around the corner (gasp, I'm getting worse than Costco and the stores...whatever happened to Thanksgiving?  Today's stores seem to jump from summer to a quick blip to Halloween and then bam, the Christmas push, in September no less!) and with the holidays come the spirit of giving, not only gifts to friends and relatives but to those we don't even know.  And of course, the surge of mail coming from so many charities that want and likely need your donations...but how to sort through them all?

    One option worth considering is a site called GiveWell.  Type in your charity and you'll likely be disappointed.  And you might feel just as Tom Rutledge did when he wrote a post on giving:  Before GiveWell, I had accumulated a lot of bad feelings related to giving.  My charitable activities had consisted of the usual, in the usual categories: alumni funds, causes that friends solicited for, affinity groups I was somehow part of, and the odd fund drive related to an event.  Along the way, I didn’t really think I was doing much good.  It gnawed at me that most causes were not transparent and didn’t deliver concrete information about results.  You couldn’t compare one charity with another.  My giving didn’t make sense.  It was haphazard, reactive, and because of my network, probably biased away from the greatest needs and toward “charity for rich people.”  And I knew it.  But eventually…and fortunately…something else dawned on me.  It’s your money.  You can do what you want with it, because you have your own priorities.  You can take time off from work to take care of a sick friend and live off your savings for a while.  You can support a political cause.  You can sponsor a park bench in the Hamptons and call it charity.  You can buy yourself a sweet car.  There are a lot of perfectly good ways to live.
 
   GiveWell surprisingly supports only a handful of charites, likely none that you've heard of (one such charity is called Give Directly, an interesting and surprisingly effective concept which was featured on TedEx).  They study and vet them, tell you of their observations, tell you of their mistakes and discoveries.  And they tell you of the mistakes Give Well itself has made, not only in its own approach but in its own funding efforts...refreshing.  It's not that groups such as Doctors Without Borders or Heifer, Int'l are poor charities or aren't worth supporting (for the most part, they do exceptional work).  But what they post on GiveWell are answers to your questions of how much of your donation actually goes to a cause, the cause you expected?  Are you paying for a top executive's salary, often a million dollars or more?  Is your charity so large that it occupies an entire office building and runs its own printing offshoot to keep those fliers and emails coming?

    These questions are valid ones, as valid as the conundrum of which does better, the well-intentioned but poorly funded charity, or the massively bloated but heavily funded charity?  Does hiring the million dollar set of executives bring in millions more in donations, enough to offset their salaries?  Does their knowledge of marketing and fund-raising justify the cost taken away from your donations?  Would your donation prove less effective to a small group that spent your money poorly, perhaps not having enough to do the proper research or obtain the proper equipment.  Wanting to outfit a herd of elephants with radio collars might be a grand idea, but suppose you only had enough clout to obtain a single donated collar (they aren't cheap)?  Could your group also afford the monitoring equipment, the software, the guards to enforce the protection of the herd, the fuel for your trucks and aircraft and satellites to follow the herd?  Suppose you only had enough in donations to support your employees' salaries, despite their generous donation of time...the electric bill, the broadband bill, the office space (even if only a single room in a tiny sublet).  As good as your intentions might be, it would be easy to succumb to an overload of work...why doesn't anyone know about how great your cause really is, why aren't people giving to your cause instead of that blasted guinea pig rescue, why did the giving suddenly stop, and why won't that dang radio station return your calls?

   One need only look at a common list of charities to realize just how many thousands there are, likely most of them with dedicated workers and many of them working on a bare bones budget.  But there are thousands.  Just peek at those charities that have listed themselves with Ebay (yes, you can donate all or a portion of your Ebay sale to a charity via Ebay's Giving Works)...and that's only those charities that have listed themselves (GiveWell wasn't aware of Ebay's program until I contacted them...they're now registered with them).  GiveWell has its own extensive list of charities, as does your own state.  Contrast that with the larger charity groups such as NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) and EDF (Environmental Defense Fund), along with a host of others such as the Sierra Club or Greenpeace, all of whom have enough of a giving base to pay their attorneys to file injunctions and lawsuits, things smaller groups would be unable to afford, especially when their opponents, whether a government or an oil company, have virtually unlimited budgets.  Both types of charities, even those somewhere in the middle, serve a purpose.

   But as the posting said, it's your money.  Your decision.  And there are those (perhaps yourself) whose giving goes unrecognized, giving their time, giving their ears, giving their muscle, giving their knowledge.  Despite all the ads and all the pleas, we are inwardly filled with the urge to help others, whether its someone who has fallen on the step or on their luck.  And it hits us harder on the holidays, reminding us of how we feel, or perhaps should feel, throughout the year.  After all, it's all just a matter of giving...