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Charity Research Begins
Sep. 17th, 2005 10:23 pmMy employer's annual charitable campaign just started up again, so it's time for my annual charity research to begin.
I don't actually contribute to this charitable campaign anymore because their overhead is too high and because I get the same benefits (anonymity, anonymity, and did I mention no junk mail or begging calls?) from JustGive for an overhead of only 3%. But I keep a tradition of annually reviewing my choices and then not worrying about it for the next year.
That's because I don't like worrying or slogging through all the horrible problems in the world. Today I looked at all the charities in my employer's booklet (PDF, pages 12-29), which is a nice collection because they do some screening and because the list comes with a short description, a website for more information, and a figure for the percentage of donations that goes to overhead.
Even just looking at the names of all these organizations is overwhelming. How can I say no to Parents of Murdered Children? Or to Water for People? I must be terribly cold.
Fortunately, I am terribly cold. And calculating. I've come up with a few guidelines to help me narrow down the choices on what to fund:
* Cures rather than band-aids
* The most important problems I can think of rather the the problems I'm closest to
* Cooperative methods rather than adversarial methods
* More effective rather than less effective organizations (I'm probably not good at this one)
This year's list has no organization whose focus is pain research. This is an area I added to my list last year, but I never found anything very satisfying.
However, I did find some new (to me) organizations to research in other areas:
* The Conservation Fund - another land preservation organization; this one has 2.5% overhead
* Rainforest Alliance - protects forests by "transforming land use, business practices, and consumer behavior." I was just looking at their website earlier today while researching how to buy chocolate that is sustainably grown. I thought this was one of those certifying agencies like the Forest Stewardship Council. I should do more research into this whole arena. I may redirect some of my buying-land-to-protect-it money to something more like this.
* Acumen Fund - "Creates a blueprint for building financially sustainable and scalable organizations that deliver affordable, critical goods and services that elevate the lives of the poor." Possibly too band-aid-ish for my tastes, but I may as well check it out.
* TechnoServe - sounds like another microlender, with overhead between the levels of the two microlenders I've been supporting.
I don't actually contribute to this charitable campaign anymore because their overhead is too high and because I get the same benefits (anonymity, anonymity, and did I mention no junk mail or begging calls?) from JustGive for an overhead of only 3%. But I keep a tradition of annually reviewing my choices and then not worrying about it for the next year.
That's because I don't like worrying or slogging through all the horrible problems in the world. Today I looked at all the charities in my employer's booklet (PDF, pages 12-29), which is a nice collection because they do some screening and because the list comes with a short description, a website for more information, and a figure for the percentage of donations that goes to overhead.
Even just looking at the names of all these organizations is overwhelming. How can I say no to Parents of Murdered Children? Or to Water for People? I must be terribly cold.
Fortunately, I am terribly cold. And calculating. I've come up with a few guidelines to help me narrow down the choices on what to fund:
* Cures rather than band-aids
* The most important problems I can think of rather the the problems I'm closest to
* Cooperative methods rather than adversarial methods
* More effective rather than less effective organizations (I'm probably not good at this one)
This year's list has no organization whose focus is pain research. This is an area I added to my list last year, but I never found anything very satisfying.
However, I did find some new (to me) organizations to research in other areas:
* The Conservation Fund - another land preservation organization; this one has 2.5% overhead
* Rainforest Alliance - protects forests by "transforming land use, business practices, and consumer behavior." I was just looking at their website earlier today while researching how to buy chocolate that is sustainably grown. I thought this was one of those certifying agencies like the Forest Stewardship Council. I should do more research into this whole arena. I may redirect some of my buying-land-to-protect-it money to something more like this.
* Acumen Fund - "Creates a blueprint for building financially sustainable and scalable organizations that deliver affordable, critical goods and services that elevate the lives of the poor." Possibly too band-aid-ish for my tastes, but I may as well check it out.
* TechnoServe - sounds like another microlender, with overhead between the levels of the two microlenders I've been supporting.