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Donate Unrestricted
111–120 of 301 posts
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#112Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
Anybody who's discussing the quite unique tax situation around charity in the US, should give Dark Money by Jane Mayer a read. This uniqueness isn't by accident, and only is called charity as a minor, inconvenient side effect.
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#113Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
I think that's a really interesting middle ground. Do you think it can fall into the same trap as mentioned in the article, where it can become "sub-optimal" due to not being as expert as the non-profit?
I think it’s less prone to that problem if you take a holistic approach when evaluating whether a loan should be repaid, rather than applying very narrow criteria such as “must be spent on a new building”.
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#114Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
Is there any way to do this easily from a legal and contractual perspective? The other piece here is that if it's a loan you miss out on tax deductions, thereby potentially reducing the total amount you could give. That also limits the more tax-advantaged ways you can give money (e.g. long term appreciated stock if you're in the US).
I imagine someone donating millions is using a donor advised fund to do the lending. By using a fund, they can recognize the donation for tax purposes while lending the money to a separate non-profit.
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#115Re: Donate Unrestricted
#116Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
But the non-profit is spending the money, and is not earning any money. If you decide to ask for repayment, how could they pay you back?
Invest the money with non-zero interest, return the original money, and use the extra to... realistically, pay the salary of the person who did the investing.
Yeah, if I had a non-profit, I would just plainly refuse.
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#117He didn't mention the little problem of the fungibility of money. If a school gets two $100k donations, and one comes with a "no stem cell research" restriction, then it usually isn't a problem to spend the other donation on that, and the restricted one on the road maintenance that would have been done anyway. So a restricted donation is really only effectively restrictive if it significantly outweighs the rest.
I wouldn't donate to universities in general. The have growing endowments which they don't spend. It also adds the income inequality in the US, you are essentially donating to the education of rich people. Note that PG talks about non-profits not schools.
Universities are probably the main mechanism we have for economic mobility in the US. There’s almost no where else in the US where the government will give a kid from a poor family thousands of dollars to invest in their long-term well being (and that kid will wind up repaying in taxes their education anyways.)
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#118Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
There's a huge fallacy where people believe that non-profits are supposed to be inherently more equitable and nicer than for-profit companies. And people who believe this fallacy get upset by executive pay at non-profits and turn to sites like Charity Navigator to find charities where 99 cents of their dollar goes to charity.
But the fact of the matter is that paying salaries to people who bring in more money than they make is a good strategy for everyone, that's why non-profits do it. Even if MegaCharity A only spends 60 cents of its income on charity but MiniCharity B spends 99 cents of its income on charity, MegaCharity A is still doing better for humanity if their annual income grows every year due to the strength of their marketing. MegaCharities can raise awareness exponentially and actually change the outcomes of some of the problems in our worlds because they have the power to raise enough money in one place with one cohesive plan to actually fight these things.
I grew up next to St. Jude Children's Hospital. Everyone has heard of them. They bring in billions every year. They have an entire marketing wing and a well-compensated C-Suite (compared to other non-profits). They have way way way more impact because of all these things than most other medical charities for children. No other non-profit in the world can offer completely free medical care to children from anywhere in the world and fly their families to live near them while they're cared for without spending the kind of money they do on marketing and executives.
Non-profits need executives, and people with the credentials to be executives have to choose between non-profit jobs that pay 1/8 of what for-profit jobs do. Sure they make more than a living salary while their employees struggle to make ends meet, but that's true of every type of organization. And in the end, they won't join non-profits at all if the money they sacrifice to do so is too high.
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#119Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall we say, “charitable”; society has a tendency to glorify non-profits because they “don’t have shareholders” but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some even working for free) while executives get far more than a living salary. And whether you’re an educational institution, an insurance provider, or an NGO, being an…
A lot of what you see in nonprofits and public agencies is about signaling: https://seliger.com/2012/03/25/why-fund-organizations-throug...
Re: Donate Unrestricted
#120I worked in Accounting (the dept that did it, not the one that taught it) IT at a major public university for several years. Something like half of the software complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on. Whether the source was the federal government, the state, corporate donors, or wealthy individuals, they all had str…
> The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of the budget was under the control of the president of the university; it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the money was controlled by the source, not by the administration. I consider that good news, actually, because it makes restricted donations meaningful. I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless, because if I donated $x of res…
If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any.
On the other hand, if you trust that someone wants to do a good thing, they probably have more information about the topic than you do, so you should give them freedom to actually act on that information. Like, maybe you think "X is way more important than Y", but maybe the lack of Y is actually what prevents them from doing X efficiently, so your restriction to only use the money for X is not helpful, even from the X-maximizing perspective.
Like, sometimes your mission is to distribute food to starving kids in Africa, but you can't organize your volunteers until you buy a new computer, because the only one you had just broke. Then someone gives you a paycheck with big letters "only use to buy food, I don't want to see you wasting money on computers". Yeah, thanks a lot, dear condescending saint.