291–300 of 301 posts
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Because the charity knows how best to spend it, not you (as explained in the essay).
They don't though, they just think they do. Their goals are largely motivated by current politics.
"Of course we can restrict your donation to X. But we're also happy to listen to what's most important to you and work yith you to develop a plan based on our expertise, and how ot fits into a larger story."
The hidden mesaage in there is not just "we know best" but also, "we can help you with the PR story or legacy or whatever you want".
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Well, Gates is a bad guy. He was a robber baron who decided that stealing a whole lot of money makes him the world's leading expert on everything. He has no training in pedagogy, epidemiology, sanitation, or really anything else relevant to the missions of his organization, yet he seems to actually believe he's a Great Scientist Using Evidence-Based Approaches to Save the World. He lives in a $200 million house yet h…
You can certainly make the argument that he was a bad guy, but I don't know if I can continue to draw that conclusion. He built that house over 30 years ago for $60M. While that is certainly excessive, its not like he just bought a $200M house while trying to be philanthropist. At least $45B in charitable contributions, so the house is worth 0.4% of that. Is the house really relevant? Isn't it possible he has changed…
Pay his employees more, charge less, and pay more in tax. Basically not have $60 billion dollars.
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So plan to give $x/N per year for N years, and stop donating if you don’t get the results you want. I don’t see a reason to make things complicated; every bit of overhead reduces the net impact your dollars are going to have.
What if the complication keeps them moving in the direction you want? That may make your dollars have additional impact rather than less.
> If a nonprofit doesn't understand better than its donors where money needs to be spent, then it's incompetent and you shouldn't be donating to it at all.
Though see TFA for some (corner-) cases where this might not apply.
Open to your thoughts on why TFA is wrong on this point - but I think you need to flesh your case out a bit more to at least address the arguments presented therein.
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In other countries, things not tied directly to a university's educational mission are still available, but as local community organizations. There are drama clubs, sports clubs, but available to the entire community, not just college students. There is no reason why the state should spend its educational subsidies on funding auxillary recreational activities solely for the benefit of university students when a good…
I think most countries have some form of student sports as part of universities, just not the kind of professional ones like in the U.S. students study better if they have something else in their lives. The problem is that it is really hard to know where to draw the line and the US as usual takes it fully to the extreme. All that being said, I thought the big sports were a revenue driver for the schools that chose to…
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> 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. This is indeed the approach I've been taking with some climate change charities: most of them have an "advocacy" component, and while I'd like to support effective emissions reduction projects, I'm not willing to contribute to the preaching for individual asceti…
‘Advocacy’ is very broad. I hope you’re not discounting donating to places because you think it can only mean one thing!
With climate change specifically, if I can't reasonably rule out the risk that the org will spend the money to tell me that I can't have an air conditioner, meat, or travel (or worse, lobby my government to ban me from having these things), they're not getting any money.
I'm OK with taking some risk that the org will use money in a way that I consider non-optimal, but I draw the line where I see a risk that the money may be used directly against my own interests. "Don't feed the mouth that bites you", I guess.
Over 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…
If you want competent people to lead your nonprofit, you have to pay them.
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So plan to give $x/N per year for N years, and stop donating if you don’t get the results you want. I don’t see a reason to make things complicated; every bit of overhead reduces the net impact your dollars are going to have.
What if the complication keeps them moving in the direction you want? That may make your dollars have additional impact rather than less.
One of the biggest challenges nonprofits face is donors who think they get to micromanage them because they give money. Any decent nonprofit has a development head who will politely but firmly tell donors to butt out, and hand them their check back if they don’t.
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Michigan.
Interesting. It seems to be a similar story in multiple states. I oppose state funded gambling, and this is one reason.
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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…
Now all cases like this, many nonprofits have multiple independent projects Like Mozilla foundation, which has a number of separate "initiatives" Or Wikimedia, which partially works on Wikipedia.org website, but also works on a number of projects not directly related to the main website.
Sometimes there is only one charity that covers a certain topic so if they also do other things you don't want to support the only choices are to make a restricted donation or to not donate at all.