201–210 of 215 posts
I'm building an app that utilizes people giving to charities - red cross seemed like an obvious choice to include, but now there's no way. This has been helpful in sleuthing out reputable charities: http://www.charitynavigator.org/
Problem: finding a reputable charity is hard. Why should users trust you?
TL;DR (the informational bits): > First the Red Cross took a customary administrative cut, then the charities that received the money took their own fees. And then, according to the Red Cross' records, the charity took out an additional amount to pay for what it calls the "program costs incurred in managing" these third-party projects. > In one of the programs reviewed by NPR and ProPublica, these costs ate up a thir…
Hi -- I'm Justin Elliott, one of the reporters on the piece, with Laura Sullivan of NPR. FWIW you should take a look at the ProPublica version of the story -- we get more into the numbers, and link to various documents: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-... To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.
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The problem with all the talk about 'effective charity' is that it invariably focuses on magnitude while ignoring sign. The great thing about donating to local soup kitchens as opposed to interfering in other people's countries thousands of miles away where we know little or nothing about what's really going on is that there is a much better chance of being able to verify that all the activity is doing more good than…
A priori, it seems quite plausible to me that Sub-Saharan Africans find insecticide-treated bed nets significantly helpful for guarding against malaria, and rather implausible that they find them significantly harmful. You can invent far-fetched stories about how anti-malaria nets are somehow harmful, but you can do the same for soup kitchens.
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Could it be that actually getting things done in horrible environments requires interacting with, and paying off, some shady people? This is of course a charitable guess, but could it be that the Red Cross has made a decision to make morally questionable choices in the short term in support of the greater good, and they know they can't publish such truths and continue to exist?
They are just lining their pockets hence their reluctance to be fully transparent. 1)Set up a few small projects 2)Take a few pictures 3)Create a few press articles to appear as if all funds are being sent to the people in need Rinse and repeat when the next disaster hits. All charity based organizations should have no problem being fully transparent. Do not make excuses for them
The biggest revelation to me in that article, which I feel should be highlighted more, is that the Red Cross provides almost zero information about how it spends its money. It refuses to provide more than very vague information about how the money was spent in Haiti (information like "35% of $488 million on shelters"), with no specific details about what projects they spent the money on, how those projects went etc.…
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> One of jacquesm's central assertions is extremely broad: governments are inept at spending money. Yep. > No qualifications. Indeed. I've seen enough of government projects on all levels (Municipal, Provincial, Country and European) to know this to be factually true and if you would so much as read the freely available news sources you'd probably agree with that unqualified statement. Government projects that are on…
I have a hard time taking your unqualified assertion seriously if your source is "freely available news sources". If that's the best you've got, you are almost certainly the victim of confirmation bias, at the very least. There's a reason that published, peer-reviewed studies are important. They're the antidote to people like you who hang around the water-cooler chat of newspapers and figure they've got a handle on e…
TL;DR (the informational bits): > First the Red Cross took a customary administrative cut, then the charities that received the money took their own fees. And then, according to the Red Cross' records, the charity took out an additional amount to pay for what it calls the "program costs incurred in managing" these third-party projects. > In one of the programs reviewed by NPR and ProPublica, these costs ate up a thir…
Hi -- I'm Justin Elliott, one of the reporters on the piece, with Laura Sullivan of NPR. FWIW you should take a look at the ProPublica version of the story -- we get more into the numbers, and link to various documents: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-... To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.
> FWIW you should take a look at the ProPublica version of the story -- we get more into the numbers
I haven't checked it out, I'm not so really interested in detailed reports, it's just that this article has a lot of claims and mentions a lot of plans, but then doesn't mention how much of the plans did succeed.
> To answer your question specifically about the neighborhood of Campeche: Zero houses have been built there by the Red Cross.
Ugh, that's worse than I suspected the number would be. Might have mentioned that in the article, I guessed it would be somewhere between 50 or 200 or so.
Thanks again!
The biggest revelation to me in that article, which I feel should be highlighted more, is that the Red Cross provides almost zero information about how it spends its money. It refuses to provide more than very vague information about how the money was spent in Haiti (information like "35% of $488 million on shelters"), with no specific details about what projects they spent the money on, how those projects went etc.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a hard time taking your unqualified assertion seriously if your source is "freely available news sources". If that's the best you've got, you are almost certainly the victim of confirmation bias, at the very least. There's a reason that published, peer-reviewed studies are important. They're the antidote to people like you who hang around the water-cooler chat of newspapers and figure they've got a handle on e…
Think about what an NDA actually usually accomplishes when you work for the government.
Yes, you don't have to look hard to find examples of government projects that are plagued by agency problems, incompetence, and grift. However, those exact same things play out in the private sector. They're problems endemic in /any/ large undertaking.
You feel it's worse in the public sector. I feel it's just as bad in the private sector (just that it's reported much, much less). You've worked in both sectors, I've also worked in both. Only way to tell which of us is right is some sort of serious, objective research. My stance is that newspapers and other popular media are just noise, especially since government waste is such a easy go-to narrative (a good example being the "$20,000 hammer").
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A priori, it seems quite plausible to me that Sub-Saharan Africans find insecticide-treated bed nets significantly helpful for guarding against malaria, and rather implausible that they find them significantly harmful. You can invent far-fetched stories about how anti-malaria nets are somehow harmful, but you can do the same for soup kitchens.
Apparently, they use them for fishing in some areas, which causes a lot of environmental damage given the insecticide-laden netting. You just can't win.