Very misleading analysis, the 8% direct grant comes from adding universities, hospitals and non-charities that make up 85% of the denominator. If you account for this using their own numbers, you get about 50% overhead, not 92%
$3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
21–30 of 88 posts
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#22For anyone even more skeptical of where your money goes when you donate to a nonprofit, there are plenty of resources out there for researching this. CharityNavigator is a popular one, but I donate primarily to GiveWell: https://www.givewell.org
you beat me to it (_/\_)
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#23> Much of it is operational necessity. But from a donor’s perspective, only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants. The rest is invisible One of my groups of friend groups has a lot of people who work at non-profits that are really dedicated to good causes. They are people who care and wanted to find jobs with purpose. The companies they work for aren’t, as far as I can tell, trying to grift or swi…
Perfectly understandable, I think. Gotta look out for number one, no sense burning out if you're not being paid enough to cover recovery.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#24Isn't charity just a business model these days? The first time I came across was about 10 or so years ago where, I think it was a 60 minutes did a report on Movember, how they have some scheme/scam where the guys who started/own the "charity" also have another company that owns the Movember brand and the charity then has to licence the brand from that company. Meaning that for every dollar donated a good portion (can't remember the exact figure) then goes straight into their pockets as license fees.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#25For anyone even more skeptical of where your money goes when you donate to a nonprofit, there are plenty of resources out there for researching this. CharityNavigator is a popular one, but I donate primarily to GiveWell: https://www.givewell.org
I worked with a large number of these so called "legitimate" charities and after what I saw I will never give a penny to any non-profit. You will have far, far more impact figuring out something you care about and directly spending $100 to accomplish that than giving $5000 to any of these organizations.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#26"It’s just that almost nobody looks." Looking will blow up too many cushy deals for too much of the Powers That Be. A great deal of it is non-show "chairmanship" jobs for the family and friends of politicians. Legal bribes. Feeding Our Future was another fine example of the shenanigans that go on in the US. Power Forward Communities was setup with $100 and captured $2 billion in EPA grants; caught while still doing o…
OK - except I recall a tour of Japanese graduate students at CompuMentor in San Francisco, studying the whole setup.. the reason? there are no "non-profits" in Japan (at that time, still?). CompuMentor was a great example -- both dipping deeply into the tills with special sales and large steady cash flows AND serving a genuinely underserved niche.
Throw-down on some EPA effort As If That Is Typical, is intellectually dishonest. Mitigation and remediation are expensive and take time. And also there is substantial abuse and greenwashing. So you throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
"Its all a scam" says the barstool attorney, doing nothing.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#27For anyone even more skeptical of where your money goes when you donate to a nonprofit, there are plenty of resources out there for researching this. CharityNavigator is a popular one, but I donate primarily to GiveWell: https://www.givewell.org
But which is more trustworthy? We need a charity watcher-watcher to tell us.
This is getting downvoted, but it's a salient point nowadays.
Who watches the watchers?
Because if it's no one, then all we're doing is vouching for what could easily be scams set up by who knows who to steer our money to dubious organizations for who knows what purpose.
We shouldn't trust the watchers any more than we should trust, say, Feed the Children. Or Medecins Sans Frontiers. All these organizations should be watched in a comprehensive fashion.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#28"only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants"
That's an extremely misleading statement. For instance, a food bank giving away food to a pantry does not count as "direct aid and grants" (at least, if they're defining that as "Grants and other assistance to domestic individuals." from the I-990" ). The salary for the warehouse worker operating the food bank is also not counted in that 92%.
Other cherry-picked statements like "32% of donors trust charities less today than they did five years ago" (not giving the percentage that trust charities more, or any other way to contextualize) make it clear that this is just a hit piece.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#29For anyone even more skeptical of where your money goes when you donate to a nonprofit, there are plenty of resources out there for researching this. CharityNavigator is a popular one, but I donate primarily to GiveWell: https://www.givewell.org
I worked with a large number of these so called "legitimate" charities and after what I saw I will never give a penny to any non-profit. You will have far, far more impact figuring out something you care about and directly spending $100 to accomplish that than giving $5000 to any of these organizations.
In what respect did you work with them? What is your main complaint? As far as I know, top GiveWell charities give malaria nets and stuff and it saves lives at fairly efficient rates.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#30I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering. I would love to see requirements that 75%+ of all non-profit revenue has to pass through to the community, that non-profits may not transfer funds to other non-profits, and that directors and officers cannot be compensated and have very modest limits on expenses.
> I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering.
Actually most non profits are a massive jobs program for the middle and lower middle class. The side effect is that some problems that the government or the private sector won’t touch, get a slight more attention while providing tax benefits to people who contribute.