Much philanthropy is a routinized exchange between salaried bureaucrats • Hacker News Board

Re: Much philanthropy is a routinized exchange between salaried bureaucrats

#261

Post by CameronNemo » Thu, May 26, 2022, 7:35 PM UTC

cillian64 wrote: post #86

krageon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what organisations, pray tell, actually need the money and would be visible to a normal human being in a country that isn't shattered by war? Most of the large charities have disgustingly paid CEO's and I can't be the only one that gets a sour taste in their mouth when I give an amount of money to them and realise this CEO receives 100k-1m in compensation while actual human beings starve in the streets or freeze…

Look at organisations like Against Malaria Fund. 100% of your donations go to buying and distributing bed nets and they collect a lot of data to prove that they end up hung above the beds of the right people. There are an awful lot of rubbish charities but there are at least a few worthwhile ones so it’s not an excuse for not donating.

How did you learn about this organization? I agree there are a lot of people out there doing good work, but how do I know which ones they are?

Re: Much philanthropy is a routinized exchange between salaried bureaucrats

#262

Post by s1artibartfast » Thu, May 26, 2022, 7:49 PM UTC

yial wrote: post #259

s1artibartfast wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If I ran a charity and had an exclusive choice to either spend $X to raise $Y... The common criticism of this hangs on how elastic the supply of donor dollars are. If you spend $1M to divert funds from another charity to yours, then the system overall is worse off. This isn't a perfect model because donor dollars are not fixed, and all charities are not equivalent. reality lies somewhere in-between. That said, it is…

So part of the problem is the evaluation based upon low overhead …. What’s low overhead? Everyone wants to donate to program work, but never to operations. Even grants that carve out for operations aren’t always realistic. Major gifts is one of the best ways to get unrestricted donor funds. You can get a lot of information from the 990 filing of an organization. In other comments, I agree that in many non profit orga…

It sounds like we agree. I dont have a fixed definition for low overhead.

I just know that im not interested if I see a non-profit with 50% marketing expenses, 30% in other operational expenses, and passes through 20% to the beneficiaries (e.g. medical supplies, research grants, or whatever the stated purpose is).

I would call that high overhead.

This sounds extreme, but some large non-profits actually have numbers like this.

Re: Much philanthropy is a routinized exchange between salaried bureaucrats

#263

Post by kortilla » Fri, May 27, 2022, 3:23 AM UTC

consp wrote: post #81

kortilla wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should rethink this stance. Do you want competent people running the organization or the cheapest possible? A charity that just passes money straight through by sending envelopes full of cash to a war torn country is much worse than one that spends a ton of money on analyzing first what the most effective way to help is.

This argument is always raised but in the end, the most work is done by volunteers and the top of those big corporations (the charity status is just a tax dodge) reap wealth like in any other corporation. The lower down payed employees get the "you don't get much but you work for a charity" speech and get abused as much as the volunteers. Let the CEO do it out of charity and take a 1$ salary and see if it all goes to…

> and the top of those big corporations (the charity status is just a tax dodge) reap wealth like in any other corporation.

No it’s not, the charity status is a massive burden and it’s about the stupidest thing you can do if you’re forming a corporation with the intent to make money.

> the most work is done by volunteers

No, that’s not true. Much of the work is done by the suppliers charities buy supplies from and employees of the charity. Doctors get paid in Doctors Without Borders.

> Let the CEO do it out of charity and take a 1$ salary and see if it all goes to hell. I very much doubt it.

This is just the standard ignorant “I don’t think CEOs do anything” view dressed up in a comment about charities.

Re: Much philanthropy is a routinized exchange between salaried bureaucrats

#264

Post by kortilla » Fri, May 27, 2022, 3:24 AM UTC

headsoup wrote: post #84

kortilla wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should rethink this stance. Do you want competent people running the organization or the cheapest possible? A charity that just passes money straight through by sending envelopes full of cash to a war torn country is much worse than one that spends a ton of money on analyzing first what the most effective way to help is.

By that logic open source software should be mostly crap... High pay bringing high competence and passion seems a rather poor assumption.

Being a CEO of a large charity is about connections and logistics. Not passion.

Re: Much philanthropy is a routinized exchange between salaried bureaucrats

#265

Post by daniel-cussen » Sun, May 29, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

solveit wrote: post #7

lmm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The ends they want" - as opposed to the ends the recipients want (as expressed through an admittedly imperfect democratic system) - is exactly what I object to. Most "donations" are made to advance a personal agenda at least in part; even when the donor sincerely believes they're doing what's best for people, that's usually a reflection of their personal politics and you'll often find other people believing the exac…

Would you be happy with government-designed (so presumably democratic) tests and quotas for which charities get the tax breaks?

You know what could be good, these charities talk about stories, not their statistics. Maybe they could humanistically keep records of their stories, like use a good system for that, maybe part digital, but with paper, so they can be read.

Like the complaints at Liga Chilena Contra la Epilepsia, they just have a Sugerencias y Reclamos book, which you can read (though they told me it is not for me to read). You can see for instance that they addressed one complaint they got a lot, which was the lack of cashiers, so in fact with their remodel five years ago they changed it completely so they now have up to 8 cashiers at a time, and short wait times. My favorite Chilean pharmacy, I'll repeat here the comment I left for that charity: "Un siete!"