I recently had to get surgery at a local hospital with a cross on top and named after a saint. As I waited for my appointment, I noticed the walls were covered with quotes from donors. The lady who was working the desk was an unpaid volunteer from a local church. Out of curiosity, I looked up the financials for the hospital and saw that the board of directors and various executives (around 12 people) were pulling in multi-million dollar salaries. Of the $3B they had raked in from donations that year, they allocated around $300M to a program to help the local people in some ambiguous way. No mention of what happened to the remaining donations. The bill for my treatment was $60K, thankfully insurance covered most of it. Rather seems like charity washing an otherwise ordinary corporation including exploiting gullible people for free labor...
$3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#72"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 cher…
Fair point. I updated the article. The 7.7% is the "Grants and other assistance" line on the 990, and it applies to the $500B charitable nonprofit portion, not the full $3T. A food bank distributing food shows up under program expenses, not grants. The original framing was too easy to misread.
The bigger issue is that even the program expenses line doesn't tell you whether the program worked. A food bank spending $2M on operations could be feeding 50,000 people or 5,000. The form doesn't say.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is there is no guarantee the warehouse worker at a food bank is doing anything of value. So we can’t assume such things are productive without direct evidence.
I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us. At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're present…
Yes, non-profits is a superset of "charitable non-profits". The IRS puts all 501(c)(3) organizations under the same filing framework. Hospitals and universities are in there alongside food banks and shelters. Breaking them out by NTEE code gives a more granular picture is a great idea.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#74Strangely, what they're selling is some kind of automated surveillance camera system.[1] "Whatever you funded, we can monitor it." [1] https://charitysense.com/#how-it-works
I think every organization (hi, Flock) selling something like this should be required to install it on their own premises first.
Agree.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#75For 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.
Not wrong
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#76I recently had to get surgery at a local hospital with a cross on top and named after a saint. As I waited for my appointment, I noticed the walls were covered with quotes from donors. The lady who was working the desk was an unpaid volunteer from a local church. Out of curiosity, I looked up the financials for the hospital and saw that the board of directors and various executives (around 12 people) were pulling in…
If there is a devil, it runs organized religion.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#77For 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.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? Ask the IRS / congress, this isn’t some arbitrary grouping it’s what charity means in the US. I do think it’s worth asking that question, but ask it of the people who can do something about it.
The people claiming to be making sense of charities are the people who are supposed to be teasing that data out.
If you’re making sense of something you need to include everything in that category.
It’s perfectly reasonable to create different subdivisions / buckets based your own definitions or NTEE code etc, but all those sub categories combined must add up to the same thing as how charities are defined.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us. At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're present…
Yes, non-profits is a superset of "charitable non-profits". The IRS puts all 501(c)(3) organizations under the same filing framework. Hospitals and universities are in there alongside food banks and shelters. Breaking them out by NTEE code gives a more granular picture is a great idea.
501(c)(3) is just one of 29 types of non profits defined by the IRS. Many non-profits aren’t charities and some of them can even distribute profits.
501(c)(7) IE non profit social club for example could be just about anything from knitting circle to a S&M sex club. Have that club buy property and then at some point in the future sell that property at a profit which is then distributed to those members.
Re: $3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year
#80I recently had to get surgery at a local hospital with a cross on top and named after a saint. As I waited for my appointment, I noticed the walls were covered with quotes from donors. The lady who was working the desk was an unpaid volunteer from a local church. Out of curiosity, I looked up the financials for the hospital and saw that the board of directors and various executives (around 12 people) were pulling in…
wait, are you saying a hospital that charges 60K for surgery is a charity?
because it cheaper than other options or what?