Amnesty International at Yale?

yalie343
Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:26:11 +0000

I would unfairly favor charities that I am involved with if I gave particular recommendations re: small NGO’s. I recommend charity sites though, e.g. [Charity Navigator](Popular Charities | Charity Navigator) so that you can gauge the efficacy of a particular charity and look for ones. Harvest Food Bank, Free (not feed) the Children, American Red Cross, and the American Civil Liberty Union (albeit clearly liberal) all do good work and are very efficient organizations. I don’t believe that CharityNavigator is 100% accurate, but it certainly gives you a gauge; to put things on a relative scale, Amnesty gets 2/4 stars for efficiency while all those mentioned get four (except the Canadian NGO Free the Children is unlisted). There are other similar sites where you can look up charity ratings – just google it.

The problem with NGO’s is that too many of them don’t offer bang for the buck. Sure, it is good to help others, but donating $1 to different organizations yields a highly variable impact: some organizations have 90 percent – $.90 on the dollar – or higher go to actual projects, whereas others may have 90 percent just go to administrative and fundraising costs.