Charitable giving at young age

Sue22
Tue, 25 Apr 2017 00:45:02 +0000

Since we’ve moved into the territory of effective giving I’ll offer my two cents as someone who runs a charity.

Any time you use a charity rating or recommendation site be sure you know how they rate charities and what conditions they impose. For instance, GiveWell only looks at charities serving “the global poor” and among those, only organizations that have consistent annual program expenditures of over 1 million dollars. In other words, your local food pantry probably wouldn’t qualify and your favorite environmental cause, no matter how effective, definitely wouldn’t. Furthermore, because Givewell only recommends a very small percentage of organizations after an exhaustive and time-consuming process it wouldn’t be cost effective for many smaller organizations like mine to participate anyway.

This is not to say anything negative about Givewell. What they do they do well as far as I can tell, and I wouldn’t hesitate to give to one of their causes. Just remember that many worthy causes won’t be rated by GiveWell, Charity Navigator (another good rating site that only considers larger charities) and many others. Some raters impose greater barriers, such as requiring a fee or taking a cut of donations made through their site.

The best way to check out the methodology is to look at the “For Charities” link usually found at the bottom of the page. It’ll tell you the parameters for consideration.

I’m a big fan of donating to causes you’ve learned from the inside. That is to say, if you can volunteer for a charity before donating do it. Combined with a little financial sleuthing done through Guidestar or Charity Navigator this is a great way to learn whether the organization is one worthy of your support.

BTW, I hadn’t run across the MacAskill book before but I just read the first chapter (Playpumps Int’l vs. Deworm the World) on line and I have to say it’s spot on in describing some of the pitfalls of charities that try to impose solutions from the outside without proper reflection. I plan to pick up the book and read the rest.