Charity Navigator is a good site to look up charities–they rate them for overhead, transparency, percentage of donation that directly go to recipients etc. Samaritan’s Purse is highly rated.
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I hate blanket unfounded statements like this. 100 bucks to a local food pantry is not the same as 1000 bucks to a world wide charity. How far your money goes is country dependent. My 100 bucks at the grocery store ain’t going anywhere frankly.
@gouf78 I disagree. My $100 donation to the local food pantry, whose budget is $300,000 a year is proportionately way more important than $1000 to a $720,000,000 organization.
Very often a local charity can demonstrate that $100 will feed x families for y weeks. How can you so quickly dismiss the value of $100 worth of groceries locally? Perhaps I am misunderstanding your point.
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Any charity who uses over 600K to fund just one CEO is not one I need to be giving money to. If I designate my funds, they’ll just use someone else’s to pay him. They have low overhead because they get so many to donate to them and use volunteers. For me, it doesn’t balance out making someone wealthy off of my donations. I can donate elsewhere that might have to pay the electric bill (higher percentage due to lower donations), but isn’t also making someone else quite wealthy with an outlandish salary for a charity.
Everyone can decide for themselves how they feel about any charity. Obviously, Charity Navigator isn’t my only source for info. Numbers anywhere need explanation.
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I also speak up about Samaritan’s purse – it is not just finances, it is the statements Graham has made about faith of non-Christians that bother me ( I am Christian). There are many organizations that do fine work without the evangelizing SP has as a primary goal, so if that is not your purpose in giving, try UMCOR or Drs Without Borders, perhaps.
School districts are great idea! Thanks for the reminder
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Agreed–Charity Navigator has some good blog articles about why CEO compensation is not one of their metrics, though they will report the information so people have it. And they do not make judgments on issues like faith approaches–their ratings are based on overall transparency and financials. The information beyond the star rating is very helpful, still. (Full disclosure: I have a relative who works there, so I have a good idea what goes into their thinking.) But I myself am not going to give to Samaritan’s Purse, for the reasons given above by @greenbutton etc…
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Charities that ‘stand alone’ are going to have overhead, including salaries and advertising. I think Elizabeth Dole made $1M when she was head of The Red Cross. St Jude’s collects a lot of money, but it has expenses too.
If a charity is a foundation of a bigger organization, often the organization covers the overhead costs of the charity. It doesn’t make the overhead free, it’s just covered by organization which then writes it off for tax purposes.
If you want no overhead, hand the $600 to a person on the street. It will go directly to his needs of food and housing, but you might also be paying for alcohol and cigarettes too.
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We do some of this too - not the person standing at the intersection with a sign, but when there are people/projects we know have needs. This can be a school kid raising money for a trip or someone we know struggling due to unforeseen circumstances.
The Red Cross and St Jude are others we avoid, but we have our local blood bank (not Red Cross) and we donate specifically to hospitals for research or to help pay others’ bills - as in - send the $$ directly to the specific hospital/clinic for a fund. I suspect any hospital can use money to help cover those who can’t afford healthcare.
Anything that spends a lot advertising turns me off. I figure they get enough from folks who like the pretty pictures. We look for things we like where we feel our money is best used. Sometimes that is to cover the electric bill. As I said in my first post, the only “big” thing we support is MSF because they pretty much need to be big to do what they do and they have my utmost respect for places they are willing to go.
The big places get plenty to cover whatever in salaries - they are well known by name and few look into anything else. They won’t even blink an eye that our donations go elsewhere. Smaller places, esp local, can change lives the larger groups miss - and the first 650 people who donate a thousand (or whatever the specific numbers are) don’t have it go to a single salary. Whether it’s 650K or a million, I think it can be better spent than in a salary.
FWIW, we rarely buy from Amazon for similar reasoning. Give us a choice of small vs large for pretty much anything and we’ll choose small (local restaurants/stores vs chains, etc). The less the Head Honcho makes compared to the average worker, the more we are likely to support it if it has what we want.
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Update: We live near Charlotte NC and recently took a trip into the city and were shocked at the number of tents. It’s not just one area, they seemed to be in several places and large numbers. Apparently the tent cities have sprung up since the pandemic started. I asked a friend who is very active in working on affordable housing and homeless in Charlotte, and he recommended giving to the local charity that runs the men’s shelter in town. We did get our $1200, so half went to Roof Above, and the other half split between our local soup kitchen and another local organization that gives grants to families in need (and provides many other services)
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