Have you heard of Charity Navigator? If not, you might want to check it
out. They evaluate charities above a certain size with published
records. They give the Shriners' Hospital for Children in Tampa, FL a
very good rating. (Comparable to Doctors Without Borders, which I like
very much.)
Joe
On 4/22/20 3:17 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
Whenever I get drawn to contributing to a charity, usually based on
sentimental TV ads, I send them an email and ask how to access their
IRS Form 990, which has to be publicly available, usually via a web
page. The last time I did this was for Shriners' Hospital for
Children. If I read the form correctly, in a recent year they had
$700,000,000 in income, paid $500,000,000 in executive salaries and
fundraising. I don't believe remaining $200,000,000 all went to
medical and family travel/lodging expenses. But I may not be reading
it right. Any accountants out there?
Frank
On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 2:36 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <geprope...@gmail.com
<mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Heh, it's funny how something you say can be perfectly inverted by
the audience to mean the opposite of what you intended. The
Telephone Game is always relevant.
My point to Steve was about "effective altruism", the idea that
the philanthropist has any idea whatsoever of the relative
optimality of one charity compared to another. My position is one
of ignorance and against the (mostly wealthy, tech-savvy,
arrogant) person's most likely *mistaken* belief in their own
competence, especially in a domain that is fundamentally different
from where they operate "professionally". My point to Steve was
that meritocracy is a sham and a sibling effect to the Great Man
Theory.
Now, to the extent that my reading of von Hayek (not Friedman)
argued for market forces because it is *arrogant* to pretend you
can design a system more efficient than the one nature relaxes
into, then I would argue for such natural, organic solutions over
engineered ones. But that's precisely *because* those who think
they can singularly, themselves, engineer a reality better than
the one that grew, stigmergically, socially, naturally are most
likely wrong.
But I have *never* insisted there is such a thing as a *free*
market. Everything that seems to be "natural" is constrained by
the engineering of the agents in and around it, even if those
agents are termites or bacteria. Whatever the Robin Hood
foundation might mean by "free market", their very use of the term
means I would not support them in any way. The term "free market"
is a trigger phrase for this delicate snowflake. >8^D And I've
already blown several cherries at billionaire phlanthropists.
Ptouie. E.g. Bill Gates' magnanimity comes at the cost of decades
of slimy and exploitative practices. It's reputation laundering in
the extreme. If Bill Gates really gave a flying fsck about these
things, he should have begun working on them *before* (or instead
of) exploiting the world to make siphon off and concentrate
billions of dollars.
So, I tend to stick with established charities with proven track
records including both the united way and the red cross. My tiny
personal donations are doled out at the end of the year to
organizations like mozilla, MAPS, software in the public interest,
etc. with ZERO regard to how "efficient" or "effective" they are.
And my real contributions are paying (and voting for) taxes and
buying goods and services from the smallest businesses and co-ops
I can find.
On 4/22/20 1:04 PM, thompnicks...@gmail.com
<mailto:thompnicks...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I was listening to a podcast by the guy who runs Robin Hood, an
organization dedicated to getting at the institutional roots of
poverty. When asked where we should give money in this crisis, he
said, give it where you feel passion, because that is where you
are likely to give it again. I confess I feel passion for these
young folks, who in the 60’s would have been in graduate
programs, or art or music schools, teaching, learning, inspiring,
but are instead meagerly supporting their passions by making me
coffee. And very good coffee at that. So that’s where my money
goes. Robin Hood
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation> might be
better for Glen because “According to /Fortune
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)>/ magazine,
"Robin Hood was a pioneer in what is now called venture
philanthropy, or charity that embraces free-market forces. An
early practitioner of using metrics to measure the effectiveness
of grants, it is a place where
> strategies to alleviate urban poverty are hotly debated,
ineffectual plans are coldly discarded, and its staff of 66
hatches radical new ideas."^[
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation#cite_note-fm-2> ”
--
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