Winston wrote: ↑July 11th, 2018, 7:09 am
This hippie named Koi Fresco makes some good points about why most or all charities are just scams with no accountability and profit most of the donations given to them. If this is true then why aren't they outlawed? Why do they exist? Aren't scams illegal in America?
I listened to a presentation and got to know some people involved in an organization that helped wealthy individuals by researching projects they wanted to donate to. For them, the metric that they were looking at was not what percentage of money donated went to overhead, but rather impact. If there were one charity/project that would drill wells where only 5% went to overhead (salaries, advertising, etc.) but they were able to impact 5,000 people's lives for the better by drilling a well in a poor village, verses a charity/project that had 10% going to overhead but had the same type of impact on 10,000 people's lives, the latter might be preferable to the donor. I don't have a problem with charities having expenses, salaried employees, necessarily, depending on what type of charity it is.
Some Christian charities can have rather low overheads. Speed the Light from the Assemblies of God had an overhead in a few percentage points. I wonder if their staff were funded by another stream within the organization or if they just had a few people passing along a small amount of donations. But you get a lot of volunteer labor with some of the churches that run soup kitchens or missions efforts, or missionaries who live off of donations from sponsors and not the money you give to the charity, so a lot of it can go to food or whatever else.
I don't usually always give to the charities on the credit card machine. I do think there are 'evil charities' out there, trying to promote sexual perversion and killing babies in the womb. Usually, these aren't the ones on the check out machine, but I like to choose where I give. I also did not like it when I was poor and they have the cashier ask, "would you like to give to...." and I'd say yes, but I cannot afford to.
There was a black woman in a Walmart vest at a Walmart in the south I went to once. She asked me if I wanted to give to Chirun Hospital. I asked what that was. Now, I'd heard 'chilren' for children, but she was saying 'chirun', and I'd never heard that before. I don't mind giving to something like that. I don't give to animal charities with all the human problems we have.
If you want to help homeless people and know what you give goes there and you live near a reasonably sized city, at least in the US, there are usually places where they tend to hang out. It might be near the homeless shelter and soup kitchen. These places seem to cluster together in a city so the homeless people can walk back and forth. Some cities may not have enough food in these places and smaller towns may have quite a bit. Let's say there is a parking lot there where they hang out, or a place under a bridge. You can drive down there and give them food. If you go on Christmas day, other poor people may show up hoping there are folks giving out presents for their children--clothes and toys.
There are also foundations that rich people can use for tax deduction, like if a rich person buys art that appreciates, then deducts it to his own art foundation for a deduction. Maybe he keeps it on his own wall after he donates it.
Sometimes the rich people run foundations because they get rich in business and then the company opens a charity, rather than the charity directly making them money.
Charities can also support business endeavors.
There was a wealthy banking and real estate family in Indonesia whose company donated to a nonprofit educational foundation. I met and spoke with some members of the family and the former chair of the board over my years in Indonesia and when the former chair came to the US. They opened a new real estate complex and eventually a mall, developing basically a city out of a little farm village area. The government had outlaw rich Indonesians sending kids to private schools, so they created high end local schools that hired English-speaking foreign teachers and local English-speaking teachers to send children to. They had two different levels of schools for different price points with a plan to open one for the very poor. They had a hospital, too. So they could channel money into the educational foundation, but the school there in the city supported their real estate project, giving parents a reason to live there and drive in to Jakarta. The kids had a high-end school to go to. The opened a couple of other city projects outside of town with branches of the school. I think they only have one university in the original town, though.
As far as I know, though, these schools did not ask for donations from the public, just tuition. But the company used them as a place to put charitable contributions.