Doing a thousand dollars of good in the world - where should it go?

In My Humble Opinion
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(Note: I emailed samclem to see if this thread was kosher a couple weeks ago, but I guess I got spamtrapped. If this isn’t kosher for some reason, please lock it and accept my apologies.)

So… background information first. I don’t know if it really counts as charity or conscience-clearing.

I’m a cosplayer. I go overboard at Halloween. I do ridiculous, over-the-top, in-character costumes. For example, I’m trying to figure out how I would make a five-foot-wide shell so I can do a Bob-Omb costume, complete with strobe light inside so I can flash angrily when I bump into things (and, at five feet across, I will bump into things).

I found these wings I want to build into some future costumes. They’re really nice - all aluminum and carbon-fiber with a pneumatic opening system and cool glowy LED tips. The coolest part is that they’re six feet across, not dinky little raver-wings. I got all kinds of post-apocalyptic-cyborg-angel costume ideas just looking at them.

The problem, of course, is that nice things cost money. In this case, they cost $700. Then there’s shipping, and it would be stupid not to buy a Pelican case or something to store them while travelling. It’s probably over a thousand dollars all said and told.

So one of the voices in my head says, “Well, Jackboots, you’re entitled to an indulgence now and again. You’re young. You have a pretty solid job. You could save up a thousand dollars in spending money in a couple months if you wanted to.”

The other voice says, “Jackboots, that’s a thousand dollars for something you’d wear probably a week out of the year. The other 358 days you’d hang them on the wall as art, so maybe you’d get ten days worth of actual enjoyment out of them. Maybe two weeks. You could feed a hungry family of four for a month on a thousand dollars, and have money left over. You can’t justify that.” (Yes, that voice actually does define extravagances in terms of hungry-person-days, which makes it rather hard to argue.)

And it’s right; I can’t.

But my mind is a flexible sort of thing, and after some negotiation with this voice I’ve decided I can save up for these wings if I do some appropriate amount of good in the world to make up for a thousand dollars worth of total selfishness.

Arbitrarily, at least a thousand dollars’ worth. I’ll do it fifty to a hundred dollars at a time (plus overhead costs) to keep accounting simple, as I save it up. My conscience can be happy with that. It’s not as good as doing the whole two thousand dollars of good, but… such is life. I’m not a monk and I’ve never pretended to be a saint.

The problem is, I don’t actually know all that many charities. So, my question for the Dope is… where should it go? I’m sure people have favorite causes that I should know about. I have a few ground rules to thin things out from the entire 501© listing, which I could just Google if I wanted to be random about it.

1 - Buy a man a fish… I believe people should work, and I lived in Berkeley too long to believe that giving money directly to the homeless does much but encourage them to be nuisances. I don’t mind helping people through rough spots, but the idea is to make society a better place, not to make urban life even more annoying. In this vein, education is a pure good - outreach programs, scholarship groups… I’m all for them. Bootstraps for everyone!

2 - Kids get a break on that last one. The Shriners are due a check from me next payday, for example.

3 - I’d like to keep the politics minimal. That said, I’m not opposed to donating to groups that are getting things done. I admit to a progressive bias, and I’m far more likely to donate to the ACLU than the Project for a New American Century. FairTaxers will be laughed at.

4 - Tax-deductible is nice but not necessary. I’ll split the tax benefits between saving up and doing good, so it lets me stretch the dollars further.

5 - I’m doing a thousand dollars worth of good, not just giving away a thousand dollars. I’m paying for overhead, too, and I’d like to avoid paying for a whole lot of it. If 90% of a donation goes to the organization’s cause, I’m giving it $112 to count as $100 to save. It adds up quick. Low-overhead charities are much appreciated. United Way can go out back and shoot itself in the head. I’ll chip in for the bullet but other than that, no dice.

2

Maybe something like Make a Wish? I had a friend when I was a kid with cystic fibrosis. Her little bro had it too. He was in and out of the hospital all the time with complications. They both had to use this weird breathing vest thing that filled with air and beat on their chest and back a couple times a day. Always on tons of pills, etc. My friend got to go to the VMAs and her little bro got to go snowboarding in CO. I don’t know about their overhead, but giving a sick kid a chance to do something they want to do but their parents can’t afford is really nice.

Anyone you know struck with a disease? Donate it to the corresponding organization in their honor.

3

I don’t even know if he would want your money, but maybe you can invest or donate to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank This guy makes “micro-loans” to the poor in 3rd world countries, many of them in the 10-20 dollar range. I saw a story once about a carver who borrowed 10 bocks fo he could buy a hammer and chisel rather than rent daily from some local tool supplier. This small thing more than doubled the guys income and he could pay off the loan in a few weeks.

I can’t think of any better way to do more with less. I’ve just been reading about this guy recently, and apparently this loan model is spreading rapidly. I’d like to figure how to contribute to it myself.

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I cannot think of a better way to spend one thousand charitable dollars than on disease-prevention programs in sub-saharan Africa.

 First, a single dollar goes much further here than elsewhere.  Those commercials are true: for a few dollars you can pay for medicines to cure life-threatening illnesses.  No other spending option will do so much good, dollar for dollar.  This isn't about searching for a cure.  We have the cures.  It's just that the people that need them cannot afford them.

 Second, while this isn't exactly teaching the proverbial man to fish, it is an important prerequisite to such lessons.  It's hard to start a small business with micro-loans when you couldn't go to school as a kid because you had recurring bouts of tuberculosis.  Economists identify a number of poverty traps that prevent economic development.  Chief among them is disease.  Malaria, for example, not only kills many potential workers, it also impairs developing intellects.  Many of these communities simply cannot rise out of poverty until they get the money to deal with the basics first (i.e. clean water, antibiotics).  

 Third, there is very little risk of your money being misspent or used up on overhead.  Your money is not paying for something vague and open to misjudgments.  It is paying for discrete, identifiable goods: vaccines, antibiotics, etc.  If you donate to a smart, efficient organization like the Gates Foundation, well over 90% of every dollar will actually go to the people who need it.  And you can have no doubt in your heart that the money is saving lives.  But more than that, it is laying the groundwork for people to help themselves.  Which they will do if they can just rise out of a world of disease and hunger for long enough.
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Volunteer your time doing something good: Help build a Habitat House, Spend some time in a pediatric ward reading to kids, same with a nursing home, put in some hours at your local animal shelter. Figure up how much you are worth on an hourly basis and multiply that times the number of hours you “do good”, and take that off your $1000 tally. :slight_smile:

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The Heifer Project www.heifer.org

In a nutshell, they give an animal, such as a heifer (a young female cow who has not yet been bred) to a poor person. That person then takes care of the heifer, and breeds the heifer, gets the benefits of milk from the heifer, and more cows, and gives one ( I think the first one) to someone else.

They also give other animals. And they do so in a variety of locations.

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Microloans was my first thought, too. It’s a great program.

Daniel

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Charity Navigator is a great site to use for evaluating and comparing charities.

You can see which charities spend more on administration than anything else, which pay 6-figure salaries to the top officials, and which ones don’t. You can search a specific charity, or look for those focusing on causes you are interested in.

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Talk to your local high school. There are always deserving kids who never qualify for the big scholarships.

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This is my annual Christmas donation.

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Being personal is great, isn’t it? I’d do that more, if I weren’t working for a startup. Most of my week is work-work-grab-food-work-sleep-work-work… =/ I’ll have to see about putting aside a Saturday for that, though.

Make-A-Wish’s overhead is pretty low (21%) relative to the others so far (Grameen Foundation, 25%, Heifer.org 24.6%). I hadn’t thought about talking to the high school. That one has no overhead at all, and I actually live only a couple blocks away. I could walk over there on the way to work and leave a note with one of the guidance counsellors, I bet.

Thanks for all of this; I’m going through their literature and taking lots of notes right now.

12

Seeing as it’s nearing the holidays, you could find an organization that could hook you up with a family that needs help with Christmas presents for the kids or a holiday dinner.

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I like to keep my charity local.

–Call up your local battered women’s shelter and ask them what they need. Then, go to the store and buy them the clothes, food or toiletries that they requested.

–Go out and buy some bags of dog food and give it to your local animal shelter. Offer to pay for a couple of spay/neuters for families who want a pet but can’t really afford it.

– Buy a nice assortment of jigsaw puzzles, books and other recreation items and take them down to your local nursing home.

–Don’t neglect your local museum or historical society. Their needs are often very simple. (The museum in which I work asks for hand tools, sheets and towels.)

Of course, any of the above charities can also use cash, but I enjoy doing the shopping myself. It’s also all tax deductible. (Make sure you get a reciept.)

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Why?

Give it to Direct Relief.

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I’d like to third Heifer project. It helps build a sustainable economic base in areas where people are starving and have nothing.

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I third micro-loans. Often your local bank offers them too. My bank, for instance, offers the possibility to put part of your money in a microloan-fund. It offers lowish interest (2 % instead of the usual 3,8 % on a savings account and 4-10 %when you’re investing in stock) but the interest is tax-deductable.

Couldn’t you make some money with those wings as well? You weren’t planning to wear them for years and years anyway. Buy the wings, make a great costume, photograph yourself in it, and then offer it on E-bay around the time of next Halloween.

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The Grameen bank does NOT accept donations. I know some organizations that considered doing similar work to theirs but which ended up deciding it was better to work with them (asking them to open a local branch, helping them find employees, telling potential customers to speak with them).

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I give to the Heifer Project every Christmas, every month to Doctors Without Borders, and also to the one I’m going to pitch - the Carter Center. (Yes, the ex-President, but it isn’t political.) They do a lot of excellent work - they’ve done a lot to fight diseases like the guinea worm in Africa, they have educational programs where they teach farmers more efficient methods - there’s a really wide variety of things they’ve got a hand in. I like them very much.

Also, the child sponsorship program I’ve been doing (orphansponsorship.org) sends every single penny of your contributions to the child. Pays for room and board, gifts, school supplies, stuff like that.

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I could really use a thousand dollars. Why waste it on food when you could buy me a few ipods?

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I have my favorite causes, too. But you can do better than taking specific advice.

A group of economists and other experts met to discuss this exact problem and produced the Copenhagen Consensus. You should check out their findings.