I have been wanting to do this for years. I am very interested if there is a family that I can help. Would welcome any info you have.
I would be happy to take any info you have to help a family in Zimbabwe.
Reported as spam. (Waringa)
How donating your money to a food pantry right in your own town or city and helping some poor American families ?
Give Directly is a well respected charity founded on the principle of direct cash transfers as a form of aid.
I’ve met with the founders before and I really like their philosophy. Their position is that direct cash transfer should be the null hypothesis of the charity world. That is, any charitable intervention should meet a minimum threshold that it does at least as well as direct cash transfer to be considered credible.
In order to do that, Give Directly is gathering data on the exact impact of direct cash transfer and showing that many commonly popular charity interventions are not as effective as direct cash transfer. According to Givewell, there are only 3 charity interventions that have strong evidence that they perform substantially better than Give Directly.
Just spend your next vacation in a poor country, befriend a poor family there, and send them money. That’s what I’ve done.
Doesn’t this run the risk of creating jealousy from other families?
It’s better to find someone who has family in a village or whatever, and try to make a donation for something that benefits everyone.
For instance, donating money to pay for all or some of the poorer kids there to get new school clothes and supplies for a year of school. Or a new well, or whatever they need as a community.
The hard part is finding someone in a poor country, which is why jtur88’s suggestion is the best. If you feel strongly about it, make a trip to that country and befriend some locals that can tell you what they need.
Also, on that Kiva site, are loaners able to track how the business or whatever is going, or only whether or not the loan gets repaid? Seems like a great site to help out others will small loans.
Apparently, judging from above, it runs the risk of creating jealousy from other Americans.
When do you expect to begin accepting applications?
Possible spam with gmail address noted and reported (davilaccaccya)
I donate to Kiva and have never had anybody default. You don’t earn any interest on your money, so it’s a pure give-and-repay program. I’ve had the same $100 recycle many times over the years. The nice thing is that you can choose who it goes to. We usually pick groups of women in Africa trying to keep a cooperative business operating, rather than someone looking for less productive efforts. Kiva has field operatives who vet the applicants.
It’s a nice notion to want to support a family, but as noted above, it’s risky if you don’t actually know the people and their situation.
Since this thread has repeatedly been bumped by spammers (since removed) I am closing it.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator