Dont take my topic the wrong way, I support the Red Cross myself and donated what I could to the relief effort. My question here is when is enough money enough money? At what point do we stop seeing the Red Cross commercials with video from the 9/11 attacks asking for more money.
I understand that the Red Cross spends money on things other than the attack, but have they got a figure somewhere saying “This is how much we need and this is how much we have got”?
Its kind of like if my daughter needed open heart surgery or something. If there where fund raisers around the office or something to raise the money for the surgery, I would not be accepting more money than the surgery would cost. Even though my daughters situation would be tragic, there would still need to be a limit as to how much money I could accept. If I somehow raised a million bucks or something, that would be wrong. There is a point at which there would be too much oney for the situation.
The General Questions here are : How much money has the Red Cross raised in the last month? How much do they anticipate the relief effort costing? Where does the money go exactly?I cant find this info anywhere on the Red Cross site.
The reason that I ask these questions is because it seems, to me anyway, that they have raised a ton of money in the last month. That celebrity fund raiser made 150 million alone. I am sure they raised a heck of a lot more than that in total. The Red Cross is not going to be paying any money to rebuild the infrastructure that was destroyed. The government and insurance companies will foot that bill. What are they spending all of this money on? I dont think that the relief workers are getting rich. Anyone have any answers to these questions? Im not looking for speculation really. I am looking for numbers.
I’m sure if you asked the American Red Cross, you could get detailed accounting from them for what it plans to spend its money on.
I doubt there could be “too much” money raised since anything extra would just be put into a surplus account where it could be held in anticipation of the next great national emergency. There are still going to be earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, et al.
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but a problem related to your question is: what has happened to all the other worthy charities in America over the past month? There are still many people in this country who need help of one sort or another (food, clothing, shelter, medical care, legal aid, protection from violent spouses, etc., etc., etc.), and i hope that Americans’ generosity in response to September 11 does not end up drawing money away from these other important causes.
We should be asking this question of our government. Why most peope don’t is beyond me. I’m sure the Red Cross will invest the money a lot more responsibly than our elected officials. To avoid GD, I’ve found some specific answers to your first question from your BEST source of information on charitable giving, Philanthropy.com. How the money will be spent has already been covered in a previous GQ thread. There’s an interesting article on that site which compares charitable giving during various crises in our recent history.
Red Cross: $370 million ($63 million from the web)
United Way (Sep 11th fund): $164 million
Salvation Army: $35 million
Families for Freedom Scholarship Fund: $8.4 million
Catholic Charities: $5 million
Incidentally, the Red Cross likes to maintain a reserve of about $50 million dollars during its busy season (the hurricane season of September/October) according to Bill Blaul, senior vp at the Red Cross.
So take the money raised by the major players listed by evilhanz (582.4 million), divide it by, oh, 5000 victims, and it comes out to $116480 per vicitm - if that was to go to just the families of the dead. Divide it among the 50000 who worked in the WTC and were either dead, injured, or just lost their jobs (I’m assuming one bread winner per family - not very scientific, I know) and it comes out to $11648. Not really very much, when you think about it. And I’m not even getting into equipment replacement, etc. for the POlice and Fire Departments. I’ll end this now, because my mind still boggles when I try to wrap it around this tragedy…
I started this thread a month ago or something and I have been reading alot of articles that are starting really question the Red Cross’s spending habits as of late. I was just curious what every one else thinks right now.
Bah. You bump your thread by posting a snip devoid of any real facts or information, merely a media sound bite saying, “A controversy exists”, with no input from yourself?
You wanna debate the Red Cross’s spending habits, please be so kind as to go start a Great Debates thread with a decent OP.