I have http://www.hungersite.com bookmarked in my favorites, and click on it once per day to donate a couple of cups of food to the UN World Food Programme. As their website states, somebody dies of hunger every 3.6 seconds, 75% of which are children.
Two questions.
Are their statistics accurate? Any idea how they are determined?
Reading their FAQ, I found this:
If they are NOT a non-profit, wouldn’t it make more sense to donate directly to the UN, Red Cross, or some other relief organization?
OK three questions. Since they are not a non-profit, does this mean they are making $ by exploiting the idea of starving children? WTF?
First off, no one donates anything to the Hunger Site. You click on a button and see some sponsor ads and those sponsors donate directly to the United Nations World Food Programme.
Secondly, according to their About Hunger page, they got that statistic from The Hunger Project, United Nations. Other statistic sources they list on that page are: CARE, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Oxfam and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
As to your last question, are you implying you are against for-profit organizations creating, running, promoting and/or contributing to charitable programs?
Finally, did you take their advice and click the About Us link?
[Moderator’s note: I tried to fix the link to eliminate screen-scroll. -manhattan]
It just seems a little morbid to have a for-profit organization to aid the hungry. Are there for-profit homeless shelters? Or for-profit shelters for abused children? Why would somebody want to make $ off of somebody else’s misfortune?
If an organization is not-for-profit or non-profit, that doesnt mean the organizations goal is to make a profit. You have to fill out a bunch of paperwork to get that status, I think because it makes you tax exempt. For example, If I set up something like hungersite, it really wouldnt be an organization at all, and I certainly couldnt claim to be a non-profit organization.
I’ve been reading about affordable housing recently, and I know that the most effective programs for affordable housing are the ones that created market incentives for private investment in providing the housing rather than trying to conquer the problem directly. I would assume the same applies for the Hunger Site. By connecting businesses that want to be associated with humanitarian efforts to an audience of people who come to the Hunger Site to feel better about themselves, they are really providing a service for business. They make money by providing this service. The UN program and the truly teeming millions suffering from undernourishment are helped only insofar as they provide the impetus for the target audience’s participation. If, for example, they had launched the site as “The Dividend Site – Each time you click on the button below, these corporations will donate a fraction of a cent to each of their stockholders” there would be no audience.
Maybe I missed it, but where exactly is The Hunger Site making a profit? There are no ads on the site, other than the sponsor links, and the sponsors do not pay any money to The Hunger Site, they pay everything directly the UN World Food Programme. All that answer says is that, legally, they cannot call themselves a not-for-profit organization. I cannot call myself a not-for-profit organization, but that does not mean I am a for-profit organization.
And even if the organization that runs The Hunger Site is a for-profit organization, that does not mean they are making a profit on the website. That just means that, whether it’s due to social consciences or just PR purposes, that organization has decided to donate time, effort and server space to create and host a website that can be used to donate food.
There are for-profit enterprises in my area that donate food to charities (food pantries and homeless shelters), is that morbid? Then why is it morbid to donate webspace?
I know I shouldn’t mention this, since it’s coming out of my rather poor memory without any back-up, but I was watching something last week about certain poor countries. The show was mentioning that the average income was something like $6 a month in the country they were featuring.
So, in theory, an extra $20 a month (just to pick a number out of my head) would mean a lot more to them then to us.
Mind you, these people seemed to have dirt floors and one room houses, so it’s unlikely I would want to move there because of the lower cost of living.