I ask because it seems like a good idea-you sponsor a poor child in a 3rd world country, and the money goes direct to the child’s parents.
Has anyone ver done this? And is the charity recognized as a well-run one?
According to this site it is…
Charity Navigator gives it 3/4 stars and shows 6.2% of funds going to administrative expenses (less than 10% is their best category, so good for them) and 11.6% going to fundraising expenses, which is somewhat high. (Less than 10% is also the best here.)
Their fundraising efficiency is $0.12 on the dollar, which is somewhat low (less then a dime is best.)
3/4 isn’t a bad charity at all, but there are better ones.
Bolding added. I’ve no idea if the charity is well-run, but I don’t believe that the money goes directly to the parents. According to the website:
I believe the book The Road to Hell has quite a bit about the Christian Children’s fund. If it’s not that book, then it is one of the other big charity/foreign aid expose books.
Basically they misrepresent themselves- your money will probably be pooled and put into community projects. Any contact with individual children is pretty limited, and is mostly a marketing thing. The book I read alleges that the do some sketchy stuff to more sponsored kids on their lists and accuses them of having pretty limited understandings of the communities they work with. They don’t do a lot of research on what the communities need, they don’t try to make their projects sustainable, etc. Can’t give many details as I’m half-remembering a book I read years ago.
If you are looking for a charity, I have personal experience with Peace Corps Partnership. Peace Corps volunteers spend a lot of time living as a member of a community and discover its most pressing needs. Then they can begin working with community members small projects that directly address those needs. These projects need to be sustainable (they must provide training, etc. so the things they build can be maintained after the volunteer leaves) and have to have a significant community contributions (to prove this is something the community really wants and will use.) Your contribution goes directly and entirely to the project under the supervision of the volunteer and their country office. In my experience, these small projects- things like wells, classrooms, scholarship programs, etc.- do a hell of a lot of good and their impact lasts a long time.
This is better suited for IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I use the Charity Navigator to help decide what charities to give to. Here’s their take (3 out of 4 stars): Charity Navigator - Rating for ChildFund International
I saw the African Children’s Choir perform with the BSO tonight, they were quite impressive. The only thing I know about them is info from their handout, but I was most impressed with the kids and it looks like they do something similar to the CCF, but with music. You might want to check them out. I don’t know how they would “rate”, however, neither of the links in this thread lists them.
I used to sponsor kids through CCF but after a while I did get the distinct feeling the one-to-one sponsorship thing is a marketing ploy. Kind of like the “personal” notes you get from politicians when you donate to the party - gosh guys, just how stupid do you think I am? Take my money, do good work with it that we all believe in, but stop with the smarmy follow-up.
A bit of a hijack : even sven, I gather you are currently working in an African country (Cameroon?) as a volunteer helper? Do you have any experience with the child organisation PLAN (international)? Because that’s where I sponsor a child. They also changed from the give-the-child-cash-money to the community-centered approach several decades back. I get letters (though I’m not good at answering), though they also take the time to explain why it’s uncommon in many cultures to write letters, and why therefore the letters are often short and unpersonal. Once a year I get a progress report about the community projects and my child’s progress.
Plan says that the sponsored child is a representative for the whole community (and that’s why the families are carefully selected). They see the communication with the children through letters as an additional personal way of learning about cultures - for both sides! - so when you give 25 Euros a month, you know it’s to make sure that one girl can go to school/ have access to clean water / etc. They also caution foster parents to not give expensive gifts to this one child, so as not to make the other children in the community envious.
Their goal is self-substience, and they withdraw from an area after a fixed amount of years, once they are sustainable, and move on to the next community.
They say that their community volunteers and helpers are trained and come from the area.
And Plan is non-devotional - they take children regardless of religion and caution donor parents not to mention politics and religion in letters since they are hot topics. This sounds better to me than on overly Christian charity - I wonder how much missioning they are doing?
It looks legit to me, and has been certifed by the German Institute for charity, but it would still be interesting to hear what somebody who’s actually there thinks of their work.
A lot of other charities - Unicef, CBM, etc. - also have the direct approach of “For a gift of 20 Euros, we can buy food for 5 orphans/ provide immunisation/vitamins for 20 children, for a gift of 75 Euros, we can buy medicine for one health outpost, for a gift of 150 Euros, we can buy a cow so a mother can feed her children healthy milk…” This seems to work better for people than just giving x amount of money for charity in general, without knowing what happens with it.
How about going with Doctors Without Borders? They do good work, across the board, in a completely non-denominational sort of way.
I’m in southwest China right now, but I just spend two years in Cameroon as a Peace Corps volunteer. I don’t have any personal experience with PLAN International. Northern Cameroon isn’t a “sexy for charities” kind of place, and so the only major players really working in my area were CARE (who have since parted, I believe) and the United Nations Development Program. Other than that it was a handful of small charities, micro-finance companies, scattered missionaries and Peace Corps.
My view of the major charities is that they often don’t have the resources on the ground to really figure out what needs to be done. And here my Peace Corps bias is going to show. Most Western employees of major charities live in ex-pat enclaves of major cities. They spend their lives in walled and guarded houses. When they go out, they go out in chauffeured land cruisers. So they don’t really have the on-the-ground experience to really know what a community needs. And every office in a corrupt country is going to have a great amount of internal corruption. So you can’t count on the idea that “community members” are actually going to be invested in their community.
The unique thing about Peace Corps is that they are really the only organization that sends people to live as part of the community, and I think that really works. That and Americans are super-sensitive about corruption, and volunteers do what it takes to make sure their hard work doesn’t go into corrupt hands.
Charity is always going to be tricky. There is always a chance you are going to do more harm than good. And nothing is ever straightforward. “Sustainability” became the buzzword after too many big project rotted because the governments didn’t have the ability to maintain them. But at the same time, my province had a big huge un-sustainable hydroelectric dam that the Chinese built. And you bet have electricity made everyone’s life a lot better. Much better than 1,000 community gardens. So even the most modern ways of thinking can’t eliminate the problems and complexities.
I mention Peace Corps Partnership because in my experience it was the quickest, most reliable way to really help someone. The person who wrote the project probably spent nearly a year doing community assessment and planning. Corruption- a HUGE problem in most charities- is extremely low in Peace Corps Partnership projects. There is a very good framework for making sure projects are completed (a big problem with many charities) and you get the satisfaction of directly choosing a project that interests you and perhaps even funding it fully. I think it is probably the most direct way to “make something happen” outside of personally knowing someone working in the field.
Christian Children’s Fund uses some of their funds to proselytize, organizing and promoting religious services, handing out bibles, and filtering all education through their specific religious beliefs. Do they do some good? Sure. Would I support them? Never.
Cite?
Same here.
A short list of 4-Star International Relief Charities per Charity Navigator:
Action Against Hunger
Camfed USA
Children’s Relief Mission
Mercy Corps
Oprah’s Angel Network
Save the Children
Water for People
They turned down funds raised in memory of E. Gary Gygax at Gen Con, so fuck em.
False. It was a non-issue that a few uberdweebs blew way the hell out of proportion.
I recommend Orphan Sponsorship International. I knew the Peace Corps Volunteers who worked for this organization’s Bulgaria office and they did a lot of great work for kids who really needed it. (Virtually all of the Bulgarian kids being helped by this program are members of the Roma ethnic minority, who tend to live in really appalling circumstances even if they do have families, and these kids don’t even have that.) They work in other countries too, I just mention BG because I have first-hand experience with them there.
Ditto what even sven says about Peace Corps Partnership Program. All of the money goes towards the project, not towards administration at all, and they are planned by members of (often small) communities, not by someone in a distant capital who doesn’t know what people really need. These projects are community-based, at the lowest, grass-roots level. You can help girls get a good education in El Salvador, promote entrepreneurship and health in Mali, or or help fund anti-domestic violence programs in Ukraine. (BTW, these proposals were written by the volunteers themselves, so…there’s a rather wide variation in the description styles.)
Not false. Your own damn link says they didn’t get the money, and refused to allow their name to be associated with the auction, with some hand waving about endorsement policies. And thanks for the unwarranted cheap shot at gamers. That was really classy.
Mercy Corps and Direct Relief International are both extremely highly rated by Charity Navigator and do lots of very good work. It’s not one-on-one sponsorship, but with Mercy Corps, you can choose to buy a “mercy kit”, and your donation will go to a specific project - breast feeding awareness, building schools, digging potable wells, etc. I haven’t personally interacted with Direct Relief, but I’ve heard equally good things about them; they’re extremely efficient and make great progress in bringing medical care to people who really need it.