The demonization of actual charities/orgs in favor of individual GFMs has done nothing but stripped marginalized people of their privacy + dignity by forcing them to become internet celebrities in order to get their needs met as opposed to an org that could privately help them if said org had the funding!!!! Also it’s why people feel the need to go as far as to fake their own kidnappings just to get traction! Not to mention it’s just made the lives of grifters so much easier
To circle back, who benefits more from this? The 65 year old drug addicted woman on skid row who can’t read or the young hot gen z college kid with 10k tiktok followers? This bastardization of “mutual aid” combined the constant like mining dopamine cycle social media has done almost irreparable damage to young wokey people especially young people of color.
Making every poor person dance for the internet in order to get their snazzy twitter begging flyer traction will only set people up for long term failure.
Imagine: I’m a young person down on her luck so I beg on twitter with my real name and face along with every personal detail, I get my coin, I am actually able to put myself through schooling but now whenever an employer googles me they can find this incredibly personal information about me!
I have nothing but sympathy for people who are in a position where they urgently need money and need it fast but we should instead put that money towards orgs whose whole job is to PRIVATELY help people
My guy you have entirely missed the point of my post and there are multiple ways to vet a charity
if you are worried about charities spending your money they do actually have to share their accounts publicly in most jurisdictions.
It’s important to know that your charitable donation will be well spent and support the programs you care about. Here’s how to check on a no
Ok both of the above are great suggestions, but that’s a lot of work to do all that vetting yourself. You can also check with Charity Watch to see what their rating and recommendation is.
Donate with confidence. Get detailed information about your favorite charities. CharityWatch is America's most independent, assertive charit
You can also consider giving to an Umbrella Nonprofit. These groups distribute funds to much smaller orgs that may have trouble reaching a large audience on their own. The most well-known of these is The United Way which has over 1,000 individual charities it distributes funds too. You can often designate your donations this way - either to be distributed to charities all who serve a cause, or to specific charities only.
Direct giving is fine, but your dollars are far more impactful if distributed through a non-profit network. So give directly to people you know personally, but there’s a reason why these charities and more importantly things like rating systems and watchdogs exist and that’s precisely to ensure your dollars end up where they can make the largest impact.
The other thing is, if a charity is doing work that you support ... money is not the only way to support them. Your time and energy might in fact be more valuable to them than your money.
Find a charity in your area that supports a cause you do. See where they need volunteers. Show up and help. Get involved. You will have a sense of accomplishment, you might make friends, and you will have a much better idea of what the charity is doing than any amount of websites or other tools can tell you.
One little note of caution I would insert here -- the issue of vetting charities (and people who profess reluctance to give to charities) often ends up focusing on fears around "overhead". CharityWatch in particular is all about monitoring overhead.
Overhead, for those who don't know, is the expenses a non-profit has that aren't directly on programs that fulfill its purpose. For instance, non-overhead spending at a food pantry would be purchasing discounted food from a supermarket; overhead costs might be rent on the space, payment for the electricity to run the refrigerators, or paying staff to write grants or plan and throw a fundraising event.
People have a lot of feelings about charities spending on overhead, because they feel like "but I wanted my money to go to people who need help, not to buying toilet paper for the office!" Which I get on an emotional level, even if I fundamentally disagree with it. And sure, a mismanaged charity probably will spend a high proportion of its funds on overhead. But that doesn't mean that overhead is a bad thing in and of itself, and that you should base your decisions on it. It's better for non-profits to be staffed by full-time workers than by volunteers, and it's better for those workers to be adequately compensated in offices that are taken care of than for them to be living paycheck-to-paycheck and needing the assistance of other charities.
As an alternative to Charity Watch, you could try Charity Navigator, which ranks charities by things like:
- how do they develop their programs and monitor their impact? - how do they maintain accountability for their spending and how public is their financial information? - What feedback do they collect from the communities they serve and how do they use it?
It's a more complicated ranking system, so there's more reading involved, but it's all in one place and it avoids the trap of assuming that all overhead is 'wasted' spending.
