It's time to navigate the non-profit world! I've decided to run the posts on Tuesdays under the title #GivingTuesday because I love the Giving Tuesday Campaign that encourages people to donate to their favorite charities the Tuesday after Black Friday. This
tour of the non-profit world will include posts covering charity shopping, national vs. local initiatives, current trends in philanthropy,
and a societal look at who gives what and when.
Today we’re going to get
you started with some Charity Shopping. Charity shopping is a
peculiar habit of mine that I get weirdly sucked into around 1am because it
feels like a legitimate excuse to avoid going to bed.
When I say “charity
shopping,” I think of it in the same vein as Rory Gilmore doing her course
shopping at Yale her first year. When it comes to charities, you can find a
group supporting just about anything, and it’s easy to find yourself completely
obsessed with the mobile library van in a tiny Chilean mountain town or learning
about the team bringing mosquito netting to an African village via bicycle. There
are so many eye grabbing options out there, but after you hit that first intro course you’ll often find that what looks good on paper isn’t the right fit in
practice.
There are more charities
with a 501c3 rating from the IRS active today in the US than ever before, but
that does not mean that they are all created equal or held to a simple
pass/fail standard. That’s the main reason that I never, ever agree to round up
or add a dollar at a checkout line for the charity du jour. I’ve done
absolutely no vetting on that charity and have no idea if it matches my values
or beliefs, so I can’t justify even thinking about contributing.
Thinking about how to
get started? Here’s a look at a few of my favorite non-profits and how I
stumbled across them. It's not super readable, but here's a snapshot of the charities that I like to keep an eye on, and the way's that I've summarized and subgroup them.
We’re going to talk
about this in a future post, but my personal preference is for charities
offering a relatively small range of services in a specific community. I
believe that non-profits that operate locally often have a better perspective
on local issues, employ local citizens, and are better able to concentrate
their dollars. Hopefully this gives you a sense of what’s going on with my
little portfolio!
When I shop, I’m looking
for 4 star rated charities. If you can’t reach a 4 star rating with
Charity Navigator, then there’s always another charity that operates on a similar
business model, delivering a very similar product, that is more reliable and
more transparent. That’s not to say that there’s something definitively wrong
with a 2 or 3 star charity, but as a general rule it works for me so I rarely make exceptions.
One controversial topic
is always overhead costs. As someone who has a lot of first-hand experience
with non-profits that deliver direct service to clients, without or in lieu of
any financial component, the idea that just because a non-profit pays its staff
well it is somehow negligent just doesn’t ring
true. A charity that is obsessed
with pricey PR campaigns or constantly sending out promotional junk isn’t going
to be your first choice if you want to see infrastructure being built, but a charity isn’t superior because they
cut corners by paying their idealistic staff peanuts.
I like to search by service
category or geographical region, and then I often drop down a few rungs from
the most obvious name recognition charity to one that I’m less familiar with. I
also like to combine interest areas. Some examples of how
this places out for me:
Instead of supporting
the Sierra Club, I look at Teton Science Schools because I believe that their model of
conservation and science based education is going to reach an entire new
generation of makers, doers, and actors who will be the future of conservation
in the current and next generation. By supporting Teton schools, I feel like
I’m combining interest areas: our national parks, conservation of wildlife and
the natural land, and education of young minds.
Because the general advancement of women is important to me and I think that
STEM jobs are one of the best guarantees of future economic security, I’ve got
my eye on the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology. I like the idea of offering that extra push to
help young girls become comfortable with mathematics and the sciences right at
the age that they are starting to turn away from STEM. I wish someone had helped me to see that STEM could work for me when I was younger!
My Amazon Smile charity
of choice is the American Indian College Fund It’s a well run,
respected charity that pushes to offer Native American teens
the opportunity to gain an education that they can use to better their
entire community. By the way, if you’re ordering from Amazon.com please,
please, please, make the fast change to www.smile.amazon.com and let a percentage of every buy benefit the
charity of your choice! It’s just free money waiting to be donated!
Once you find a charity
you like (and seriously does the rabbit hole get specific and weird when you
get deep into shopping, or what?), don’t jump to sending money now! First,
check out their website to make sure nothing jumps out at you that
is a personal values conflict. Then, follow the charity on any social media that
you can find and set your Facebook settings so that they appear at the top of
your newsfeed.
In my case, I start
every day by seeing anything new from the Island Institute,
Adopt-A-Native-Elder, and Remote Area medical. I identified those three charities as my major
interests this year and I’m loving following along with their current
objectives, projects, clients and staff. The Adopt-A-Native-Elder Walk in
Beauty campaign that gives schoolchildren new shoes breaks my entire heart!
I know that as many of
us in our mid-20s start to secure more reliable incomes, we’re looking outward to helping the causes we believe in. Finding out that your dollar didn’t reach the
intended audience, or that you didn’t do enough research to learn about a
political or religious conflict before donating is enough to put anyone off
philanthropy.
Do you feel ready to do some charity shopping of your own to see what's out there?
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