End of the Year Thoughts: Charity

We've spent the last few weeks researching organizations to donate money before the tax year ends. As the children grow older, I want to volunteer on projects as a family. But now they're too young, and our hectic life with a toddler and a newborn means that we don't have spare time or energy to donate either. So our contributions are mainly financial this year.

First of all, we designated the issues that seemed most important to us. They included:
- world health
- alzheimer's research/care
- doing something about the genocide in Darfur
- environment
- education
- local arts

Once we determined those categories, the real work set in. Researching the organizations. I started with general google searches to create lists of organizations in the various fields. After looking at the various groups and their specific approaches, I then checked them out on third party charity rating websites.

For example, www.charitywatch.org gives charities a general rating. Charities that get high ratings have to spend more than 75% of their income directly towards programs, and spend $25 or less to raise $100. It's a good site if you want to do the minimal amount of work in checking out a charity. But it wasn't necessarily good enough for me. I wanted more detail - like how much money does go directly to programs, and what does the president get paid. I hate to think that my charity is making one guy wealthy, increasing the gap between classes. I dug deeper.

So I turned to www.charitynavigator.org, a website that not only rates the charities with a star system, but also breaks down the information specifically, including pie charts that show where the money goes and breakdowns of executive pay. This was super helpful, but not all the charities I was interested in were here, so I kept looking.

Then I came across the Better Business Bureau charity guide: give.org. It has information comparable to Charity Navigator, but it also lists the organizations that refuse to share their financial information. This is a red flag that immediately crosses an organization off my list. What charity refuses to share their info with the BBB? One with something to hide is all I can surmise.

Of course, the financial information isn't the sole factor is picking a charity. The most important thing is finding a charity that does something that we believe makes the world a better place. This means having both a strong objective and an approach that will work. This is the subjective part of the research. In the case of organizations working to help the people in Darfur, none of them were rated by any of the agencies I consulted. But this was a very important issue to us, so we made a leap of faith and donated to the Save Darfur Coalition.

But here I am on NYE, still deciding on the last of the charities (we still haven't found an Alzheimer's organization that is a clear leader of the pack).

When am I going to have time to work on New Year's resolutions? I guess it's all about priorities. Maybe the kids aren't aware of our choices now, but there will come a year that they notice what we are doing and it becomes a model for them, and eventually when they have their own families they will sit down and make their own choices.