Although this particular case is egregious, I'd like to point out that donors should not be overly focused on a simplistic view of a charity's finances.
A charity that only moves money around should of course be pretty efficient about it. But a charity that actually does things faces the same kinds of inefficiencies as any business.
For instance, The Nature Conservancy is a charity I like (I'm not necessarily recommending them -- do your own research). About 2/3 of the raised funds go to their actual programs, and the rest is administrative and fundraising.
However, they are one of the few large environmental charities that actually does stuff to help the environment, and attracts the expertise to do it well. The rest are lobbyists and money-shufflers, which I have little patience for when it comes to charities.
In other words, I'm much more tolerant of inefficiency when actually doing something. I think anyone who actually does things would agree that it's not always efficient when observed from afar. But in reality it's much more efficient to go straight to the people who can do stuff than what other charities do: buy time with Congress, hoping that they will pass laws that will either (a) move some money around in such a way that someone (perhaps someone without much expertise) will do something; or (b) force someone to stop doing something, hoping that they won't find a much worse thing to do instead.
Charities also have an ugly trade off when it comes to fundraising. You can often raise $2 by spending $1 on fundraising at the cost of lower efficiency -- you're spending half the money you raise on fundraising. But which gets more money to do the work, to raise $2 at 50% efficiency or to raise $0 at 100% efficiency?
You would think that the "total efficiency rating" of a charity wouldn't measure just the internal overhead of the company you're giving the money to, but rather how much useful work comes out the other end once the job of actually helping someone has been subcontracted out N times. In such a view, a money-shuffler is clearly less efficient, because in the end they have to give the money to someone else, so they can only add overhead on top of whatever efficiency that someone-else already has.
In high school I actually worked at one of these organizations. It was the typical boiler room you might imagine:
Grubby, dirty office space in a forgotten retail center with dingy cubicles consisting of a beat up desk, a phone and a stack of 3x5 cards to call.
We were taught to do just about everything we could to convey that we were active duty officers calling for donations, without actually saying that.
Middle class citizens were all too often happy to donate or, in our case, buy tickets to what I assume was a non-existent fund raiser because of who they assumed we were. The whole system felt 100% fraudulent from top to bottom.
I lasted about 3 months and moved onto telephone sales for a major retailer. Back then if you had a deep voice you could make way better money than your friends working at fast food, etc.
I can recommend telephone cold calling as a means for getting an extremely harsh but powerful lesson in reading people via voice tone very very quickly. :)
In hindsight, I can now recall that I gave money to these kinds of operations several times in my 20s. (This was back when answering the phone for unknown callers was a thing I did.)
Many people perceive a deep, masculine voice as authoritative. It's just the same way a big musclebound guy will be taken more seriously than a physically frail person saying the same thing. We haven't evolved as much as we like to imagine.
You're near Oakland, right? Have you seen the movie Sorry to Bother You? If not, I think you might enjoy it. It's an Oakland focused telemarketing spoof, and one of the better things I saw last year:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sorry_to_bother_you_2018. It's not perfect, but it's definitely original.
Like he said, they were supposed to imply they were police officers, as it was some kind of (pretend) police charity. A masculine sounding voice would obviously help, compared to a prepubescent boy's voice.
This same scheme applies to any “charity” that does not overtly state 100% of their proceeds are donated. And it’s not limited to law enforcement associations. Those commercials you see on TV about starving children, abused animals, suffering refugees, etc. are all complicit. What really happens: executive level and staff salaries are set at the market level for the association. All donations go to cover these “costs” throughout the year. Whatever is left over from these “costs” actually gets donated to their target group. The donations usually equal about 10% or less of their received funds. Correlate the executives that run these to other donation groups and you’ll see a pattern of people running them. Unless 100% of the proceeds go toward the target group is clearly communicated, all you’re doing is paying someone’s salary to run a feel-good effort that actually contributes very little to their target. And I’m a cop. Do your research.
Small, local charities usually have the greatest impact. And you can't pay an executive's salary in donated food or toiletries, so charities that run on practical items are great too.
That's true if people are going out and buying food to donate. But I think many times, people are donating food items that they overbought. Or bought on sale/clearance. Even bulk buys aren't always cheaper than a clearance sale trying to make shelf room for a product that will sell better.
There is obviously a need for money to buy in bulk the items that are needed. But if you can donate food that otherwise would go to waste and can be used locally as well, it's a win win.
But aren’t you buying those practical items through multiple middle men? Each pocketed something so it costs more? Doesn’t seem efficient. Even if you know the supply can only be donated and not paid to execs.
Yeah exactly. It may be the case that 100% of the canned goods you donate to the food bank finds its way into the hands of those who need it. It may also be the case that those canned goods have a lot of costs you're paying all throughout the supply chain. A can of chunky soup may cost $2 but what are you getting for that? Pennies worth of potatoes, carrots, and meat, fractions of a cent worth of spices, seasonings, salt, and other preservatives.
None of that matters at a local scale. Your local church running a food bank to support your neighbourhood wants practical grocery items that feed families in a dignified way.
Almost everyone who has canned food paid cash or equivalent for that canned food (most banks don't accept home-canned) which means they spent money on those cans. Unless you can buy a can for less than the shelter, its always better to give them the money you would have spent on the can, period. Even if you can buy it for less (you probably can't buy food for significantly less than a food shelter considering the discounts and relationships they have with vendors) money is still probably the better choice.
Why is it always better? Cans are all downside compared to cash. They take up space, they deprecate, they may not be what the shelter needs.
Shelters accept food for 2 reasons. 1) Many people see giving food as more "moral" or better than money because they believe the recipient does not deserve anything more than food and getting dented cans of corn is better than nothing. 2) Some people get offended if the shelter will not accept your donation so in interests of keeping donors happy.
TLDR; shelters take ragu sauce and canned creamed corn b/c that's what they can get, but it's about catering to social norms not supporting the needy.
There's a lot of numbers between 10% and 100%. A charity that donates 100% of the collected funds is one that only employs volunteers in their free time: I can understand they might not be the most efficient and effective. At the same time, a charity that uses 100% of it funds in administrative costs is simply a scam. There could be two solutions:
1) a law that mandates charities to display front and center the percentage of collected funds that went to charity in the previous year;
2) a hard cap on administration costs, maybe 1/3 of the collected funds.
Why are so many people under the delusion that money spent on salaries is “wasted”? A charity’s sole purpose doesn’t have to be to funnel raw cash to a target group.
If you’re running an animal shelter, who the hell is the money supposed to go to, the animals? Of course the money goes towards paying people to look after the animals. Money spent on those people’s salaries isn’t being “wasted” under any reasonable sense of the word.
As long as mentioning big projects like this, I'm a fan of givewell.org. Originally they just measured various charities effectiveness, though now they also offer to operate as a (fairly transparent) pass-through. I'm sure charity navigator is pretty good too, but I have vague memories of some issues that made me prefer GiveWell... if anyone else has anything more concrete to say for or against CharityNavigator, I'd be curious to have recollection refreshed/updated.
IIRC CN relies on judging expenses, whereas GW relies on effects. So while a charity on the former might be punished for having some percentage of 'overhead', it might be rated higher by the latter because its employees are more effective because they're not doing adminstrative work themselves, but instead leave that to eg secretaries.
Yeah, that's why I presume GGP preferred GiveWell.
I also think it might be good not to be too critical in general. As in, I don't care too much about overhead for most of my purchases, so if an organisation delivers a good amount of Good, then I'm not going to worry too much about whether it's the absolute most they can do. It's not like I donate that significant a part of my income anyway.
I think we're saying the same thing. I don't care about "overhead" at all. It matters not to me how much Tim Cook gets paid or how much Apple wastes on marketing--I only care about whether the iPhone I buy is better bang for my buck than the alternatives.
It's exactly the same for charity giving. (Perhaps more so for me, since my contributions cut into my living expenses in a noticeable way.)
> Do other countries suffer similarly with fake self-serving charities like the US does?
Not quite, robocalling is much less common, as are easy ways to figure out who is a likely donor.
A very good effort in this domain is Givewell, their own transparency report is a good example of how it should be done and their information is usually of very high quality:
The upside of being a psychopath is that you don't have to justify it to yourself; you sleep well as long as your belly is full. The downside is the amount of effort required to maintain a false persona that is persuasive to others. Smarter psychopaths don't get too hung up on that, instead finding less smart or well-resourced psychopaths willing to perform that work on their behalf, eg think of a cult leader who rarely appears in public or only issues bland truisms, and whose adherents maintain the reputation of the leader sufficiently carefully to assure a sufficient supply of new recruits, but not more than the cult organization can absorb without losing status or cohesion.
See also, Fraternal Order of Police. A quick Google search returns many results of the low quality of fundraising by this organization, which is not rated by charitynavigator because it's actually not a 501(c)(3).
I love those license plates and fake badges in the windshield. A bonus if they have something patriotic on the vehicle too.
Nothing screams I love my country like blatantly advertising corruption and using a tax exemption to do it.
Just the other day I met someone who was able to open a gun range in a town that I thought would never let someone do it, and he showed me his gold police union card or whatever and bragged about having the state's police union as a customer for his other business via whom he was able to contact an old police boss, and of course they were able to pull the right "levers" to get the permit for the business issued.
In Washington state you can even get special license plates that say "law enforcement memorial" for an annual fee, presumably for the same purpose.
I was tempted to get these for my car+motorcycle but then I remembered I haven't gotten pulled over in 20 years so I probably don't need it.
In California I occasionally see "11-99 foundation" license plates, for $2500 any non-felon can get one and hope the California Highway Patrol will go easy on them.
My fiancee still has a rank sticker on her car from when she was dating a police sergeant before we met. It's gotten her out of so many speeding tickets (she drives like a madwoman...). When she gets a new car we'll have to peel it off and save it.
The more cops you know, the less inclined you are to get them involved in anything if you can help it. They aren't as bad as game wardens, but still best avoided if at all possible.
An ex once worked for a "charity" like this. The person running the "nonprofit" drove a very nice car, but as far as we could tell the income (mostly derived from fooling retirees into increasing their recurring donations) went largely to perpetuating the owner's paycheck with a small amount diverted to printing pamphlets.
Australia used to have (still might, I moved to the US in 2006) a scheme called "work for the dole" ("dole" being slang for unemployment benefits).
Be unemployed long enough and you had to do a work program, or learning scheme. I was laid off as a web developer during the first dot com crash. And ended up in one of these - a computer "web" course, run at a church, that'd teach people HTML, etc. One, I figured it'd be easy for me, and two, I could even mentor people.
It was a shit show. 10 people, 5 donated computers (which were old, and didn't have fresh installs, so lots of browser bar removals, etc., etc.). Only one copy of Dreamweaver. Lots of screwing around.
I'm thinking to myself, I know the government pays people to come up with these schemes and can make themselves a supplier - provide a program, outcomes, and get paid per student to teach them.
Why then the donated old computers, the church hall, and the shared copy of Dreamweaver? The second morning, the "tutor" told us the owners were going to come by and check on things.
It was two ladies in their 50s. They had near zero familiarity with computers and very little desire to know / learn anything...
... probably because they were too busy discussing the features of their two brand new company cars, Jaguars, that they'd just picked up. Not leased, just purchased outright. With the funds that were presumably to provide computers and educational materials.
>I'm thinking to myself, I know the government pays people to come up with these schemes and can make themselves a supplier - provide a program, outcomes, and get paid per student to teach them.
Unemployment/retraining and social services type programs are child's play when it comes to state sanctioned wastes of money. The real money is in the programs judges force people to attend. The people who are really smart (or devious, depending on your viewpoint) make up programs that sound like they screwing people who deserve to be screwed (if you ask the people who take everything at face value) out of their money but are really a much broader dragnet. Traffic school and anything having to do with DUI are the best examples that come to mind but all sorts of "failure to respect the rules set by the government" civil infraction and misdemeanors have accompanying privately run programs that the judges will require people to attend in lieu of jail time or longer probation (both of which cost the state money). These programs can fly under the radar basically forever because a large chunk of the population will turn a blind eye to anything bad as long as you can do some mental gymnastics and make it seem like the bad thing is happening to "criminals".
In New York, they always have aggressive guys with heavy Long Island accents. The schtick always puzzled me, as I live upstate and the accent sounds like nails on a chalkboard up here.
Always check the percentage of money donated/used for the purpose of a charity vs how much is spent on overhead/fundraising (using public sources not the charity). Ideally 90% should go to the purpose and no more than 10% to the other. It's sad how many are inverted.
I use givewell ( https://www.givewell.org/ ) out of fear of this kind of thing. I have no affiliation with them but I do recommend them due to the way they evaluate charities.
Seems like it's too easy to setup a "charity" with little to no oversight. Just my outside opinion with little knowledge of the process or follow up done. This kinda reminds me of the Goodwill reports that came out bashing them...
The whole charity tax exemption concept is just a big loophole, and I can’t imagine it was created unintentionally. Obviously there is not sufficient manpower for enforcement of the rules, not to mention it’s impossible to make the rules without so much room for plausible deniability that it wouldn’t make a difference anyway.
This is so true. Even the guidrstar seals of transparency aren't that trustworthy. I filled one out for an nonprofit I volunteer with, and trust me, you can say the most random stuff to get your Platinum seal (their highest rating). They don't check at all.
I generally assume most charities are bogus until and unless I specifically research it and discover otherwise.
For example, the Seattle Marathon has long claimed to help UW medicine, and then it turned out that less than 1% of their money (and none of the entry fees) were going there.
I never donate to any charity that asks for donations on a phone call. I ask them to email or mail me the information to consider. Furthermore even if it is a charity I know about, I rather donate directly on their website to make sure middlemen don't take their cut.
I don't care about downvotes. People who disagree with this are either ignorant or suppressing the data all around them regarding how commerce and economics has been progressing in the US over the last 30 years.
You can downvote me to dead, but what I'm saying is still accurate here. And when you have to step over the homeless people as you exit your expensive SF condo, you can pause to consider that it wasn't always this way.
If you didn't care about downvotes, you wouldn't have responded to your own post to complain about downvotes twice. It's also possible that some people who disagree with you are not ignorant and they're not suppressing data. They just place a higher importance on some data versus other data.
I just want to point out that you are taking experiences with people wearing a uniform and projecting them onto others solely due to them also wearing the same uniform.
If a cop who had just resuscitated a shooting victim were to walk by you, you would hate him for the things other cops have done to you.
This is a tribal, bias driven dehumanization of the other. Exactly the problem that many police departments suffer from internally. I find it ironic that you have it as well.
I going with experience, yes. Experience with multiple cops from different departments in different cities. Cops have conditioned me to be aware of them and be cautious. You can blame me - I will say that I've never been convicted or even arrested, just harassed. Again, respect is a two-way street. When cops stop acting like Eric Cartman maybe I'll start respecting them.
I’d have more sympathy for this view if police officers denounced other cops who broke the law. But they never do: the “Blue Wall” effect where they close ranks around dirty cops is well-known. And if that’s how they want to operate, fine, but it means it’s perfectly valid for us to consider them all guilty.
"But they never do". Except when they do. Again, you are saying that every single cop ignores misbehavior from other cops, or keeps silent about it. Evaluate your statement for accuracy. Do ALL cops keep silent, a majority, a slim majority, or a minority? Is that universal from city to city, region to region?
Replace "cops" with Muslims and incidents of police brutality with Islamic terrorism incidents and you guys sound like my bigoted in-laws. Your behavior and bigotry worsens the problem you are complaining about.
By the way, I've been falsely arrested before, and in the process got thrown down on the pavement face-first with cuffs behind my back. I was 18, and was in a not so good neighborhood in Norfolk, VA. I'm not naive, but I'm also not dumb enough to lump in every cop with the bad ones. When Ghandi said "Be the change you want to see in the world" he meant that you can't wait for the other side to behave in a humanistic fashion. You have to start it yourself, or the cycle of mistrust continues.
That Ghandi quote is also a two way street. Why must it be the public who is the first to bend?
I don't care much for your anecdote either. There is no way to verify it and you could be lying about it simply in order to make it seem like you understand the other side. If you genuinely had a point, you wouldn't need to drop to such a blatant appeal to emotion.
There are more instances of cops shooting unarmed civilians than there are of cops reporting each other for misconduct. Cops with reports of misconduct from the public are often found in new districts or precincts. They protect their own with far more fervor than they protect the public.
My anecdote is real. I was walking back from a party to my girlfriend's house at 2AM, and a vehicle approached me head on and came to an abrupt stop. I was blinded by the headlights and a large man with gray hair jumped out of it carrying a baseball bat and charged me with it. He held it horizontally with both hands and rammed me in the chest, knocking me to the ground. He had already called the police, and lived a few blocks away. Neighbors woke up, and he asked them to update his location.
3 cars showed up. I was happily waiting for the police because the man was threatening to hit me in the head, and I knew I was innocent. The neighbors were all away, watching from their porches. The cops showed up, didn't believe me at all, and 100% believed the man who had just fucked me up with a bat. It wasn't a fun night.
Keep in mind, I was already hurting from the bat when I got cuffed and tossed down.
You are constructing a straw man here, by acting as if I'm against cops doing the same thing. Of course I'm not. I'm simply observing that individuals should first change their own behavior before expecting changes from others. This goes for the cops too. They should respect people even if they are being disrespected and called pigs or whatever.
I'm against all forms of abuse of power, and I take huge issue with police unions and departments sheltering bad actors. It's deeply frightening to me to think about abusive people being given a license to commit violence with impunity.
The point is that it tells us nothing. Once again, just because you provided more details to the story does absolutely nothing to verify those details. We have only your word.
You're more paying lip service to the idea that you take "huge issue" with police unions and departments sheltering bad actors. You say the words. But you're also here defending them with the whole "they're not all bad" shtick.
And pulling the whole "replace X with Y, well aren't you a racist" card.
There's far more instances of them protecting each other than there are of them protecting us from "the bad actors".
If it were "deeply frightening" to you to think about abusive people being given license to commit violence with impunity, then I don't see how you so readily leap to the defense of law enforcement officers.
I even clearly explained why your anecdote was pointless to any argument you might want to make. It's unverifiable and simply an appeal to emotion.
I think it's fair to question the motives of someone who would not only do that, but fail to acknowledge it when it was pointed out.
You're the one labeling people as "ideologue"s and refusing to bring anything resembling a fact. It's just straight to defense of the police. With the occasional "Oh, I hate abuse too, sure" when called on it.
Calling out cops for their bad behavior is inhumane? Saying that I won't support cops financially is inhumane?
Next time I catch a beat down for no reason I'll be sure to tell the cops that I love them. Next time I'm offered a bogus ticket in exchange for not being improperly arrested I'll be sure to tell the cops I love them.
Like I said, when my experience changes so will my opinion.
You aren't calling out individual cops for bad behavior. You are collectively blaming an entire group for individual misdeeds. This fits the very definition of dehumanization. If I am making judgments on the morality or individuals without knowing them personally, or even knowing their ideology, I am dehumanizing them. Collective guilt is the pinnacle of every horrifying genocide ever perpetrated. "The Jewish man didn't let me into art school, they are all evil." "The 19 Muslim men blew up the buildings, they are all evil."
It sounds like you are being victimized by a shitty police department. That's a problem, but it doesn't mean that a police department in my state would give you the same problems. You know this, but don't want to believe it, because then you'd have to recognize your own prejudice and correct it. And that would be uncomfortable, so just carry on.
> When Ghandi said "Be the change you want to see in the world" he meant that you can't wait for the other side to behave in a humanistic fashion. You have to start it yourself, or the cycle of mistrust continues.
Is speaking out against financial supporting a group seriously considering not "humanistic"? They're not advocating for violence against cops or something, I'd say they are taking the high road as Ghandi suggested.
How many cops have abused the citizenry vs saved their lives? There are 700k officers in the US. If you look at the number killed in the line of duty its 27. Note this doesn't include car crashes and heart attacks the number 1 and 2 ways to die in the line of duty.
Very few officers are charging into the line of fire. They mostly push paper and park their cars in areas where the speed limit dips so they can harvest money from drivers.
A charity that only moves money around should of course be pretty efficient about it. But a charity that actually does things faces the same kinds of inefficiencies as any business.
For instance, The Nature Conservancy is a charity I like (I'm not necessarily recommending them -- do your own research). About 2/3 of the raised funds go to their actual programs, and the rest is administrative and fundraising.
However, they are one of the few large environmental charities that actually does stuff to help the environment, and attracts the expertise to do it well. The rest are lobbyists and money-shufflers, which I have little patience for when it comes to charities.
In other words, I'm much more tolerant of inefficiency when actually doing something. I think anyone who actually does things would agree that it's not always efficient when observed from afar. But in reality it's much more efficient to go straight to the people who can do stuff than what other charities do: buy time with Congress, hoping that they will pass laws that will either (a) move some money around in such a way that someone (perhaps someone without much expertise) will do something; or (b) force someone to stop doing something, hoping that they won't find a much worse thing to do instead.