Americans are the most generous people on earth when it comes to opening their pocketbooks to charities – somewhere around $300 billion a year.
But Americans are also very uneducated and naive when it comes to making charitable donations: all to frequently giving their hard-earned money to charities that use most of it on themselves and on fundraising. At the bottom of the column I will provide you with some Internet sites that allow you to check out charities before making a donation.
Time Magazine wrote an excellent piece on the issue last month. This is the top:
It’s not that the National Breast Cancer Research Center is a scam. It’s more like a charity within a charity, run by an organization called the Walker Cancer Research Institute. The parent organization, based in Aberdeen, Md., dutifully files tax returns that show it raised $12.7 million in 2009 and spent 52% of it on fundraising. The return also reports that the organization spent exactly $487,505, or about 4% of its income, on research — most of it for probing plant life for anticancer compounds. Given that kind of research commitment, the group is unlikely to make significant advances anytime soon.
That said, Walker has a better chance of accomplishing something than the National Charity for Cancer Research, part of the Optimal Medical Foundation Inc. in Fremont, Calif. The group gathered $5.3 million in 2009, of which zero seems to have gone toward research. And don’t confuse that with another Walker affiliate, called simply National Cancer Research Center, which uses the exact same fundraising letter as its California counterpart. Wonder what share of the $487,505 this branch gets to spend. “I shudder when I look at how many groups have ‘cancer research’ in their names,” says Greg Simon, a board member and former head of FasterCures, a nonprofit focused on improving medical research. “The general public is throwing its money away.”
The cost of badly managed cancer charities isn’t just wasted money. People are dying while these outfits mishandle funds that could go toward care. Search the word cancer in GuideStar, a database of nonprofits, and 7,747 names show up.
Check out your charities here:
There is a lot of money to be made in “non profits”. If you get a good charity going you can take a huge salary and spend pennies on actual charity. Be careful, do research before giving.
fyi:
There’s a nonprofit with no salaried positions that is dedicated to helping all good nonprofits since 2000.
http://www.CharityChecks.us offers Giving Certificates that include a Charity Check,a financial instrument good for ANY 501c3. These make great gifts to “give the Joy of giving” to others. The RESOURCE CENTER of the nonprofit website offers ways recipients can vet and research charities before filling in the payee line with a chosen charity. The charity receives the FULL amount of the funds in this innovation that carved the way for people to give others funds to give away.
Charity Checks also offers Charitable Literacy programs in schools so kids can learn to research and be thoughtful givers. It has empowered kids in inner city public schools to get involved in solutions, and in helping prepare students in top private schools for philanthropy ahead. Hundreds of charities have benefitted from these youthful philanthropists so far. See “education” in http://www.GivingCertificates.org