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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Regarding "The Red Cross Is $600,000,000 in debt", this comment from another thread seems like very important context:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1051934

Smart people both inside and outside our network have recommended Partners in Health --- www.PIH.org --- they're on the ground right now in Haiti and working to get surgeons from the states set up to handle Port au Prince victims. They have an absolutely painless donation page. PIH spends the vast majority of its revenue on programs, has 4 stars on Charity Navigator, and pays its chief executive less than many QA engineers.

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Charity Navigator profile of Partners in Health:

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...

Link to Partners in Health's Haiti information page:

http://www.pih.org/inforesources/news/Haiti_Earthquake.html

Thanks for the link. That is a big difference and I appreciate the information. With that being said, RC is still a bloat of an organization that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year on overhead... and will not give 100% of the money they're raising right now for Haiti to Haiti.

Ultimately, isn't what matters that the most aid possible gets to where it's needed? I don't understand the criticism of organizations that spend money on "overhead."

I think Dan Pollatta's book, Uncharitable, is pretty interesting. In your comments on the other thread you talk about not accepting the status quo and having a hacker attitude towards charity, but it seems like your criticisms of the Red Cross are because they aren't status quo enough -- they spend some non-zero amount on things other than direct aid.

We should judge a charity on it's efficacy, not its tactics. If it costs $500,000 a year to convince the most talented people to spend their time working with a charitable organization, and if that person proves to be worth the money, why shouldn't that be encouraged?

Up-voted, thank you for reading Pallotta's book, that book is a mindbomb...

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