Ask HN: Do you donate to any charities? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you donate to any charities?

10 pointstrev0r24 comments

If so, which organizations are your favorite and why?

ASPCA and my local SPCA

Nothing but nets

I want to start with charity:water soon too.

The "why" is that these causes touch my heart and the organizations are responsible. No pet deserves cruelty or starvation. Every child deserves to live with clean water and not die of malaria. But so many causes are worthy so it's more a matter of what problem breaks your heart.

Yeah, I donate to charity. I also donate to open source projects. I give to bloggers. I buy freemium-service subscriptions even if I don't need the features. I give to buskers.

Why? Because it feels right.

If you don't have a lot of money but are interested in doing something you might want to check out Kiva (http://www.kiva.org).

They give micro loans to small businesses in countries around the world. You, over the course of months, get your money back and you can then redistribute it back to another person somewhere else.

I've been a member for nearly four years now and in that time I've managed to help with 14 loans.

I go out of my way to avoid charities. I'd rather build up wealth and dispense it Bill Gates style than give out a slow trickle over the course of my life. That way I can personally make sure my money is being spent properly and be hands on with it, rather than trust some far away bureaucracy to not waste it.

There are problems with thinking like this:

1) You may never be rich enough to have any wealth to dispense. This is arrogance and ignorance.

2) You ignore the plight of those today. Money isn't the only way to be charitable. Time, energy, effort, and passion can be lent to charitable causes.

I have the same thought process as you, "oh I'll be rich one day and I'll be generous and give everything and make happiness, that'll be my contribution. But not now, I've got my own problems.". I think we all have a responsibility to do something for those less fortunate, those without opportunity, those suffering. A lot of my friends in college volunteered, and it really shamed me a bit into how little I do for anyone else.

That said, give now, whatever it is you want to give.

Plus, if everyone did it, you'd just multiply bureaucracy: every dot-com millionaire will have a non-profit organization, with its own office, staff, accountants, lawyers, fundraising office, designers, program managers, etc., etc. That's one reason Buffett just gave his money to the Gates Foundation instead of setting up a self-aggrandizing but redundant Buffett Foundation.

Well, what I should have said then was I want to give my money away Warren Buffet style: carefully research which is the best nonprofit to donate to, and go all in.

I don't need to become as rich as Bill Gates to do this. I'm simply talking about having a large sum of money at the end of my career that I can use to help others. That could be $10k or $10M; the point is I will have the time to see that it gets used properly.

At this point, my biggest responsibility is to my family. 100% of my time and money goes to them, as it should. By making sure they are well provided for and educated properly, Im doing society a bigger favor than throwing a few bucks towards some charity every month.

If you're not facing any fears of going broke and confident of amassing vast wealth in future, any income that's not spent or invested in amassing vast wealth may as well be donated to causes you support in the short term.

Then again its a pretty common human trait to defer charitable spending to an unspecified point in the future, possibly after death.

Think of it this way: If Warren Buffet had given away half of the money he had started out with before making his fortune, he might not have made nearly as much or become rich at all. Money we have now is always worth more than money we have later.

It helps to think about it in the extreme cases. I could give all my income and time away today, but it would seriously hinder my ability to become rich later. I could also just give 1 dollar and 1 hour per year now and feel a little less guilty but it wouldn't really be helping anybody now would it.

Now perhaps there is some magical number that I should adhere to that will be the perfect mix of perserving my own time and money and helping others (and assuaging my guilt), but I think it'd be hard to pin down. That said, I'm taking the logical approach that one should aim toward giving the maximum amount of time and effort that one can possibly give. Without question that money and time comes towards the end of one's career.

To put it in perspective, the amount of money both Gates and Buffet are donating to charity not only dwarfs the amount that all of the HN users give, it makes it mathematically insignificant. In the end, we're all just buying indulgences.

The same concept of well-directed small investments now yielding disproportionately huge rewards in future applies to philanthropy as much as to investment.

Buffet is something of an outlier in his ability to maximise ROI - an average person's affordable gift of $200 now would arguably help people more if given now than given after a number of years of earning interest averaging marginally above the rate of inflation in a savings account. Sure, if you need that $200 to bootstrap the next Google it's an entirely different matter.

I take your point about mathematically insignificance in comparison to Buffet and Gates, but there's no shortage of worthwhile causes they aren't donating to where small donations can make a difference.

On the bitcoin forum, I started a thread to donate bitcoins, which is a kind of cryptocurrency, to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

This is because the technology and the concept behind bitcoins is probably something that the Electronic Frontier Foundation would probably have to defend in the future.

Yes. Amnesty International. Because I think of all the things wrong in the world, and I think a good way to start to fix them is to work on the most basic of human rights. From this will flow other benefits. How can we save the planet if we can't even look after each other?

Yes.

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS, www.maps.org) is my #1 destination for donations. I think the war on some drugs has done more to damage the US than anything else, and this seems like the most reasonable pathway to fix this -- showing that various "evil" substances are medically useful.

I also donate to: EFF, Gun Owners of America, NRA, Tax Foundation, the National Cryptologic Museum, and the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

I'd like to donate to global, national, and local (Seattle or WA/PNW) environmental groups which are responsible and not "Environmentalists"; buying land privately and being responsible with it seems to be a more direct way to accomplish this.

I've been resolved since I was in college to give away 10% of my income a year. I give to two anti-human trafficking organizations that I know first-hand spend their money wisely and vastly improve the lives of individuals who have been victimized in a way most of us can't imagine: GEMS: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services (http://www.gems-girls.org/) and Polaris Project (www.polarisproject.org/). I also give some money to NYC arts organizations (NY Philharmonic, etc), but that is mostly because I like the benefits rather than out of any great philanthropic ideal.

I am a blood donor, but I never really donated money to any charity. After witnessing a huge ONG meeting (non-governative organizations) and all the businessy-feel that accompanied the whole event and how people managing small/middle tier charities were visibly more interested in their personal wealth rather than the cause they were working for, I came to the conclusion that I'm not in favour of putting my hard-earned cash in their pockets, charity shouldn't be a job. I'm sure not all of them are like that, and maybe one day I'll change my mind, in the meantime I stick with blood donations only.

My wife and I give. I think it is one of the most positive things you can do. We give to several faith-connected charities, children's hospitals, etc. My new "favorite" charity is charitywater.org. They have a lot of good things going for it not the least of which is that they are about as close as it comes to a "startup" charity in terms of innovation, marketing, etc.

Yes, mostly local organizations: humane society, anti-poverty programs, etc. And Child's Play, every December.

I have frequently volunteered out in Africa with Camara (http://www.camara.ie), a charity that sends second hand computers to schools in Africa. They are taking the long view of how to help Africa develop as a region, education is the key.

March of Dimes, both my wife's pregnancies almost ended with premature births ( months of bed rest, hospitalization, etc.) We toured the NICU and saw babies born months early. We say the doctors and nurses who work in this area while staying in the hospital for 30 days.

Does political stuff count? I give some money to the EFF, because with the amount of money I'm able to spend on those issues, I feel they can spend it more effectively than I could as an individual.

Kiva.org and Make A Wish Foundation. Both are pretty self explanatory, seeing helpless kids with horrible circumstances breaks my heart.

yes Kiva. It seems to me to be the smartest charity and awesome way to help people.

Wikipedia.

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