Don't donate canned goods to food banks (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Don't donate canned goods to food banks (2017)

nationalpost.com

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This is not universally true. I'm sure its true for food banks where That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible is true, but in a lot of rural areas they don't have the people to purchase this stuff or the time. They take what is given to them and put in on the shelves for the folks to take. Heck, many of the food banks around here cannot even process credit cards.

So, like all charity interactions, know the folks you are actually dealing with and what their needs and abilities are.

We had a food drive once, around Thanksgiving time. The most common item was canned cranberry sauce.

A lot of people don't eat it, or really know what to do with it.

The other big failure was someone who donated 50 frozen turkeys. We had to give them away immediately, as we couldn't store them. Later on we had people tell us the turkeys didn't come out right, or they didn't have the right roasting pan or even oven to cook one in. You can't microwave a turkey or cook it on a hot plate.

https://fox8.com/2018/11/21/but-can-you-actually-microwave-a...

But yeah, I get your point! I do know someone whose charity gives away turkeys every year for thanksgiving dinner successfully (along with ingredients for the rest of a thanksgiving dinner) but it’s planned in advance and families come knowing what they are going to get.

I've been part of volunteer groups that have specifically been drafted to help cook and hand out these sort of holiday meat splurges - in Boston there was a good amount of warning and people would register their donations ahead of times so that we could make sure the turkeys get to shelters that can cook them and they didn't end up lying in a freezer because no one had the time to babysit them - or thrown out because a shelter over-estimated how much traffic they'd get. And, while a lot of time the safety of food that is consumed is questionable, shelters really don't want to hold onto meat beyond its shelf-life and end up giving everyone food poisoning.

Also funny are the employers who give out frozen turkeys they day before Thanksgiving...they won't thaw so you have to save them for Christmas.

my employer gives them out 2 weeks after Thanksgiving

The only thing any employer has ever given me on Thanksgiving was a shift on the help desk.

Wow, you didn't even get paid for it? Crazy.

Our church foodbank gives away all the fixings along with a coupon to get a turkey at the local grocery store.

Thanks to the people who donated money to pay for the coupons.

At least they didn't drop them from a helicopter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg

> You can't microwave a turkey or cook it on a hot plate.

Yes you can, you'd slice it up and cook it like bacon. Other parts you can use for stews etc. You can't cook the whole bird all at once, but if the alternative is no turkey at all I bet a lot of people were happier with it than without.

> I bet a lot of people were happier with it than without.

And a lot of Turkeys will end up in the dumpster as well.

Based on the experience you shared, I think the may find the podcast linked below interesting.

http://www.econtalk.org/canice-prendergast-on-how-prices-can...

Here is the description: "If you have 250 million tons of food to give away every year to local food banks how should you do it? Canice Prendergast of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about how he and a team of economists created an artificial currency and a daily auction for the national food bank Feeding America so that local food banks could bid on the types of food that were the most valuable to them. Prendergast explains the results of the new system and the cultural and practical challenges of bringing prices, even artificial ones, to a world accustomed to giving things away."

Sounds like a great idea for a tech nonprofit. All in one inventory and credit card donation solution, as well as a distributor function that negotiates with the food suppliers like Sysco, A&W etc in bulk. Frees up the smaller banks to focus on what can’t be automated like community outreach.

> Frees up the smaller banks to focus on what can’t be automated like community outreach.

Or Last-Mile delivery, getting the food to the people who actually need it. They're not always in shelters, and not always amenable to regular schedules or fixed feeding times.

Exactly. The food banks should be able to focus on the high touch unique needs of their community, not trying to replicate the same backend process.

That's not the only reason he provides for not donating cans:

* Cans have to be sorted and warehoused, which costs money.

* Can donations are effectively randomized, which makes it harder to fit them into a coherent meal plan.

It's really hard to see how cans could ever be better than cash.

Cans last (almost) forever. High nutrient food in packaging that preserves it. A surge of can donations in 2019 can be used in a donation slump that occurs in 2025.

The argument isn't against cans, it's against donations of cans. Instead, donate money, so the food bank can buy the cans it needs, rather than the cans you decide to throw at them.

Fair - but isn't it better to donate cans than nothing at all, which is probably the more common usecase?

Also, as I've noted in a separate comment, the food banks themselves often sit outside grocery stores with shopping lists that can be comprised of 80% cans.

That's actually exactly why they sit outside the grocery stores - they'd much prefer to get cash from people to spend as needed but a lot of the people who end up donating cans would never have donated cash.

In our area, the charities actually ask people to put random foodstuffs in a certain bag and leave it on the porch for volunteers to pick up later.

If they didn't want that food and would prefer money, it'd be a lot easier to ask for that.

That leads me to think that they do want the food, but also that you're probably correct in thinking that people aren't likely to donate at all if it's not food directly.

> A surge of can donations in 2019 can be used in a donation slump that occurs in 2025.

Sure. Where are you storing the cans in the interim? Who is paying for that warehouse space? Wouldn't it make more sense to just receive monetary donations which can be stored for free and converted into food when needed?

Those cans would require storage for 6 years. Then someone would have to make sure they are used before they expired. Now compare that to cash the company could put the surge of cash into an account and buy the right food.

Cash just begs to be spent. A company (whether for- or non-profit) with a cash surplus will strongly tend to invest that money in expansion, especially over 5+ years.

Every "expanding" food bank is going to be significantly better at efficiently converting capital into food than you are, so donating cans to those kinds of food banks is simply throwing money away. Just give them cash. Give them less cash if you're so worried about misuse of proceeds.

> Cans last (almost) forever.

Please do not donate food that is past its marked best by date. You're wasting everyone's time and effort.

The food charity that I support (with cash) specifically takes and distributed safely edible but past best-by or sell-by date food.

Best-by and sell-by dates are not a food safety date.

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/fsis-content/inter...

> Best-by and sell-by dates are not a food safety date.

Exactly this. Properly canned (or otherwise preserved via cooking in a sealed vessel) food effectively has no end date, so long as the seal remains intact. It will taste largely the same (barring leached minerals or otherwise from the vessel), unlike frozen food.

> Properly canned (or otherwise preserved via cooking in a sealed vessel) food effectively has no end date, so long as the seal remains intact.

I've certainly had some expired, but not especially old, cans pop. Took me a while to notice them, too (gross). The item was brand-name pureed tomatoes, stored in an environment that was probably warmer than it should have been (a cabinet above a refrigerator). I doubt there was anything wrong with the manufacture of those cans, I think they opened up because of their age, the temperature of their storage and the fact that the item inside was a bit acidic.

Truthfully, I don't know if inspecting cans for damage is really much more difficult than just checking the expiry date on the can. For a food bank it's undoubtedly a bit of a pain either way, compared to rolling in a pallet of new cans...

> specifically takes and distributed safely edible but past best-by or sell-by date food

It'd be interesting to know how they make that determination. The food bank around here tells people not to donate expired items (and has once or twice shared photos of the truly ancient stuff people sometimes donate) but it just occurred to me that I don't know whether they automatically throw that stuff away, evaluate everything individually, or what.

The one I support takes cans mostly from the commercial and grocery food distribution channels and uses money to move them.

If the canned food’s sell/best by was last month and it was pulled from channel because of that, it’s obviously perfectly safe.

Yeah, I can't imagine month old cans would ever be a problem. What you describe is an effective way to use those cans that are no longer saleable but still in good shape. Working with charities is probably a very effective way for businesses to get very recently expired inventory off the books.

I can see why those same charities might institute a rule about no expired goods from the general public, however.

Money can also be stored indefinitely, and actually increases in value during that time, unlike cans.

Sure if it's a large operation for 10000 family drive but a lot of food drives can just store their food in the church basement or a managing members garage. Plus if you are buying food with the money you have to do that anyway. Just offload physical donations first.

> if you are buying food with the money you have to do that anyway

I assume when purchasing the foodbank can standardize and become much more effective. E.g. A family of 4 gets package type A, a family with a newborn gets package B, etc.

When dealing with donations you can't do any of that as every request is going to be a custom assemblage of food stuffs.

If you don't have people to spend the cash, then its pretty much a logistical problem. A lot of these food (need) banks are just rooms and its not anyone's full-time much less part-time job. Meal plan? That too requires the staff to support such things.

there's another effect, you donate food, it's food and it's most likely going to be used as food[1], if you donate money there's zero guarantee that those money will be used toward the purchase of food. it might be used toward a fundraiser, for a greater total effect in the best case scenario, but still, giving food is a statement of intent that a charity cannot convert in liquidity assuming the worst case scenarios.

[1]there's a lot of stuff actually going on behind charity, for example here clothes bank don't donate clothes around to the poor, clothes get sold in bulk by weight and the earning go toward sustaining the charity operations first and what's left is sent to the poor in various ways. which is fine, as long as 'operations' are kept lean, but nobody really looks so there's a bit of everything going on.

If you know what they want and buy in bulk, this could be more of a "shop for charity" volunteer opportunity.

The key is that someone is making a shopping list based on demand, rather than guessing.

> in a lot of rural areas they don't have the people to purchase this stuff or the time.

Do you know this to be true? Time spent purchasing seems like it would be dwarfed by stocking shelves, dealing with the public, and administrative tasks.

Yes, I do know it to be true. I think people are thinking of some dedicated operation as opposed to operations run by churches or non-profits in the area. Frankly, they use money for other things like keeping the lights on and paying bills. The food (and other needs like children's items) is donated by the community.

> Yes, I do know it to be true. I think people are thinking of some dedicated operation as opposed to operations run by churches or non-profits in the area.

sigh

> Frankly, they use money for other things like keeping the lights on and paying bills. The food (and other needs like children's items) is donated by the community.

Money is fungible.

If people donate cash instead of cans, it becomes practical for someone to spend their time buying. (there is nothing evil about paying someone to do the work in addition to using volunteers, and plenty of churches operate that way) If the efficiencies sited in the article are anywhere close to being correct, it's worthwhile.

They are only close to being correct if you are running a bigger organization. There is a rather large difference between large charities and community centered groups trying to help their fellows. People should know the actual situation and needs of the specific charity and skip following generic advice. Know what is really going on.

I have no idea what the sigh was about.

Or people should follow the general advice and only break with it if they have specific knowledge otherwise.

One open secret of nonprofits is that donations of goods or time are usually much, much less efficient, desired, and effective than donations of money: http://seliger.com/2014/04/20/volunteers-nonprofits-really-w.... Nonprofits still need to cultivate volunteers, as volunteers tend to also be donors and volunteers want a tangible sense of community, but if you're really looking at cost-benefit, focus on money.

Which really brings up the question of having a charity based social support structure instead of just delegating that to the government and letting a few hundred million required to run the entire thing be written off as a sig fig error of the military budget.

Annual donations to charity per year in the US are in excess of 400 Billion (so about 1000x more than your off the cuff estimate). Rather than being a rounding error in the military budget, this is about 2/3rds of total.

> Annual donations to charity per year in the US are in excess of 400 Billion

Yes, but how much of that is "social support" versus, say, wealthy people structuring expenditures they were going to make anyway to be more tax efficient.

There are some stats here on where the money goes:

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&...

I'm not really sure what "wealthy people structuring expenditures they were going to make anyway" even means.

If Richie McMoneybags was going to buy a million-dollar painting, but instead decides to donate those million dollars to the McMoneybags Museum of Million-Dollar Art That Richie Wanted to Buy Anyway (that's in a wing of Richie's house and is only open to the public once a year), that probably counts.

No, it does not count.

The IRS isn't stupid.

Excuse my mistake, the McMoneybags Museum is not in a wing of Richie's house but down the road, and it's open not once but twice a year (or by appointment).

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/business/art-collectors-g...

The IRS isn't stupid, but they also don't have the resources to audit everyone who makes a dodgy claim.

You answered his question but didn't rebut his data, which shows that arts contributions are a small fraction of total charitable giving, almost half of which appears to go into services for people (health, education, human services), followed by religious giving.

Think Clinton foundation and everyone else’s similar personal “charity”

Eh. It depends. Most nonprofits probably need money more than they need "show up with a pulse and do what you're told" type labor. However, donations of skilled labor and capital can often deliver more value than their cost because the organization receiving them could not go out and purchase equivalent goods/services for what it cost the person donating those goods/services to give them up. Most churches tend to use this model as much as they can and it works out quite well.

Once again, that's a very specific type of nonprofit. That is not true of every nonprofit and certainly not true of churches or small nonprofits. The closer the organization is to acting like a government agency, the truer that article is.

Plus, that's a really cynical way to look at people who want to help their fellows, and shows the difference between professional nonprofit workers and people who are just trying to help their fellows. At the point that advice is practical, you are in the NGO world.

Life is full of people with good intentions who manage to accomplish not nearly as much as someone who cares less but is just plain better at the job.

I mean, the sum of human misery in this world is vast - how someone individually feels about how they contribute is somewhat irrelevant if it only manages to break even on the management overhead they create to the system as the whole.

The "just give us your cash, we don't really want any help from you, leave it to the professionals" mentality has probably hurt giving and allowed more fraudulent activity. Things people care about and do are important. Throwing some dollars at a charity doesn't make it real and certainly doesn't create the advocates and friends a charity needs to survive. A charities inability to utilize volunteers is on them and very much a failure of the charity. If a person wants to run a charity learn to understand charity in a personal and community way, not as an exercise in strictly logistics with no human elements. That lack of interaction will cause problems in other parts of an operation.

Agreed. We run a summer camp for kids in a poor neighborhood. We've got plenty of money. What we need is people who are willing to actually spend time with kids!

Maybe you can offer teachers (or others with existing professional experience with kids) a part time summer job to fill the gap in volunteers?

I only know a few teachers I know personally, but they all seem to really enjoy their summer break as a break from all their students. I'm not so sure those are the type that will jump on an opportunity to be around kids during their vacation.

You mean the entire premise of the article we are all talking about?

I believe you may be conflating food banks and food pantries. Food pantries are places that distribute food directly to people. Food banks are centralized places that distribute to soup kitchens and food pantries, not to individuals. They exist to solve exactly the problem you're describing: Allowing a large number of small organizations to achieve economies of scale by pooling their resources.

As a kid who grew up in a family that needed foodstamps and foodbank runs I guarantee you what you get at a food bank is a hundred times better than what you parents are going to have to invent with frozen peas mayonnaise and bread.

Also keeping the donations as food ensures the donations go directly to helping your community. Non profit ceos make 100s of thousands of dollars a year. That money comes from cash donations. People don't want to line a ceos pockets they want to help their neighbor.

Most of the foodbanks we went to were churches and local groups. They weren't interested in managing accounts for foodbank replenishment they just did drives when the needed more. It's immediately easier.

When you give a physical thing it has purpose. It's not 5 dollars going who knows where. You know someone somewhere got a can of creamed corn. Most of these people donating I would say aren't going to go out and buy a bunch of stuff. But they will look in their pantry and see if there is anything they are not using.

Depending on the source they bought it from, that money also goes directly back to the community.

So there are a lot of benefits to donating food. If you want to donate money fine. But I'd wager if the only choice was donating money less people would donate.

>Non profit ceos make 100s of thousands of dollars a year. That money comes from cash donations. People don't want to line a ceos pockets they want to help their neighbor.

Do you think this factor outweighs the efficiency factor from the article?

Worst of all, the average consumer is buying their canned goods at four to five times the rock-bottom bulk price that can be obtained by the food bank itself.

That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible. The savvy buyers at the Calgary Food Bank, for instance, promise that they can stretch $1 into $5.

Yes considering depending on the nonprofit large percents of that one dollar donation go to other things like advertisements posters shirts etc. By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth. So what's more important getting someone off their feet to participate in their community or money.

    By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth.

Bullshit. In the US, charities are required to file detailed financial statements and tracked by sites like Charity Navigator. One that was spending 50%+ on overhead would be a major outlier.

For some real data, I typed in "food bank" on Charity Navigator and picked the first result:

https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

97.3% spent on programs and services delivered.

Right and their program expense is "Distributing food". What do you think that vague description of a program encompasses. Paying drivers? Paying the manager of the drive by the hour? It tells you very little of what your money is actually going to.

Now I don't mean to knock the people of Brazos Valley Food Bank, they might all be volunteers and they might all work out of a volunteers garage, in which case you bet your ass if I knew for a fact I would be donating hard cash and probably even volunteer when and what I could if that was my neighborhood.

But I'm not going to donate to some giant entity that can "scale". My entire point of the comment was that the author paints a picture that your food donation hinders operations and youd be better off to donate just one dollar instead of one can. So I pointed out all of the local cases where your donation goes just the right amount and from volunteers and for people who aren't going to complain about what efforts you are going to put in.

I picked a food bank that I remember volunteering with when I was in high school: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar...

"Food distribution" here is everything that the food bank does to put food in front of people. Storage, logistics, networking. As an example, I worked in a warehouse alongside forklift operators, carrying boxes of food between refrigerators and packing distribution boxes destined for delivery. As another example, this food bank owns and operates community gardens. They also have a dedicated "Meals on Wheels" program for taking prepared meals out to senior citizens and the infirm.

The fantasy of working out of a garage is crushed by the basic nutrition needs of human beings. A single working garden is half a garage on its own, and a walk-in fridge is another half a garage. We generally want to imagine a food buffer of two weeks. A single block-sized warehouse can be far more practical for county-sized food banks than a network of restaurants, garages, church basements, or other small repositories.

Edit: While I might not have been compensated with cash, the forklift operators were employed. Many volunteers were, like me, in various programs that required that they volunteer with the community. Employment with the food bank generally meant additional responsibilities; they couldn't ask volunteers to do certain kinds of dangerous things.

I don't really want to knock anyone, either, and volunteering is great, but I find the implication that there's something skeevy about paying a fair wage to the people who supply a charity's backbone labor to be kind of bothersome.

Subtextually, there seems to be a peculiar double standard being presented: Paying retail prices for in-kind donations, which implicitly covers the wages of all sorts of retail and distribution workers associated with the grocery store, as well as lining the pockets of the grocer store's owners and, if it's a public company, shareholders, is just fine. But providing cash donations is bad, because then the charity might use some (presumably less) of that money to pay its own employees to do those jobs? And paying them money is bad, because they should be getting all that labor for free?

It's hard for me not to see that as a tacit allegation that one's time and labor are inherently less valuable when they're being given to an organization whose mission is to help others instead of one whose mission is to make its owners as rich as possible. Which, personally, I think that my opinion runs close to being the exact opposite of that.

If you want to spend your free time helping others, that's awesome. If you want to make a career of helping others so that you can spend even more time doing it, hey, that's awesome, too. And, the world's distributions of wealth, free time and skills being what they are, supplying the money that enables people to go that route can quite easily be the most effective option still other people have for giving back, so that's awesome, too.

> By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth.

Even then the one donated can is becoming two if people just donate the cash equivalent! Even in your example donating cash would be better and the money that doesn't go directly to services but instead to advertising and management expenses will also hopefully bring in more donations. But again even in your example if we ignore 100% of the benefits of advertisement and good management 1 can is /still/ becoming 2 cans!

In high school I was part of a club that was, in retrospect, very well run. And yet some things were a new adventure every time.

For their annual events they would go around trying to get local businesses to donate goods or at least sell us supplies at wholesale prices. In some cases they could write it off. And we'd do the same thing every year, starting with places we had previous success with, but often with different people on both ends of the transaction. It was a crap shoot, and every year the game plan was a little different depending on what we got and how much.

Now if I were much bigger, and I needed 100,000 cans of something, and I wanted that to be reliable so people don't starve, I skip the locals and I go to the manufacturer. Now my alternatives are 'free or 75% off' instead of 'free, 10% (employee discount) or 50% off'.

I could end up saving $20,000 a year just on peas. You going to begrudge someone drawing a salary looking for deals and relationships like that? Logistics is hard. Everyone discounts just how hard, but Software Developers are exceptionally bad actors about this.

Reminds me of a story I read about Microsoft millionaires starting their own companies and totally screwing the pooch on logistics because the MS logistics machine worked so well that it was invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Offices don't magically appear for new employees. Neither do desks or machines or ethernet jacks. All that shit is some support person dotting a lot of i's and crossing an exhaustive (and exhausting) number of t's.

> Non profit ceos make 100s of thousands of dollars a year. That money comes from cash donations. People don't want to line a ceos pockets they want to help their neighbor.

This attitude frustrates me. Having the infrastructure in place to redistribute goods is work. It takes people's time and effort, and that does not come for free. The larger the scale at which a charity operates, the more true this becomes.

If you're concerned that a particular charity is abusing your goodwill and not using enough of its funds for its mission, research it on https://www.charitynavigator.org.

> This attitude frustrates me. Having the infrastructure in place to redistribute goods is work. It takes people's time and effort, and that does not come for free.

Neither does the work of the people donating food and/or money.

I can't figure out how that relates to my point? We're operating under the assumption that people are donating something, which implies they worked, gained from it, and then decided to pass on their gain to someone else. My point is about the efficiency of that donation, and the expectations we should have of the people who enable that donation.

> We're operating under the assumption that people are donating something, which implies they worked, gained from it, and then decided to pass on their gain to someone else.

Precisely. And they don't like the idea that some middle man is profiting off of what they're giving. It's really that simple. Tell me my money goes to some administrator who's organizing a bunch of volunteers to distribute donations and I'm wondering why the hell that guy isn't a volunteer.

Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money.

You can donate $20 to a non-profit, but you can't donate "a few hours of CEO work" the same way, it just doesn't work. So it's more of an "all or nothing" kind of position.

Expecting someone to donate $20 of their salary or a few days of their time? That's not a big deal. Expecting someone to donate 100% of their salary or 100% of their "work time" for a year or more? That's a HUGE ask.

It's no surprise there aren't any takers.

Then someone needs to take the time to explain to people what the value of that position is and why it requires the amount of money it is being paid, because neither are at all obvious.

I'm part of a volunteer organisation that does provide free food for all sorts of folk and does entirely run on volunteer labour - it's really not obvious that such an organisation does need a full-time CEO.

That's fair, I guess I shouldn't have used such absolute language, but I believe the point still stands.

If for-profit organizations find it beneficial to grow and expand using dedicated administrative staff, the assumption is that there would be benefits to growing a non-profit organization to a similar level. And while I'm sure there are ways to make it work, if we want them to run as well as for-profit companies are run, it stands to reason that dedicated administrative staff would provide greater returns to the organization (and their cause) over the cost of employing them.

If growing like that is an overall good thing is up for debate, but the idea that growing an organization requires dedicated and competent staff isn't really that shocking to me.

I'm part of [INSERT ORG] that does [INSERT OPPOSITE OF GP'S STATEMENT]. So therefore, you are wrong. QED.

> all sorts of folk

Even if we did take your statement as a datapoint (hopefully one among many...), this clause could cover a small town or an entire continent.

It's amazing that in a community of Y-Combinator founders, there is such a malformed understanding of what it means to run a large organization.

Don't get me wrong, CEOs have inflated salaries. That is a society-wide problem, not just non-profits. To argue that non-profits should just forcibly change the bar for CEO salary (1) is the wrong place to enact this kind of social change, (2) would ensure that you only get the least qualifying candidates, (3) could lead CEOs into possibly devious action to increase personal wealth, and (4) could result in lower effort/efficiency as the CEO has to juggle other financial-fitness activities.

If CEO salary is important to you, there is tons of data out there to help you pick a similar charity with more agreeable administrative compensation. I hope that there aren't people out there who just don't donate because of this.

> in a community of Y-Combinator founders

Not all of us have any relationship to Y-Combinator and/or the companies incubated by Y-Combinator (beyond perhaps using this site). I sure as hell don't.

> I hope that there aren't people out there who just don't donate because of this.

Sorry to shatter your hopes, but this is the exact reason why I'm averse to supporting the Susan G. Komen foundation in any way (well, that and them suing other charity organizations for running fundraisers that sound vaguely like "for the cure"; also, for continuing to shovel money into "awareness" instead of actual research).

Mmmmh there are many retired ex-ceos who can perfectly volunteer for that work.

" Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money."

Sure you can, by volunteering on the board of directors of said charity. Like my wife does, helping organize a charity large enough that it runs a free hospital, a dental clinic and home for otherwise homeless people in a major US city.

That isn't what is meant by democratising management in the GP comment.

In my own experience, the amount of work done by said trustees/directors of a larger charity is negligable compared to the amount of work done by manager-doers who are volunteering for them.

By negligable, I'd like to quantify: Based on estimates relating to a charity I've been involved with, about 1:300 individual trustee hours to invidual working manager hours.

With those kinds of ratios, the trustees/directors are not really doing the management. They are more like a consultation committee, who sign off on big things or take responsibility for major official decisions from time to time.

What's meant by democratising management is getting rid of the working managers, and leaving all of that work to a democratic group - ie the trustees, or the volunteer labour force as a larger democracy.

Non-profits vary greatly, so I wouldn't like to presume how much work your wife does, but in charities operating with numbers like I've just described, handing over the work done by the working managers to either the trustees (who have 1/300th the time available), or the volunteer labour force (who mean well but are not doing it professionally, and probably not full time), would usually result in the charity disastrously failing to deliver on its mission.

(I have worked for a different non-profit, where time-consuming tensions between people who wanted things to be done more democratically (i.e. a lot more talking and reporting, and inappropriate privacy violations), and people actually putting in a lot of hours and barely keeping it running while providing enough deliverables to its sponsors, to retain critical things like a building to operate in, ultimately broke down, with neither the democracy-loving-but-doing-only-a-litte-work people happy, nor the sponsors, nor the people putting in hard volunteer work in the hope of its mission continuing, nor even the recipients of services (because it couldn't deliver the best under those circumstances). The service users were glad it existed, but they didn't know how much better it could have been. So, based on experience, I'm rather cautious about recommending democracy as an approach for new charitable social enterprises, if you need to deliver real, substantial services - it helps with some things, and causes tremendous, even surprising, problems with some others. I'd take more care structuring it, if doing it again.)

Do you believe that there are no resources needed for non profits? That donations made by person A magically get to person B who needs them? You are oblivious of the underlying business aspect that any nonprofit requires as they grow. Someone has the make running that business their job, and they do deserve to be paid for it. Non profits must disclose what they pay or compensate those people and its public information. You're more than capable of looking into any organization yourself before donating to them.

Or, because my time is valuable to me, I'll just not donate to them at all, or donate something like food that no one is likely to line their pockets with. Why is it my responsibility as a donor to do all this research?

> You are oblivious of the underlying business aspect that any nonprofit requires as they grow.

I disagree with the idea that growing should be part of a charitable organizations goals. It is not a business and should not act like one.

Most charities have a mission. I use to have an attitude of critiquing how they use their money. Than I worked for a non-profit & another & another. Here's what I learned.

I realized you can't critique how they spend their money from outside.

The most important thing isn't how the money is used but the impact they have on their mission. If a CEO takes 98% of the money but the non-profit ends hunger, is that a problem?

If you want talent, it costs money to keep & retain it. A lot of non-profits had amazing young people working there but those people wanted to have families & move up in the world.

Non-profits that are 100% volunteer are usually less organized & less efficient. Most small non-profits that do pay employees pay very poorly & can't keep great employees which hurts efficiency of their mission.

Sometimes really good opportunities come up for non-profits that could help their mission immensely but they have to turn them down because it would really look bad on their finances when people look at their administrative costs. There actually seem to be black markets out there of non-profits trying to move money around to achieve missions around without hurting their administrative cost to money spent directly on mission ratio.

People need to quit handicapping non-profits. Solving problems cost money & non-profits often spend more time managing accounting than thinking about the problem they're trying to solve.

> If a CEO takes 98% of the money but the non-profit ends hunger, is that a problem?

That's not at all what's happening, though.

The quote is an extreme exaggeration & simplification to attempt to get some agreement.

You do research to make sure your not getting F'ked by some scheme fronting as a leukemia foundation. That should be obvious unless you like to just throw money at strangers.

>I disagree with the idea that growing should be part of a charitable organizations goals.

Why not? What's wrong with maximizing the amount of good an organization can do?

> It is not a business and should not act like one.

It is a business, non profits register with the govt and must have a form of liability, especially with volunteer labor.

> That should be obvious unless you like to just throw money at strangers.

Hence just throwing canned food at strangers instead.

Growth for it's own sake shouldn't be a goal, yes.

But if growth furthers the mission of the charity, which it may well do depending on that mission, then absolutely it should at least consider it.

From the outside as a donor/supporter of that charity and mission, the logical thing for me to care about is how efficiently they can deliver, and are they getting better or worse at that. Which is why you have charity efficiency ratings. Those are hardly perfect, but that's what is important, not some limited information opinions on salary.

If they are doing a good job at it, they are demonstrably in a better position to judge how than you or I am; or almost anyone outside their area.

> I disagree with the idea that growing should be part of a charitable organizations goals.

If a charity today is serving 1000 people well (say by providing food security), is it not better if they aspire to serve 1200 people next year?

That’s what “growing a charity” looks like: helping more people.

I think there is a fair distinction to be made between growing the market, and growing the market share.

You may find the Econtalk podcast interviewing Dan Pallota interesting. He is a high paid charity consultant (450k) and defends his work and salary.

http://www.econtalk.org/pallotta-on-charity-and-the-culture-...

Because if they can effectively organize people to efficiently distribute goods and do that on an on-going basis, that’s what enables the goods to get to those in need.

Not many people are going to be able to volunteer full-time. At some scale, someone has to work full-time to make the machine go.

but does that person need to be a CEO? or could most of the day to day be managed by someone at a much lower rate. and then use the board/ceo to make directional and larger decisions.

high level decision making is not needed all day every day at most companies. Even the ones i've worked at that had thousands of employees, could operate with out a head being around 9-5. Particularly so if they were well managed.

Sometimes, paying for things yields better outcomes and more economically efficient results than seeking those outcomes thru volunteerism alone.

I've been a non-profit "administrator" guy - and I did volunteer.

Guess what happened?

It was a nightmare.

Work times varied between 40 and 80 hours a week (I'm not exaggerating, there were day shifts and evening shifts and I often covered both). If someone else was off sick or on holiday, I often had to cover for them.

There were zero weeks off, because we were running all through the year.

Less involved people had nice things like holidays. But not muggins administrator here.

Just like a startup, in smaller non-profits you have to wear a lot of hats. There aren't enough people to specialise in all the things that need doing.

Even when there are plenty of people, most of them won't put in enough hours, and the quality of those hours is, how shall we say, "variable". It's a thing that comes up in volunteer organisations in particular.

Volunteers tend to think they're being generous when they put in, say, a 5 hour shift. And they are being generous. But unfortunately, because of the needs served by the organisation, a comfortable donation of time is often small compared with what's needed. Variable-time volunteers like to spend much of their time goofing off as well. Like it's sort of a job, and sort of a fun day out.

To rub it in, they tend to think the work done by someone else doesn't really need doing, or is done much slower than they would do themselves. Even though they have no idea what's really involved, and their eyes glaze over if you try to describe it all, and they don't believe you anyway. If you've worked in a software dev shop, you may recognise the type: A project that took 1000 person-hours to produce will be assessed by someone as "a couple of hours". Sometimes they're right, usually not.

So they "suggest" how to do it better, often in public forums, except you can't figure out any way to usefully apply their suggestion that doesn't create more work in the end, or infringe someone's data privacy, or fail to deliver what some sponsor expects for their money, or fails a legal requirement, or it's just plain nonsense, or etc. (longer rant available on request). People talk a lot of shit.

But you acknowledge you don't know everything, so you delegate to them a task, hoping they will build up responsibilities over time, without failing in your responsibilities in the process. (For example you can't just hand over a bunch of people's personal data, or a box of cash, or the keys to dangerous machine, to a keen volunteer-for-the-day just because they want to help.)

So you give them a useful but quite easy task, and they do a half-assed job of even that, and quit half way anyway ("I have to go home now, sorry man, I gotta leave the rest to you to finish off"). Then you're stuck staying late while the other volunteers have gone home, or have gone to the pub for a drink because they had enough fun contributing for the day.

Then people wonder why they don't see you at the social events, and think you're not really engaged with the organisation. Little do they know, and it doesn't register if you tell them anyway, that the reason you're not at the pub is because you're doing the damn record-keeping and box-moving and tool-operating that they're dimly aware exists, but somehow forget that it adds up.

The end result: Being a volunteer administrator at that scale and level of responsibility is very expensive for the poor fool who makes the initial commitment!

I went from good, comfortable savings, to struggling to pay houshold bills, because it wasn't possible to do enough paid work at the same time. It costs a lot of money to be a volunteer.

Naturally, some would "suggest" that paid work should take priority. But they didn't actually help make that possible; instead, the same people tended to add to the workload, by adding meetings instead of useful assistance. A few people offered assistance and were genuinely, awesomely, helpful. (Massive thank you - you probably know who you are.) A few others, though, offered "assistance" which was of negative help (i.e. created more net work), and seemed to be all about improving their social status instead (democratic organisations can suffer from this).

It's not actually possible to walk away from a high-responsibility volunteer position, while being responsible about it, since doing so risks seriously jeopardising the work of the organisation.

Or I can donate to a church that is doing all of it for free. If the issue is efficiency then isn't it better to donate to individuals doing it for free.

Such small operations typically can't scale and have greater difficulty dealing with emergencies.

You don't need to scale. How many churches are in LA? When I was homeless over there when I was younger, there were spots all over the city that were feeding the homeless. You don't need one giant entity. You just need the community to care. If your community doesn't care no amount of money is going to fix it.

Scale and agility matter during emergencies, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes. In such circumstances, the smaller local organizations are affected by the same problem.

We are not talking about an emergency though. We're talking about regular food drives. Donating to emergencies if a different matter. And if your city is underwater, get your ass out there and help.

I will say though, after the damage is done and its been x amount of time and there is no immediate danger. There is not too much physical donations that can help, but again that's not a food drive problem.

While the article is about general food drives, emergencies do introduce a bigger problem of scale and management that come and go quickly.

I volunteer with and donate to a group - https://adrn.org/ - and that's what we do. When Hurricane Harvey hit, they (I was traveling) mobilized 150+ churches around central Texas to support the coast with food, supplies, and transportation immediately after it hit. Further, we've supported cleanup operations and helped get people back on their feet.

One of the things I've helped with directly is developer our playbook so other groups worldwide can learn from what we've done and build the infrastructure and relationships to prepare in advance.

By working with smaller organizations, the closest to the problem, you get great perspective but backed by larger teams who can coordinate across a city, region, or country.

It's business management + crisis response.

Yeah, they DO need to scale or there wouldn't still be people in LA and everywhere else going hungry.

I'm a Christian who proudly supports our local church's food bank (no strings attached, walk in and take food) -- but I recognize that the Church can't do it alone.

The church down the street from me has it's own food bank (with actual staff, the leader earns $57k according to guidestar) and is also partnered with a local food bank network. It's not like these things run in isolation of each other or are necessarily running that differently just because it's a church.

Free doesn’t imply better outcomes or efficiency (doesn’t imply the reverse either).

Imagine a charity could hire someone that would 100x the amount of donations, whether that’s through more effective marketing, connections, etc. how much should a charity be willing to pay for that?

At that scale, aren't we talking more about systemic problems?

The charity is about need. If it is also about that kind of growth, there is serious need.

We may be better served by a policy change so that charity remains at a lean scale.

Yes, there are massive systemic problems everywhere. Feel free to go ahead and policy change away the war, disease, hunger, homelessness and so on if you can do that?

That's exactly the progressives plan. We can't get at all of that, and for sure, not at once.

But, there can be much better basics in place for people, and with those, a reduced need for charity to somehow perform at very large scale.

It can target, operate locally more, all good.

Disease, hunger, homelessness are all massive artifacts of long overdue policy reforms in the US.

Depends, are they just shifting donations from other non-profits doing work without paid overhead?

> Or I can donate to a church that is doing all of it for free.

People donate a ton of money to churches.

Not only is it work, but as you say, beyond a certain scale, it's really, really hard work that can only be done by a person who is perfectly able to earn that kind of salary working at a for-profit.

If you're not willing to pay for that ability, and you can't find someone with that ability who is already independently wealthy and willing to work their butt off for no compensation, then you're going to end up with someone who is absolutely not qualified, which in my opinion, amounts to saying that you don't believe charities should be large or efficient, which I suppose is a valid opinion, but doesn't seem like a better use of resources than paying a competent manager.

Describe an example of this hypothetical really, really hard work to me, if you have the time.

I find that there's always someone willing to clamor that CEO's are with their weight in gold, but I find it excruciatingly difficult to find an elucidation of how what a CEO does is dependent on a particular person rather than to an arbitrary individual making a decision based off of high level information collected about the state of the company.

I'm really curious, because it bugs me that everywhere I go I never seem to be able to jive this view of CEO's as unique in their own right, with the fact that what they are doing is just enabled by carte blanche access to the internal state and business affairs of the company in question.

My understanding is a CEO's main capability that earns them a large salary is being able to influence company salaries.

Most CEOs are quite detached from managing company salaries and have delegated that responsibility - CEOs do work, sure... but not a proportion of work in line with their earnings.

How much role do CEOs have in directly determining their personal salary?

Directly? Not much, supposedly. But maybe they sit in the boards determining the salaries of the board members who determine them.

Yes, that's my simple explanation for the hugely disproportionate salaries CEOs earn. Two possibilities:

1. They are somehow superhumanly increasing the company's bottom line

2. They target companies with enormous amounts of money and intentionally influence their salary to become very large, independent of their job performance

Insofar as #2 is possible, that seems the most plausible explanation for large CEO salaries. Unless the people determining the CEO's salary are somehow completely firewalled off from his influence, it is hard to see how #2 is not possible.

Or 3. CEO's are superhumanly capable of DECREASING the company's bottom line. The board is paying to minimize their risk of ruin.

With consistent good management, mature organization should hope to see incremental growth. Bad management can destroy a company overnight.

CEO's sit on board for other companies where they get to decide on the salary for CEO's who sit on the boards of companies where they get to decide on the salary for CEO's who... well, you get it by now. Like the revolving door between politics and business these people generally do not bite the hand that feeds them so generously.

CEO salaries are typically determined by the board of advisors or at smaller companies, by the company's investors.

In the UK, company directors have also vastly outpaced everyone else in earnings growth since the '80s. Their compensation is decided by a remuneration committee. The remuneration committees are composed of company directors from other companies to give them "independence", shareholders play no part in the process. It's a you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours thing. Why don't the shareholders object? Because the shareholders are mostly funds who similarly have directors.

They also compare the remuneration with the one provided by peers. Of course every CEO is above average and deserves to be paid better than the industry average. Unsurprisingly, the average compensation increases year after year...

You need someone who can do this at the right time and about the right thing: https://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an...

The ability to see where you suck and see your opportunities and above all, fight hard to fix it, is rare. It is much more than making a decision based off of information collected by advisors - it is vision and wisdom and political sense and grit. This is no less true when the particular mission is reducing suffering than when it is making money. Solving hard problems is always hard, and there are never enough people around who can make it happen.

Lots of people run things, and lots of them are really bad at it. I've known people who I would classify as way above average managers, and their success is not just due to having carte blanche access to internal state. It's due to being able to manage the goals and expectations and workflow of many groups of people, and being able to keep all of the different plates spinning. Ensuring that everything is moving in the right direction all the time in an organization bigger than a few people is not trivial, and if you think it is, perhaps you are not getting paid enough.

I also think if you can replace a given manager with anyone and the right information, then that manager is as worthless as you think they are. While that may be true of many managers, it's not at all true of good ones. I think there's the daily work of the business, and there's the managing of the daily work of the business, and while the skill-sets often overlap, they are not the same, especially as the business grows.

On the other hand, I find it hard to justify many (most?) of the highest end CEO salaries, but generally a competent manager at a company doing just several million dollars worth of business per year is worth at least several hundred thousand dollars per year (roughly how much someone who owns and runs a business with that much revenue would make).

At the end of the day, I'm going to have to take the cop out though and say that if you've never met a manager that can't be replaced by just anyone with the right information, you haven't met a good manager, because I definitely know at least a few people who can step into many roles, whether it's running a business, or coaching a youth sports team, or helping a local non-profit, where everything starts running better once they start providing direction and it's not because there was no one providing direction previously.

> I find that there's always someone willing to clamor that CEO's are with their weight in gold

Keep in mind that HN has a disproportionately high number of owners of startups compared to most Internet communities. You'll see a lot more CEO worship on this site than reddit or any other site.

I think there's a whole lot of ground between worshipping CEOs and pointing out that managing a large organization is an actual skill that is not particularly common.

Are CEOs highly compensated because of scarcity or artificial scarcity? How would one tell the two apart? Answer the second question, apply it to the first, and I think even if we don't find an answer to your original question we would be in a better place.

Personally, I don't know. It does seem to be a lot of 'who you know' over 'what you know' at that level. Some special knowledge, but nothing that couldn't be taught with a 4 year degree. But it would be foolish of me to think I fully understand all that is needed. So I'm left wondering which is the case.

So you're saying any rando could have accomplished what Steve Jobs did? Leadership matters as demonstrated by all the similar companies which made horrible decisions in hindsight, and now are no longer around.

Sure, but those similar companies all paid their CEOs an absolute fortune too, so it seems that paying CEOs buckets of cash isn't a very good gamble.

I knew a person who worked in the food service industry and I worked in IT. I once asked her what she thought most people made on the upper half of one of the 40+ floor buildings in town. She said they likely made at least $50k/year. To her rich people made over $50k/year. It made no difference if some made $350k and others made $50k, they were effectively the same to her.

It's difficult for me to describe what makes a CEO worthwhile as I do not have much understanding of the job past the barebones startup level in which case it doesn't really mean much of anything, so let me ask you a question - is there anything about what you do that means you can't just be replaced by anyone off the street, give them the info pertinent to the job, and set them loose?

I think most people on HN would say no I can't be replaced like that, I think I can't easily be replaced in the job I'm currently on. Not saying it's impossible just saying it is difficult, which is why they pay a lot of money for me.

I've worked non-technical jobs in construction and the like, and unless it was the stupidest low-level stuff you couldn't really pull anyone off the street and tell them well here's the job have at it.

But for some reason there does seem to be some people who think management can be replaced like that. It seems unlikely to me.

Now of course this calculation changes if the person being replaced is no good at the job, then yes when I worked construction you could probably have replaced me with some idiot off the street. And I suppose there are bad managers and CEOs that can be replaced the same way.

As for why they are worth their weight in gold, it is because that is what the market will pay, just as I am worth what the market will pay for my skills and the best construction worker I ever knew was worth what the market would pay which was quite a bit less than the money I get paid which is in turn less than a CEO gets paid for their skillset.

Are there no retiresd CEOs willing to volunteer?

Like, really?

I'm sure there are, that's where a lot of small non-profits find their leaders and board members, but past a certain size, the amount of time required means that they would not be retired anymore, and I presume most of them retired because they had interests to pursue beyond managing large organizations.

Not only that, but it is interesting to see the multiplier effect of those overhead funds. If a charity redistributes 90% of donations to their cause, can they raise twice the amount of money by increasing their overhead by 5%? It is well worth it to pay someone a mid 6 figure salary if they are really good at bringing in funds (value) greater than their pay.

If their overhead is reasonable to start with, sure. My personal threshold is 20-ish%. St. Judes and Shriners meet that threshold with their massive TV ad spend. Certain veterans charities have been exceeding 60%. They are money grubbing scum.

> This attitude frustrates me.

CEO's making market-wages (100k+) "working for charity" frustrates me. At that wage, they aren't charity workers at all. Every dollar they accept is someone remaining underfed, while the CEO gets resume-flair.

Protip: Charity's do not need a CEO in the sense that a company pushing a product to market needs a CEO to manage various business units. They need someone who cares about the net impact to the impoverished at reasonable expense to themselves.

100-200k seems like a perfectly reasonable salary for someone working in the non-profit sector in a high-level management capacity, assuming there is some need for these types of skills, which there certainly are for many non-profits. Presumably that same individual could make anywhere from 300k to many millions as the CEO of a private company. Yes, you may be able to get someone for less, you may even be able to get someone fully qualified for less who is really invested in the mission of the non-profit, but such an individual becomes vanishingly irreplaceable at some point.

On the other hand a small non-profit with a half a dozen employees probably has greater need of a competent accountant.

I made more than 100k as a software support tech with no management experience and minimal college. Not sure that amount measures up in every locale. 100k for a CEO of a large charity seems pretty low.

What? Every organization that wants to grow and thrive needs leadership. And getting and keeping good leadership requires offering fair compensation. Do you disagree?

Yes. Disagree.

I think in many cases the right candidate for a non profit is someone who cares deeply enough to take a pay cut to work there.

  >  someone who cares deeply enough to take a pay cut to work there.

What makes you think this isn't the case? In my limited experience, it is very much the case.

Then I guess we agree.

So you don't have a problem if that reduced pay is still north of $200k/yr, all else being equal?

They do take a pay cut. There are no stock options at a non-profit. Salaries are lower than in the private sector. If you think non-profit CEOs are raking in millions, no wonder you think they are over paid! Don't worry, they are not making anywhere close to what a similar role in the private sector can earn them.

This makes a terrible assertion about what's in people's hearts, something you cannot know and ought not to make accusations about.

Hypothetically would you rather have:

1. Someone making $100k who is able to bring in and distribute $3m in donations per year

2. Someone making $300k who is able to bring in and distribute $5m in donations per year

There's real value to having someone who knows what they're doing in the top position, and that won't always be the person willing to take a pay cut.

How much you care isn't as important as how effective you are at running the organization. That seems like a counter-productive optimization. Let's say we have two charities: one that is run by 'bleeding-heart' passionista's who live in near poverty themselves, or one run by master marketeers and logistic experts who collect sustainable and fair wages. Which do you donate to and why? Which one will actually solve the problems you want them to solve?

Your protip is naive.

I'm not saying there isn't any excessive pay in some charities. But the management needs of an organization are not determined by the goods or services being supplied by that organization so much as by the complexity of the organization. It's not somehow fundamentally easier to manage a charity than it is a product company of similar scale and size.

Now, there can be unwarranted complexity of course, but some of this is a natural outgrowth of scaling and reach. So just like in private sector, charity organizations have a huge range of needs. Running MSF is very different than running a local independent food bank.

From my limited personal experience, charity sector executives tend to be paid a fair bit less than they would in private sector work, but still at a reasonable scale for experience an skills.

This is exactly what you want: someone capable of doing the work well, who demonstrably cares enough about it that it as made a financial impact on them. Otherwise you are effectively suggesting that it is better for the organization to be inefficient and waste its donations, so long as the people heading it are also "donating" their time. You can hope for somebody good who is financially secure and doesn't need the salary, but it would be foolish to count on.

There is one other issue, which is the question of whether or not larger scale charity organizations are (or can be) more efficient at delivering meaningful impact than smaller, localized one. That seems like a good target for some proper research. If the answer is that larger organizations are better at it, then clearly there is a benefit to having them run well. And caring about the impact is nowhere near enough qualification to do that.

Most of the larger charities simply spend more of their budget on marketing. Is that desirable, and should the charity leadership be compensated handsomly for that?

It's a tough question as they may just be redirecting money away from charities with less marketing spend.

> Is that desirable, and should the charity leadership be compensated handsomly for that?

It depends on the overall efficiency, doesn't it?

I'm not saying this stuff is easy to evaluate. I'm saying there are vastly more important qualifications than "I care about this work", and if we have decided large charities are effective then clearly we want competent people running them.

I'm perfectly ok with the answer being: "no, the best bet is very small, very local, entirely volunteer organizations".

The worst case to me seems to be poorly managed large organizations, which will then just bleed resources at every level.

It's not somehow fundamentally easier to manage a charity than it is a product company of similar scale and size.

This is empirically false.

Companies fail far more frequently than similar charities do. The core reason for this is companies operate on a much smaller margins. A charity that distributed 90% of it’s donations last year could distribute 80% if it’s donations this year if they collect half as much. Combined with often significant endowments and failure is rarely a major concern. Companies on the other hand are almost never in those situations.

I've tried, but I can't see what you believe you have falsified here, can you elaborate?

There are certainly issues with inefficiency in charities stemming from the fact they don't have the same market pressures on them as private sector companies do (or at least, not as much). However, this doesn't have anything to do with the difficultly of managing complexity in large organizations.

Or were you objecting to the hand-waving about efficiency? I agree measuring impact of charities are difficult but what else would you look at? Executive pay rate is obviously a silly one without extra context. Year-over-year changes are good, but I at least alluded to that.

I guess I don't know quite what you are objecting to.

While it is true for the reasons you mention that a badly managed charity may last much longer than a badly managed company, that has no impact at all on my statement. It is not somehow easier to manage the charity, it is just less immediate that the negative consequences impact you.

But note, I'm not suggesting we support badly managed charities. I'm saying that to manage it well requires similar skill to that of a similarly scaled private sector company, and you will have to pay for those skills.

This is entirely separable from the issue of evaluating whether or not it is being effectively managed.

I object to the assumption that equivalent sized organizations are equally difficult to run.

Compare the rate of companies that existed 5 or 50 years ago and don’t exist now vs the rate of midsized or larger charities that existed 5 or 50 years ago and don’t exist today. If they where equal you could argue running them was equally difficult. However, because utter failure is not equally likely clearly it’s not equally difficult.

You can use other metrics like the rate CEO’s are replaced and they also show it’s just a much easier job.

So, if the org is more likely to survive and you’re not as likely to be fired that’s clearly an obvious threshold for success at the job. Unless you’re going to suggest only more capable people run charities or something.

PS: I then tried to suggest why this was the case, but that’s not central to the argument.

I don't think they are exactly equivalent. It's certainly not true that all 1000 person orgs are equally difficult to run (regardless of sector). I didn't claim that.

However, I do think there is an aspect of complexity that is inherent in scaling and reach which is just unavoidable. If you operate in multiple countries/jurisdictions. If you have multiple locations & plants. If you have distinct branches with different goals. If you operate in multiple languages. etc. etc. These things are inherent complexities, and as you get bigger, they are harder to manage well.

I see what you are getting at, but I don't think failure rate is a particularly useful comparison, for two reasons. (1) (as noted before) charities can survive mismanagement for longer, typically. (2) Lots of organizations have a sort of "useful lifetime", not everything is going to become a multigenerational organization, and that's fine. I would argue that due to types of mission, charities skew longer here (e.g. the work is often unlikely to ever go away) than corporations.

Fundamentally what I was objecting to was the idea that charities are somehow inherently easy to run, so they should do fine with people who either aren't skilled or are incredibly self-sacrificing (you'll mostly find the former). That's just crazy to me.

So I don't think anything you've brought up invalidates what I said; it just points out an orthogonal problem - that it is harder to evaluate "good management" in the context of charities. Not that it wasn't already hard to evaluate.

Care to provide a citation on anything you're making claims to?

Examples include that charity CEOs aren't required to have the same skills as private CEOs, companies failing at larger rates, companies having smaller margins, etc. You're making easily falsifiable claims without backing up your assertions.

Just based on the fact that it's pretty easy to start a business compared to a charity I'd say the average soil requirement for a functioning charity is as high if not higher than a private entity since you can sell your services to make more money, you typically don't have the income incentive to a large portion of the population, you have an unstable workforce of non-paid resources, and unlike an established business you're in constant fundraising mode. I'd say it's more akin to operating mode of an established company with the income model of a startup.

On top of this you need someone willing to spend either time or money to hire a professional to navigate the legal system. It's not a easy as just trying to be good. Our church for example can't be used as a warming center in the winter due to liveability requirements, we had to work with our local city government who has a full time paid grant writer to get funding to cover just the building resources and we volunteer the staffing for the center.

Then there's logistics. Any professional organization needs to know what it has and in what quantity to be able to effectively distribute those resources. That requires software, logistics expertise, and sometimes physical hardware. All of these are professional roles in a company of any real size.

I think you may be understating the difficulty of the task compared to private enterprise. This is why I'm asking for references, I did a cursory look and didn't find anything directly for what you stated, perhaps you're aware of some information resources I'm not?

Is your 'pro' tip based on either data or anecdotal observation?

My experience with non-profits (granted, not 'pro' since I wasn't being paid) is that organizations that limit their capacity to amateurs and volunteers also significantly limit their impact.

The CEO making 100k+ could likely be making 400k+ in the private sector.

They've already taken a 75% paycut, at a certain point you're not going to attract the talent necessary to do great work. The difference between an A-player and a C-player is vast, and sometimes you need to compensate higher to attract the A-players that will have a transformative impact on the charity.

Plenty of studies show there may be no correlation between CEO pay and their performance! Have a look through the results of: https://www.google.com/search?q=ceo+pay+correlation

Another example was the guy that built a successful baseball team from low paid players (what was the book called?) which showed low pay did not mean low performance in a discipline where outcomes could be measured (much easier than CEO, so you would expect better correlation of pay with performance for sports).

Edit: Moneyball (baseball is as foreign to me as rugby is to Americans?).

Baseball also has verifiable, long term data on specific metrics with a guaranteed minimum rate of pay for entry level people. You're comparing different things.

You're comparing executive pay, which isn't based on verifiable public data. It's not the same thing.

While your assertion that pay doesn't correlate to performance is correct that's based on the idea that the wrong tools and metrics are being used to measure CEO performance. At a certain point you're not going to attract talented people for the task with 25% of the pay unless they've already made their money. There aren't a lot of those types of executives with this experience available unfortunately.

Just because you work for a charity doesn't mean your work is itself charity. If you're collecting money to buy food for people, you still pay for the food, you're not demanding that the growers and packagers of that food simply give it away. Thus they still work to produce the food, and still make the market rate for that work. There's no reason anyone working at any organization should work for less than market rate.

There is absolutely no requirement that workers at a charity must work for charity. You're clearly confused about mission versus methods.

Are there bad methods with good missions? Yes. Are there bad missions with good methods? Yes (most for-profit companies fit here).

Furthermore, CEO salary is one of the most dismal metrics. UNICEF USA's CEO is often in chain-letter-type posts about CEO salary, yet UNICEF USA raises gobs of money for highly successful programs saving millions of lives per year in developing countries. UNICEF vaccinates somewhere near half of the worlds children. Half.

Somehow, hiring talent seems over-rated. This seems related to "efficiency" which is % of dollar going to "programming". Fine salaries paid to employees is cash they cannot hand out to homeless. I get it.

It's usually not those trade-offs that reduce "efficiency". There's a ton misunderstanding about what "programming" is. If a company installs a landing strip to fly in 10 years of supplies, have they spent that money on "programming" or "overhead"?

The worst offenders, in my opinion, are the tiniest hobby non-profits that do virtually nothing. If I fly to the third world and install a well for some people, have I done real good? Perhaps! If I hand out food once a year around thanksgiving, have I? yes! But that labor, effort, and money may have been better invested in policy changes or continuing-support programs. In almost all cases I've seen, the tiny non-profits bemoan the cost of doing this compared to the larger non-profits. Why are some programs more expensive when implemented at a larger non-profit? The main reason is they include this "extra" work such as publicity, policy, continuing support, and yes, hiring good people so they can do better next year with more money.

Any business-minded person will tell you that you must reinvest in your organization to do more. What that more is might be up for debate (the mission), but to avoid self-investment is to have a bad method.

Why? CEOs in the USA (and UK to be frank) earn way more than an average worker compared to many countries such as Japan. They do a look of work sure, but they needn't be paid so much.

I think you make a really good point here by looking at international salaries. Like a lot of other commetors, I think that a good CEO really is worth the salary. We've all had bad managers and seen bad C-suite decisions play out. However, the excessiveness of the increased pay is very concerning. I get it, those people exist in a market as well, and you have to play by market dynamics as a result. But as compared to international C-suites, US pay is very very high.

The issue's core problem is the excessive pay of C-suite people in the US affecting the workforce. This bleeds quickly into charities, of course.

If people here are cool with CEOs making hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, then everyone working under him or her should make a better-than-average salary, all the way down to the line workers, who'd normally make minimum wage.

Agreed, and people may not be away of how egregious the budgets of their favorite non-profit/charity are.

"Nationwide, the mean salaries of chief executives at nonprofit hospitals rose 93% since 2005 to reach $3.1 million in 2015, according to an October 2018 study in Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nonprofit-hospitals-criticized-...

I'll agree that a person in a CEO position of say Goodwill deserves to be paid a lot of money given their position, running an organization takes money etc.

But I personally don't have much money. I would rather give my local church food to be distributed than money to organizations. It's not that the CEO doesn't deserve to be paid, it's that I don't want my money to go to him.

> Also keeping the donations as food ensures the donations go directly to helping your community.

This is addressed in the article. Charities specifically do not outright ban food donations because they don't want to dictate to people how to donate. But receiving a bunch of random food items is logistically harder to organize, store and transport. They prefer monetary donations because they hire logistical specialists who can buy bulk food items at far lower rates than what consumers pay at the grocery.

> Non profit ceos make 100s of thousands of dollars a year. That money comes from cash donations. People don't want to line a ceos pockets they want to help their neighbor.

You should look into the annual reports of your local nonprofit; you may be conflating what CEOs of national/global orgs like Doctors without Borders or United Way get paid vs what a local charity head does. You'll probably also notice that a significant portion of NPF revenue comes from corporate donations. Guess what? They don't give out of the goodness of their hearts. They give because the suits have connections with people in those spheres, and convince them that giving is good for their brand.

>>This is addressed in the article.

Right and I addressed it at the end of that comment. Saying its fine to donate money if you want. But people shouldn't be ashamed of donating canned food.

>>You should look into the annual reports of your local nonprofit;

This whole article was about efficiency and how much further your money goes if you donate cash. Putting any middle man in there with any budget for operation cuts away from the gains. And if they are getting donations from corporations, then fine, use that money for operations. My money won't be going to them. I'll donate to a church or whoever who is actually doing it from the goodness of their heart. (Note I keep referencing churches, but there are other non religious groups that do it for free not under a non profit corporation, specifically I know for a fact in LA at venice beach there is a group that helps homeless youth by feeding them and offering them a place to sleep, they even hand out condoms.)

There's a smallish movement of people who are trying to figure out how to do the most good for the least cost in absolute terms, and the conclusion seems to be that what feels good isn't what actually works well. This is an essay that sort of explains why some people are moving in that direction:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3p3CYauiX8oLjmwRF/purchase-f...

Regarding your objection to leaders making an income on your donations (an objection I used to share), what if it could be proven that more people are helped more effectively that way? Would that change your mind?

> If you want to donate money fine. But I'd wager if the only choice was donating money less people would donate.

If the figures in the article are correct, three out of four people would need to stop donating in order to make that a net loss.

(Three out of four people would not stop donating. Give them an easy way to pay and those contributing to a food drive appreciate not schlepping around food.)

Consider watching this video on rethinking charities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfAzi6D5FpM

A lot of time I buy more canned food than I need, especially when preparing for holiday cooking. Donating it is really the only way to make use of it. Otherwise it will sit in my cabinet and maybe I'll remember to use it.

I get that money's always bets, but also encouraging people to get rid of excess purchased food before it expires and goes to waste can't be a "bad thing" altogether.

Donating excess food is fine! The problem addressed in the article is people going out to a store and buying random canned food for the sole purpose of donating it.

> You know someone somewhere got a can of creamed corn.

But the point was you don't know that. If they get deluged with creamed corn, it might just sit in a warehouse, get shipped to a different community, or even get trashed. Donate a can if you prefer, just don't fool yourself with false guarantees.

This is extremely wrong-headed. To begin with, you're stating "downsides" which the original article specifically said "hey, people think this and they're wrong". Downthread you bring up worries like "spending money on advertising", but as I understand it most advertising that charities get, especially non-national level charities, is donated by the companies that own the advertising space (in-kind donations), so they're also not spending money on that.

I've volunteered at the Alameda County Community Food Bank. Do you want to know where your churches and local groups get their food? They come to a central food bank like the ACCFB, where they can load up. The ACCFB does not directly distribute food to people in need, instead trusting smaller groups to know their community's needs better, so they invite those groups to come get food. Staples, fresh produce, baby food and formula at exactly zero dollars all day long, more "premium" products at a heavily subsidized price.

Do you know what the ACCFB spent money on that wasn't food? A gi-fucking-gantic walk in fridge and freezer, so that they don't have to worry about bulk donations/purchases spoiling. And a large warehouse so that they can take in fresh produce from farmers (often stuff that cosmetically won't sell well) and re-sort it in a way that local organizations can use.

You can see what the executives of non-profits make. The Executive Director of the ACCFB was paid $256K in 2017, for overseeing an organization with $64M in revenue. The rest of the individuals on the Form 990 were in the $103K-$150K range. For full-time Chief/Director work IN THE BAY AREA. In case you've been living under a rock, that's not a good salary.

Every "benefit" to donating food is that you get to feel like stopped someone from tricking you and you're smarter than "all of those rubes" who gave cash. Turns out you're actually being the least helpful donor, and now write smug comments bragging about how you're the least helpful donor trying to reduce the helpfulness of other donors.

ACCFB's Form 990 for 2017: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/942...

I found the details you provided helpful in shaping my understanding and opinion on this issue. Thank you for taking the time to write them out.

My personal bias had previously been shaped by the example of the the Susan G Komen for the Cure scandal. In my recollection they were hardly donating any of the funds raised. Perhaps I am mis-remembering at this point.

Distributing food and clothes is much easier to do and measure than "cure cancer" so I'm not sure why I thought the outcomes would be similar.

If there's a cause you're interested in supporting, you can show up to volunteer or even just a volunteer training. I learnt about how the ACCFB operates at my volunteer training and it was not what I expected.

1. If you spend $5 on food, and the foodbank could have bought $25 with that same money, but would instead buy $15 worth of food and $10 spent on salary for the person buying food, management, etc... it was still more efficient to give the $5.

2. Margins on food are VERY thin. The local supermarket makes a few percent in profits. Unless you're buying directly from the farmers (most arent), that money isnt staying in your community. It's going to go thousands of miles away where it's being grown.. and then the remainder is going to go to Kroger/Walmart/etc corporate bank account so that they can pay their managers that 100k+/year that you so oppose charity workers making.

While I see your point your math does not add up. You can’t take $5, then transform it to $25 worth of food and then again to $25 in cash so you can give a $10 salary. Unless of course you would resell the food you buy at a massive margin.

Perhaps 2$ of the 5$ goes towards buying 10$ worth of food, and then 3$ of the 5$ goes to administrators, thus leading to two seemingly contradictory truths: most of the money you gave went towards paying administrators, and the charity used your 5$ towards your desired goal more effectively than you could have yourself.

If the charity can take a $5 cash donation, turn it into $15 of food and $10 cash, then instead of paying the $10 cash to management, why not split it into two more instances of $5 cash and repeat the process?

Because this isn't a magic fantasy world where you're literally turning cash into bigger cash. When someone says "$5 cash becomes $15 worth of food", they mean "I can spend the $5 to get what would cost you $15 to spend". And when it's broken down into "of the $5, $3 goes to paying for food, and $2 goes to paying people", that $2 pays the people who can use the $3 as effectively as the original person could use $15. If you decide to get rid of those people, and just spend the $2 directly on food, you can no longer use it effectively.

I understand that $5 at wholesale prices could be three times as much food than at retail prices. But the example literally says that $5 of cash turns into $15 of food plus $10 of cash.

That's why nobody likes recursion

> If you spend $5 on food, and the foodbank could have bought $25 with that same money, but would instead buy $15 worth of food and $10 spent on salary for the person buying food, management, etc... it was still more efficient to give the $5.

Ok, but what if they spend $4 on food, and $21 on "costs"? You can't just make up numbers.

A few percent would be the final profit margin after all the costs of operating the store are taken out. The typical gross margin (price they sell for minus price they buy for) is about 20%[1].

[1] https://csimarket.com/Industry/industry_Profitability_Ratios...

Margins on dry goods, canned goods, and other processed foods are the highest margins in a supermarket. It's the produce that is razor thin.

I believe canned good margins vary around 50 to 100% markup.

You might wish to go back and look at those "churches and local groups" you got your food from your childhood. Or go to similar ones that are around you where you live now. Ask them how they get their food to give out to the needy. There's a good chance they got much of their food from a warehouse.

Now, you might not have heard of them until now, but read this description of how a lot of food bank systems work: https://www.feedingamerica.org/our-work/food-bank-network That's Feeding America, a massive network of food banks as in #2 charity in the United States in 2018. What's bigger? United Way.

The churches and local groups? They're name in this model is a "food pantry". Somewhere, especially in metropolitan areas, is one or more organizations that are basically giant warehouses of food. They're the "food bank" of the model. They take in donated food and donated money, buy huge amounts of food in bulk, and distribute it to the "food pantry".

What happens is the food bank takes a $10 donation and buys 100+ cans at wholesale prices, then distributes them to the food pantries, sometimes for a tiny fee (think: pennies) to discourage waste.

Its one thing when you clean out your cupboard of cans and another when you willingly buy a few cans at the grocery store to donate. The latter is wasted a bit, because you didn't get a good deal compared to what the food bank could get in bulk. The entire article is on this.

A picture in the article is the perfect example of this. These people wanted to "feel good". Well, even with a few percent of overhead for the "CEO cost", that warehouse-level food bank could've probably bought double the food with $500.

I get it is feel good for sure and I get the anti-corruption angle. But an honest to goodness food bank known to service an area, one that is well audited(!!) should be on your cash donation list. They're the ones supplying the small local groups with the food you got.

In Brazil, [Herbert de Souza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_de_Souza) mobilized the society with a campaign called "Christmas without Hunger". One of the foundations of the program was that it wouldn't accept money, just non-spoilable food. Money would never reach who needed it. It was one of the most effective social campaigns we ever had.

They make some excellent points. I fully support the idea that the best way to help a particular cause is usually to give cash, not in kind goods.

But having done a lot of volunteer work over the years and also spent several years homeless, I would rather see a whole lot more emphasis on creating a world with less need for charity.

We will always need some charity. This article talks in part about charitable giving following a fire. Stuff happens. The world will never stop having crises.

But some problems would best be served by social justice, not charity.

"Give a man a fish, feed him for the day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime." We have a world in which we glorify giving away fish while often actively refusing to "teach a man to fish."

Example:

Discussions of homelessness routinely dismiss the idea that such people can be meaningfully helped to resolve their problems. They get dismissed as crazies and addicts who simply can't be helped.

Meanwhile, my efforts to develop useful websites while homeless and monetize them was snidely characterized by someone as me "panhandling the internet" and people generally didn't want to hire me. I was clear I needed more earned income to get off the street. Charity wasn't going to give me my life back. But I couldn't seem to get taken seriously by anyone.

I 100% agree with your assessment.

>They get dismissed as crazies and addicts who simply can't be helped.

How can we identify which people are in which group? Is it simply a matter of advertising a path out, and those willing to try will follow up?

Obviously, this assumes someone has a functioning path out, which I don't.

I think the best approach is make paths available, let people sort themselves by which path they prefer.

I have a functional path out. No one cares and I can't get support for further developing it.

I posted this to HN. It got no traction.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-people-fi...

I am actively working on developing additional resources, for example:

https://genevievefiles.blogspot.com/

Explanation:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2019/06/lgbtq-indiv...

I would like to also put together information related to understanding and resolving our current housing crisis (because that's one of the root causes of homelessness). I've made multiple stabs at starting a website to gather such data. The latest was started yesterday:

https://americanhomeworks.blogspot.com/

But ad income for websites generally has tanked in recent years and I get endless excuses and justifications for why writing shouldn't get paid at all and I get told I should get a real job and stop whining.

I don't feel like rehashing that in detail for the umpteenth time on HN. Short version: there are enough people here with money to spare that it really shouldn't be hard to adequately fund my Patreon for me to be able to blog full-time instead of spending time trying to come up with money to survive doing writing of a sort that people here decry as "ruining the internet," but almost no one wants to put their money where their mouth is. They are all too happy to watch the world burn while loudly decrying how it can't be fixed and once in a while patting me on the head for making my life suck less but not actually taking me seriously as someone with anything of real value to offer cuz Reasons.

Meanwhile, I'm nearly broke as usual and wondering how the hell I'm going to get through the rest of the damn month because doing low paid writing for clients is harder than doing quality writing on my own sites, but developing my sites mostly doesn't pay. Too bad, so fucking sad. It sucks to be me.

Writing/ blogging might simply be the wrong approach to get your message out. Have you tried YouTube or Podcasts? Interviews of the homeless and/or activists? Photos of them on instagram? Add all of the Tools of social media marketing to your toolset and you might have more impact.

A. I'm medically handicapped. A lot of that is simply out of reach for me.

B. My writing is good enough to sometimes make the front page of HN. It still doesn't pay, not because I'm doing anything wrong, but because the world expects content for free.

Most YouTube channels, etc, also don't really support their creators. Plus you are de facto asking me to abandon something I've spent years getting good at in order to start over from scratch with something else. The subtext there is "Of course writing doesn't pay! It never will! Just quit!"

This piece (below) by me made the front page, got substantial upvotes and generated substantial conversation. It made not one thin dime.

https://raisingfutureadults.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-hand-li...

I've been on HN a decade. I've read and participated in numerous discussions pertinent to this problem space. A tldr is people don't approve of any means whatsoever to pay content creators.

Ads are evil.

Tip jars are "panhandling the internet."

Patreon is seen as "begging for charity" rather than a legitimate means to monetize your work in a world where people aggressively use ad blockers and bitch and moan about the evils of ads.

Selling something else as a product and writing related content -- aka content marketing -- is another form of evil ruining the internet.

Doing low-paid writing, such as product descriptions and content marketing pieces for hire, makes me part of the problem that is ruining the internet.

People on HN actively look for and promote means to get around pay walls.

There is zero means to monetize online content that doesn't get decried as evil, evil and more evil. Reflecting that back as "So, basically, you think writing should be done by slave labor" offends the high paid, high minded types that find it an affront that writers want a middle class life.

Meanwhile, they also bitch and moan about there not being enough good writing and utterly dismiss the idea that making it impossible to get adequately paid for writing has any bearing on how journalism etc is going to hell.

I'm exhausted and tired of saying the same things over and over and hearing the same tired argument that I'm just doing it wrong, I'm just too stupid to figure out the right way and some random internet stranger can fix my life with a paragraph or two of advice if I will just dutifully listen.

I already said I don't really want to rehash this. I still don't really want to rehash this. It's amazingly aggravating and pointless.

I don’t think you’re stupid, you sound very intelligent, but it seems like if nobody wants to pay you for what you want to do, then maybe you should get a job doing something people pay for. It’s not like I’m passionate about writing ci/cd pipelines. It pays the bills.

I have a form of Cystic Fibrosis. The classic form had a life expectancy of 36 or 37 when I was diagnosed just before my 36th birthday.

My oldest son has the same diagnosis. We are supposed to be on thousands of dollars a month worth of drugs. We are both drug free our "diet and lifestyle" based approach to managing our condition is saving an estimated $200k to $500k annually.

Working from home so I have control over my environment has been a big part of that. No job in the world pays enough to make it worthwhile to go back on the eight or nine prescription drugs I've gotten off of.

I do work very part-time as the webmaster for a local non-profit. I am trying to figure out how to get more clients doing website work.

It still would not likely be big bucks.

I would be amenable to accepting the right job. I can't accept just any job. It doesn't make sense for me.

I think I have knowledge and skills worth money. I'm quite confident if I were a man this would not be such an intractable problem.

I don't plan to discuss my personal situation further. I know people mean well, but it's extremely unhelpful and dismissive to get these kind of one-off suggestions from strangers who don't really know enough about my life to make useful suggestions.

I made a general comment. Someone replied to that and asked a few questions. I responded with a good faith reply. As is often the case, the result is a bunch of people wanting to talk about me and my personal problems and not actually take my framing of the situation seriously.

To reiterate my main point:

I actually got myself off the street on my own efforts, so I think I know some useful stuff. My comments on HN about homelessness are consistently some of my most upvotes comments.

So people seem to think I make sense.

But most of them don't want to help me do more in this problem space.

So if the world is going to hell in a hand basket, maybe that's because the world thinks that's a cool destination and visiting it to watch the poor people roast is good entertainment. Or at least something more desirable than admitting that maybe a woman knows something actually useful and should grt genuine support for further her work.

I think I'm done here. This conversation is the usual maddening pattern. And after multiple people have basically politely pissed all over me with seeming good intentions, if I get aggravated and lose my cool, that becomes another reason to blame me for my problems and say I deserve to be dirt poor, I deserve to be ostracized, etc.

I seriously doubt most people here could do half as well socially under the same circumstances.

From what I understand, writing can be very lucrative but it is far from guaranteed income. It's like being an actor: sure you can make it big, but there are thousands of actors that don't make enough money to survive without doing other work.

From my vantage, it seems that the homeless community has gotten so large and so widespread that it could spawn and support its own economy. Is there anything that could be traded for services such as washed clothes, security patrol, food gathering, etc?

I keep imagining that assisting the creation of such self-supported services is something that the non-homeless could achieve. I would hope that this would scale naturally, and then naturally result in lifting these individuals out of homelessness. Meanwhile, it would mike homeless life much more comfortable.

Thoughts?

"The homeless" are not some separate population here. You can't distinguish them from "normal people" like they are a separate species.

People at risk of homelessness are, in a nutshell, people with barriers to regular employment. This includes people who are twice exceptional and the LGBTQ crowd.

Ideally, we develop more resources for people who have trouble achieving conventional success as a means to lower their risk of homelessness. Waiting until after they are on the street to help them is the worst possible way to handle this. It's much harder to help people after their lives have fallen apart than to give them other options before it goes that far.

Years ago, I homeschooled my two twice exceptional sons. I was Director of Community Life for The TAG Project for a short time. I was a low level presenter at a gifted conference that year.

I have expertise in how you deal effectively with this stuff. But there's no effective means to put that information out there. I can't afford to do everything for free. It doesn't pay and the institutions we currently have are often part of the problem.

Because it's a term I'm not familiar with, but you used twice, I looked up "twice exceptional". For anybody else wondering, it "refers to gifted children who have some form of disability."

Yes, though adults can also be 2e.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice_exceptional

Makes sense. Thanks for the correction.

The author might be missing the main reason people donate canned food.

It isn't just cash vs goods, they also want to feel like they have made a personal contribution. I loved eating canned corn as a kid, same thing for canned string beans (don't judge!).

I, and others like me, want to feel like they are doing that personal act. Be it donating kids clothing that has been out grown, or our favorite type of canned goods.

When I was in college and had very little money to spare, I still donated canned goods because I wanted to help out. If I had been given an envelop and a form to fill out my CC details or drop cash in, I likely would have done nothing. And I suspect many other people are the same way. And honestly, back then as a poor college kid, spur of the moment I could go into my pantry and grab a couple of cans I got on sale last week. It'd be harder to donate money that has to be spent on future needs, which are much less certain than needs that have already been met[1].

Charities, and all human organizations for that matter, have to work within the bounds of human psychology, and humans are rarely creatures of optimal habits.

[1] I wonder how much of canned goods is new purchases versus existing purchases? I personally have gone out and bought canned goods specifically for a food drive. If the majority of donated canned goods are from existing supplies, than the article's entire point is invalid.

Speaking of canned foods I liked as a kid were: the little peas in the silver can, tangerine wedges, Viennese “sausages” and spaghetti-os. All of them are barf inducing to me now.

> the little peas in the silver can

Canned peas are terrible.

Canned mandarin oranges (Google turns up no results for canned tangerines?) are actually an essential ingredient in quite a few recipes, well unless one wants to peel a bunch of tiny orange wedges by hand.

Canned Vienna Sausages likewise have their place, rare as that place may be, and there are actually higher end canned brands that are rather edible.

So, fun fact about sense of taste over time. Kids have a more sensitive pallet, food tastes super strong to them, so it is often more bland or has simpler flavors. This is why kids can't eat lots of bitter or sour things, they taste really bitter or really sour. As we grow older, our sense of taste starts to die out, and so flavors are less intense. This means overpowering flavors become less overpowering, and we can taste more "refined" foods. And we can also tolerate pickles. (See: Tendencies for older adults and red wine[1])

Exact same goes for our sense of color and taste. Again, as we get older, brighter colors, and stronger perfumes become preferred.

Back to food, simple kid foods either taste bland, or have one dominant flavor. In American famously it is mac and cheese. The texture is simple and the flavor is simple.

[1] IMHO most red wines taste horrible, but at a certain age we just can't taste how horrible they are and they become tolerable.

If kids taste things more strongly than adults, why do kids like Sunny Delight? It's far too strongly... whatever-flavor-it-is (mostly sugar) to the adult palate, but kids have no problem with it.

Because their metabolism actually wants all those calories.

Sunny Delight tastes like it was made on a bet that someone could make orange juice without using any oranges.

seems weird to me too. when I was a kid I certainly didn't like complex flavors, but I loved intensely sweet, "tangy" things (like sunny d).

spaghetti-os are still good!

| I wonder how much of canned goods is new purchases versus existing purchases? I personally have gone out and bought canned goods specifically for a food drive.

single data point, but I've helped unpack/sort for several different food drives of the years and I would say that its somewhere between 50/50 and 70/30 on previously bought vs existing.

No, the author covers this pretty well:

> And lastly, something that is probably the most uncomfortable fact about all this; it doesn’t feel as good to donate money. As much as we like to pretend that charitable giving is a selfless act, a lot of it is driven by the human need to feel special and magnanimous.

> As donations go, it’s much more satisfying to donate a minivan filled with Ragu than to send a $100 e-transfer.

> Charities know this, and it’s another reason why they are so hesitant to pooh-pooh canned food drives, despite the extra logistical cost. Non-profits know that people get a buzz from loudly dropping $6 worth of cans into an office hamper, and they’re happy to channel that urge towards something good.

I personally donate cash to GiveDirectly. Money is always best.

Well, I know the charity administrator can just pay himself with a cash donation, but they can't do much with cans of food other than either distribute them or destroy them.

Another portion of the article touches on the overhead to sort and store all these items for later distribution, that sorting might be done by volunteers (and thus be free-ish) but there's always an opportunity cost, the labour used for receiving these items is labour lost on other important projects.

If the charity is a responsible one then you're wasting more money by forcing them to sort your cans, clothing and miscellaneous junk than the slim chance that someone's going to misuse those funds

Exactly. Reminds me of panhandlers who ask for money to buy food. But if you give them food they refuse to take it. Yeah, right...

You can actually vet a charity unlike a panhandler.

You might even be able to volunteer for them yourself for a few weekends and gain trust in them before setting up a scheduled cash donation, if you really want to verify it.

This is not normal, and you shouldn't be giving any organization where that happens. The board pays the executive. The executive should never write their own check.

I just surveyed my small team at work (5 ppl). Every single one said they'd rather donate canned foods than cash due to this reason alone. 3 said they would "never" donate cash.

Look up the charity on https://www.charitynavigator.org to vet them. If you don't trust the charity with money, then find one you do trust with money and give to them.

Bear in mind that if everyone gave canned food, there likely wouldn't be a charity in the first place. Someone has to run things, and that someone generally needs to get paid for any sizeable charity; it IS a full time job.

If you're worried about that look up the charity's pay filings. Most are very efficient at distributing donations into services and pay very little as a percentage they take in. If you live in a reasonably large city chances are good there are multiple charities that give 95-97%+ of their donations out again in services.

Even if they don't reach that lofty level it's hard to beat a 5x multiplier between the money paid for a donated can and the amount a purchaser could get with that money.

Then on top of the 5x amount of food argument, there's also the nutritional argument: a jar of Ragu sauce without any pasta or cheese or vegetables isn't a balanced meal. And it's better to spend money on fresh food and vegetables and milk at the time it's needed, than to throw away donated perishables, and only distribute canned food.

> No, the author covers this pretty well:

Partially, I am also saying that the food we donate is what makes it special. Part of it is donating a mass of Ragu sauce, as the author says, but part of it is that the person who donates all that Ragu sauce probably really likes ragu sauce and wants to share that joy with others.

And in reference to winter food drives, the holiday season is all about sharing joy. Be it sharing one's favorite dishes at thanksgiving, or giving the perfect gift. American society values putting thought and effort into ones gifts, and canned food allows people to do that.

For some people it likely is about feeling good over sheer quantity (and local news reports do show off the mounds of donated cans!) but I do think another part of it is wanting to do something more personal.

He doesn't it at all! He, acknowledges that this is a problem, but doesn't resolve the point -that there would be less donation- against his argument.

To do that he would either have to prove that money donations would increase in lieu of canned goods and/or that the administrative costs are higher than the value of the canned goods (which maybe true for very specialized and/or very corrupt charities, but not for your local volunteer run pantry)

They did touch on the feelgood factor of donating food vs money.

Are you from the US ?

My 2ç:

I noticed that there is a strong tradition there to favour charity over social welfare and one of the recurring argument is about how the receiver should feel grateful toward the giver because it somehow attaches a moral debt to the help which the receiver wouldn't feel the burden if the government was the proxy (through taxes) for helping those in need.

I am a European and my first thoughts are always "What a nasty way to help others, adding moral debt to being helped, to put conditions on what should be an act of voluntary uninterested generosity (as opposed to an obligatory act through an inhumane government). That must have something to do with the protestantism cultural background in the US but I can't put my finger on it.".

Likewise, in Europe, I also hear a lot of "I don't give money to beggars but if they want to eat then I can buy something". I disagree because to me it's part of a larger dehumanization process: who are we to tell people what they should spend their money on ? If the guy wants to drink it or buy a night in a cheap hotel or buy a blanket or food or whatever... it's still up to him. I don't have the `right` to control what his priorities should be.

Personally I don't give money to beggars. I did some volunteering and I regularly donate money to some very specific charities I support because:

1. they are going to do a much better job than I and

2. in the city, once you get tagged as a coin giver then words get around pretty fast. It got so bad at one point that I couldn't walk some streets without having two people coming up to me and

3. my government (which has some decent support for homelessness) don't support those specific charities with its welfare system so...

Edit: format and light rewording.

I believe this has to do with everyone's specific set of values. I am not saying Americans are bad people and manipulative moralistic individuals (and I just found some arguments that support the idea that the american charity style helps poor people better than the euro style).

Im totally shocked that someone who doesnt give to those in need is okay with them using panhandling money for alcohol or drugs. Its always okay when its not your own money.

I haven't been clear. I used to give money in the street, I did some volunteering and now choose to give to some specific charities regularly. I still give a coin every three months but way less more than before. I am still okay with this coin being used for whatever purposes though.

> Its always okay when its not your own money.

Are you trying to build an anti-socialist argument ?

I am anything but anti-socialist. Just pointing out that i can see why you dont care about what these poor, usually mentally ill people do with money given to them out of good will, since its not your money and you have no stake.

Edit: Wanted to add something. People usually donate or offer help to those who need because they want to see their lives improve or to make them happy. And that makes you feel bad because they dont wish their money or help end up causing harm.

>> if they want to eat then I can buy something

The reason for this one is that in the US some of the "beggars" aren't really struggling at all. When offered food or whatever else they claim on their placard they're lacking, they will decline. Where I live we have a beggar woman standing on the corner with a placard. Behind that placard, though, she's watching YouTube on her iPhone XS. She's been doing this for at least 5 years now, swapping phones more often than I do. Nearly all of those guys who "ran out of cash to get home" will decline an offer to pay their fare, too.

This is definitely true in many cases, but I'd wager that it's the exception, not the rule. (It also probably depends on location.)

It makes sense to me to refuse to help individuals who seem to be abusing goodwill, but I think this is a poor excuse to refuse helping anyone who asks. I always give the benefit of the doubt to those in need.

If you don't want to give, that's your prerogative, but I don't think this is a good justification for that decision.

I disagree. If I can

- give $10 to the person on the corner who has a 20% chance to waste it on alcohol or drugs, or

- give it to a charity that I know does good work

then the second option seems better to me; and that 20% is part of the (reasonable) justification why.

It's a given that the rate of success for beggars would plummet if they asked money for anything else than food or transportation anyway.

Iphone of unknown origins ? Free WiFi around ? That could explain it.

Honestly, 90% of homeless people have psychological problems so I take the iphone lady over the grumpy drunkard any day :). Everyone has a different coping mechanism :/.

Now, "some beggars" is likely not "the majority".

Anyway, there are many different ways to help others (giving money to the lady so she can keep being by herself without annoying anyone, giving the social workers or ngo that will try to get to her through other means, etc.). I believe what is important is that we try do something from time to time and we don't forget these are humane beings.

It costs me less than $1 USD per day to get unlimited, high quality 4G data. $0.83/day to be precise.

My high-end Samsung phone to watch things on comes to $0.91/day. That's because I bought new. If bought second hand I'd expect to pay closer to $0.50/day.

So for $1.74/day, I can watch YouTube all day, on one of the most expensive devices, with a screen so high-end you can't see the pixels. It also gives me communication for free with anyone all around the world, real-time access to financial services, unlimited games, and access to various kinds of work.

It would be very difficult to eat or drink on $1.74/day, and it's vastly less than the cost of renting a home.

Does it really make sense to conclude the beggar women standing on the corner isn't struggling, because she can afford to watch YouTube on a nice phone?

This is the paradox of cheap technology next to expensive housing.

People who are struggling typically don't have $1K to drop on a phone, or $30/mo to spend on the data plan. If you believe the news, most people in this country can't scrounge up $400 in case of an emergency, let alone to buy the most expensive phone available. I used to struggle myself when I was a student (not in the US), and it not even in my wildest dreams would I think of spending my food money on overpriced electronics.

Nobody I know has to pay $1k up front to get a good quality device these days.

People who are struggling tend to get the hand-me-down previous-generation devices for nothing or next to nothing, and you don't really need the $30/mo data plan. Older devices are also quite cheap when bought incrementally as part of a phone plan.

For example, I know someone with an iPhone 6 that cost them nothing, and a USD $12.50/mo plan, with unlimited calls and several gigabytes of data allowance.

I agree with you that not everyone who is struggling is able to allocate $30/mo, or even $12.50/mo, but it's low enough that if it's a very justifiable expense (and I would argue that communication and internet when you have to sit or walk every day on the street is extremely justifiable), that level does not impact someone's food consumption enough to justify a random passerby judging they are secretly faking povery.

Spending $1.00/day or $0.40/day on something you'd consider a luxury item, does not mean that person is faking poverty, at least in the US.

I totally agree, and I wish more people thought this way. I currently have the good fortune of having more than I need, through both hard work and luck. If someone asks me for help, I have an obligation as a fellow human and neighbor to help without judgement.

>Likewise, in Europe, I also hear a lot of "I don't give money to beggars but if they want to eat then I can buy something". I disagree because to me it's part of a larger dehumanization process: who are we to tell people what they should spend their money on ? If the guy wants to drink it or buy a night in a cheap hotel or buy a blanket or food or whatever... it's still up to him. I don't have the `right` to control what his priorities should be.

If someone is living off a welfare check, I do not want them using that money to buy things I consider luxury goods with the money I worked to earn (tax dollars).

This is more a comment to your 'drink it' part, but also applies to people who buy soda/candy bars/junk food on food stamps. When I was working minimum wage I didn't buy that stuff because it was a waste of money that I couldn't afford.

> using that money to buy things I consider luxury goods

It always pains me to see people convey that attitude. We spend on luxury items because they make us feel good, they give us a little endorphine hit when we buy / use / consume them.

I grew up in a poor family of four, like my first real job out of high school in the mid-90s at $20K was more than my step-father ever brought home. Having that "luxury" chocolate bar, or being able to save enough for a brand-new bicycle or Nintendo... that was a huge deal. Saying that poor people shouldn't have access to "luxuries" is saying that they shouldn't be allowed to spend money to feel good.

I would never tell someone what to spend their money on. if I'm going to spend my money to help them out, I'd prefer it not go straight to a pint of liquor. is that unreasonable?

Hi, my answer is just food for thought:

I was having a conversation with a friend of a mine who happens to be a doctor and she works for the red cross some days of the week. I happen to have another friend who works as a social worker in a refugee centre so we traded stories and impressions.

She told me that there were a lot of tensions between people and electricity in the air as time goes by.

Now, every few months workers there organize a party where refugees cook typical dishes to share with everyone. It does a lot for easing the tension and the weeks after those parties are easier on everyone, staff and refugees.

Now those parties have a lot of desserts (easier to bake and to store) which are for all intents and purposes a bit of luxury. I think there could be a bit of alcohol but don't quote me on that.

Would you say that was not money well spent in the end (the red cross is supported through donations and the government adds some at some point) ?

> I would never tell someone what to spend their money on. if I'm going to spend my money to help them out, I'd prefer it not go straight to a pint of liquor. is that unreasonable?

It really does depend upon your values. What if - alcoholism excluded - that money is going to buy a 15ç can of bad beer but it'd be only one beer. What if this is the alcohol in that can of beer that'll help the guy to muster the courage to spend all of his days panhandling so he can get food or pay for his spot under the bridge for the night ?

My point is that I don't believe that because I gave them some money I should have some control on them, or restrict the use of that money to my liking (shelters do that, with contracts and agreement put in place with the objective to lift people out of the street but that's another debate). Either that gift is free or it's not a gift, it's a salary for a behaviour I want the beggar to have. If I give money it becomes their money, if he can't dispose of it then it wasn't given.

I often wonder what would happen if I just said : "OK, I'll give you ten bucks if you help me move some stuff for an hour or help me with the garden". Then, what if he spend that money on booze, girls or WoW pre paid card ? At least he didn't mug anyone.

Anecdote: where I live, people on social welfare can get some small jobs (lawn mowing, paint jobs, that kind of things). They aren't paid in money. People give them some kind of social paper that is the equivalent of money and then they have to go the administration to get that turned into money into their account. Here's the catch: only people on welfare can get these jobs. And they are basically given monopoly money by people buying their services (who first bought these cheques from the government). These papers have validity dates, can't be used on the spot to buy something. Some money get lost this way. Why should people on welfare be paid with fake money ?

It reminds me of this news about beggars getting a qr code or a RFID chip. Mobile payments would go to the shelter they are affiliated with and that would be converted into housing and food.

> is that unreasonable?

To each its own, it just means we have different outlook and a different set of values (and by that I don't mean to imply I am better than you or correct).

edit: and of course, we live in many different cultures that have different subsets of values and people in it so what might be the righteous and the practical way to help beggars/homeless people might be different on a different continent... or over in the next town.

> Anecdote: where I live, people on social welfare can get some small jobs (lawn mowing, paint jobs, that kind of things). They aren't paid in money. People give them some kind of social paper that is the equivalent of money and then they have to go the administration to get that turned into money into their account. Here's the catch: only people on welfare can get these jobs. And they are basically given monopoly money by people buying their services (who first bought these cheques from the government). These papers have validity dates, can't be used on the spot to buy something. Some money get lost this way. Why should people on welfare be paid with fake money ?

Sorry to probe, but what country do you live in? I'd like to do some further reading

Belgium. Here's an official explanation of the system: http://www.werk.belgie.be/defaultTab.aspx?id=42422# Unfortunately there isn't an English version (but you can toggle between dutch, french and german).

Also a wikipedia entry https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titre-service and a google search https://www.google.com/search?q=explication+titre-services

first of all, thank you for the thoughtful reply.

let me address your point about welfare first. in the US, we really don't like the idea of tax dollars going towards drugs, alcohol, etc., so the federal and most state governments generally don't just give cash to poor people. they either give food stamps (to be redeemed at grocery stores) or even drug test people to make sure they are not misusing the funds. some research (I don't have time to get a citation, sorry) has found that the government spends more money to make sure that people don't buy drugs than they would actually waste on drugs in the first place! I don't love the idea of my tax dollars going to feed an addiction, but it's silly to spend more money to prevent them from doing it. so I say if someone is legally entitled to get some money from the government, just give it to them as cash if it's more efficient. they can decide what to do with it.

to be clear, I don't think alcohol is evil, and I think the parties your friend organizes sound great! consumed in moderation, alcohol can certainly help people form important bonds, and a good meal shared with other people can be worth a lot more than its nutritional value.

all I'm saying is that I don't like to give cash directly to a person whom I suspect is going to spend all of it on their addiction. if someone is holding a sign saying "hungry, need help" and they refuse anything but cash, that's kind of suspicious. if, like you said, I could pay them $10-20 to help with a small task, I would consider the money fairly earned and I would be fine with whatever the person spent it on.

I've had similar thoughts but never felt great about articulating them. (So don't jump me as though I'm typing this with absolute certainty please!)

Like, maybe there's some kind of societal rot where our problems are all abstracted away.

- Some government program takes care of that, and payment for that was taken out of your paycheck before it got to you.

- Don't collect items, no need to volunteer, just cut a check and let the pros handle it.

- Don't talk to the homeless man, except to tell him that there's an agency who can fix all of his problems.

- Don't bake a loaf of bread for a family; we can't trust that the bread is safe, and that dollar of ingredients could have purchased two loaves of the cheaper stuff.

All while suburbs and cars physically insulate us from those problems. We don't have to meet or know those people; just drop a few bucks in the plate and don't think about it again.

Just seems like it all has a cumulative effect, turning real problems into abstract ideas. Maybe it's selfish to want to feel like you're doing something directly, but I wonder if there's a difficult-to-measure aspect here of dehumanization on the side of those in need? Is "maximum efficiency" some side effect of extreme capitalism, and not the be-all and end-all of charity?

It's probably just a by-product of modern living in a large complex society. Free riders are punished in small communities because individuals know each other and are aware of each others actions over [x] period of time. In a large society no on knows anyone else and free-riderism is much more difficult to control.

I was under the impression that most people just donate existing food that they have in their pantries instead of purposefully buying food to donate. I probably wouldn't directly donate unless I had a connection to the charity, but I would get rid of a couple of cans of corn that if I'm being honest will probably sit idle until they expire.

Grocery stores love them, they even make bundles of money, er... bundles of canned food for people to buy with their groceries and drop off in the donation bin when walking out the door.

If the store made sensible bundles that combine into meals, that'd actually be much better than donating whatever scraps you find in your pantry.

Indeed. My process is buy cheaply -> put in pantry -> consume -> donate old stuff but before it expires.

Correct. Or if I find a coupon getting canned item X for a nickel a piece I buy 50 of them for the foodbank.

n.b. This argument is ~exactly the same for donating your time to charities. The current company which you sell your services to has a way to metabolize them and will pay you (presumptively high) market wages for doing so; a charity chosen randomly by you at a time convenient to you may have no infrastructure to metabolize your services nor a charity-perceptible need for e.g. web development.

If you're feeling charitable you can virtually always find a charity amenable to you which has outcomes they'd like to cause in the world but for lack of money and help them vis the lack of money.

This really is not exactly the same. For nonprofits that do things like run big events, it's often a lot better to have 15 motivated event volunteers than 15 part-time temps hired for the day. They're about equal in skill, but one is free and actually cares about the cause.

I say this as someone who was involved in organizing many large events for an animal advocacy org in the Twin Cities metro.

Volunteers are also better at many other tasks such as outreach, for example handing out leaflets. For that sort of thing you need a lot of bodies, and people who care about the cause will do a much better job.

I say this as someone who spent about 19 years helping run a local animal advocacy org in the Twin Cities metro. Ironically, what we could have spent money on was hiring staff to reduce the load on people like me ;)

As someone with a desk job, mindlessly sorting cans for an hour actually seems relaxing.

I pick through boxes of potatoes/carrots, throwing out the bad ones and bagging up the good ones, then throwing those bag into another box. I do things like this for 2 hours on the weekend at a local charity called harvesters.org. At the end I've worked up a sweat, but it's quite relaxing and I always meet friendly people there to chat with.

This is called "effective altruism"; you are more effective if you maximize your skills and then turn the profits of those skills over to a charity.

The only argument against it is that people tend seek out and perform charity work for their own sake (eg. vanity, restitution, relaxation).

Unless your skills happen to be those that a charity could make good use of. Someone has to do the work in the end.

Charities are usually focused around the bottom of mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, that is, food-shelter-water.

You don’t need skilled and educated people to dig wells, build houses, stock shelves, fold clothing, serve food, etc. These jobs can be done for the minimum wage or by people outside of the workforce (youth and elderly).

I kind of disagree with charities that get so big that they need skilled workers. If your charity gets that big, it should just become a social program as part of the government. Like why is Red Cross a charity? That should be an arm of the UN, not a private entity.

Some charities are food-shelter-water. Other charities are, for example, medical or legal aid for particularly burdened communities.

And even for food-shelter-water you need someone deciding where to dig the wells, what to stock on the shelves, what food is most cost-effective and nutritious in bulk. And building houses definitely isn't unskilled; it's manual labor but that doesn't mean there's no skill involved.

Huh. Very interesting, considering our local food bank itself sets up outside grocery stores with lists of food to donate, and canned/preserved food fills some 80% of the page.

Sure, if it's unasked for, huge donations of canned goods can be less useful than money. However it's not as if they can't use or don't need canned goods.

I wonder if thats just the food banks playing cultural norms to their advantage. All being said and done, and equal value cash donation would probably be better for them, as the article outlined, but the real result of asking for cash would probably be less donations overall. I can't speak for everyone, but for me there's something fundamentally more satisfying donating a thing rather than money.

I donate money, food and my wife's time (time I would otherwise enjoy for myself instead of babysitting two kids)

The food is part of my pantry management. We don't eat too many canned goods, so we regularly donate it after a few months (well before expiration). We keep canned food for, among other reasons, emergencies.

Also, we buy - and therefore donate - very high quality food. Mr. NationalPost might not taste the difference, but in our family, we do. Am I any better than the poor that I get to eat the fancy stuff?

The donation of food has an aesthetic appeal - I'm literally giving sustenance and therefore life to the less fortunate. When I donate money I give the mere possibility of sustenance. Assuming the charity is honest.

I would not donate more money if I didn't donate food. I'm not homo economicus and the increased money signal from purchasing less canned goods doesn't tug on my donation levers. I.e. I don't take partial derivatives of my (woe me, undefined!) elasticity and demand functions.

I even keep wool Costco socks in my car to give out to panhandlers in the winter. Surely the $15/pack could have been put to better use! But imagine the joy of a panhandler receiving a small package from a more fortunate.

Hopper was full of it when he posted this a few years ago. He's full of it today.

Counterpoint: people usually donate canned goods that they bought thinking they would consume it, but no longer want. Oftentimes, if you go to costco or other large warehouse store, you buy a box of cans, and then you may get tired of it. These unused cans accumulate, and there is zero marginal cost to donating them. Otherwise, they'd just be tossed.

I'm often reluctant to donate cash because of organizational waste in nonprofits- how much of my donation is going to administrative staff?

This is why I donate dry goods, canned goods, and labor.

Nothing wrong with donating your time and labor. But if you're concerned about waste, why not visit the website and glance through their annual report? Nonprofits are regulated and their financial statements are independently audited, so you can see exactly what the aid to salaries/op expenses ratios are.

Probably because that's a lot of extra work. And donating a can takes care of the obscurity problem and is dead simple.

>why not visit the website and glance through their annual report?

Number 1, I'm lazy and don't want to do that. Number 2, I'm not a business person and don't have any idea of what an ethical administrative budget would be. 5% of donations? 50%? I have no idea.

There are organizations which rank charities.

https://www.charitynavigator.org/?c_src=WPAIDSEARCH

https://www.givewell.org/main?utm_expid=.Mr3umtjnSuel86Mlr0l...

https://www.charitywatch.org/top-rated-charities

Okay, so the actual reason here is that you're lazy, it's not a lack of information. I get that — I'm lazy too — but don't cite vague concerns about administrative budgets when you could literally search "how much should a nonprofit spend on administration" and find 237947209847 articles about evaluating that. There are entire organizations like GiveWell dedicated to answering that question and they do in-depth research so that you don't have to.

Chrissake, you have no idea how much we deal with this working at nonprofits. "You are nefariously concealing information from me!!!!!" "Have you tried looking at our website?" The answer is basically always no.

So you're willing to donate your time and labour for an organization sight unseen, but pulling up a PDF with a Google search is a bridge too far?

It was difficult to change my mind about it, and I still find the fact almost offensive, but I was confronted last year with hard evidence that the most efficient way to help people in need is direct no strings attached gifts of cash money. It doesn't appeal to one's ego but the reality is poor people generally use money to improve their lives and frivolous spending does not increase when given cash.

Can you elaborate on what you find offensive about it?

There's a logical fallacy problem where everyone knows that people with (legal or illegal) addictions spend all their money on their addiction so giving money is just donating to the local liquor store or crack dealer. However the logical fallacy problem is, true, most addicts end up very poor as the addiction proceeds, but most poor people are not addicts.

So giving money to an alcoholic merely means they die of liver failure a little sooner which is "offensive" but giving money to people who are generally poor mostly helps non-addicts.

Note there are local issues. In big cities the working poor are too busy to take a monetary handout (panhandle) so virtually all opportunities for urbanites to hand out money, involve feeding an addiction, even if the vast majority of the poor people in the city are working poor.

It's difficult to separate the concept of giving money away from the concept of being tricked or taken advantage of. It was not easy to give up the belief that welfare would be best tackled by shipping big boxes of essential supplies rather than a cash or a credit system.

I understand where you are coming from, but I've come to find it horrible to put judgments on a donation. Am I better than the panhandler that I know what he should receive?

What should I give a panhandler?

A sandwich? Maybe he's has celliac's. Or diabetes.

A gift card to the coffee shop? Maybe he needs gloves.

Money to buy gloves and a sugar free lunch? Maybe he's an alcoholic.

Instead, just donate. Just help. Just see the person lying on the floor as a fellow human being fully deserving in dignity. If you're Christian, see Christ sprawled on the floor and make sure your right hand doesn't see your left hand.

Giving to make the world a better place? Read about effective altruism [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism

This might be more clearly worded as: don't buy canned goods just to donate. Give money instead.

On the other hand, if you're cleaning out your kitchen, it's nice to have something useful to do with food that's still good, rather than throwing it out. Better to have avoided buying it in the first place, but purchasing mistakes happen.

Canned food is harder to embezzle.

This. Goods are real, once they get it, they gotta do something with it. As soon as the donation model becomes money only, they can start filling their pockets wider while also buying less and lesser quality goods for those in need. Yikes.

If a food bank didn't want cans and would prefer money instead, why would they accept donations of cans? Whenever I offer to donate anything to a charity, wether physical goods or money, I assume they have agency and can refuse donations that they don't want or need.

Am I so naive to assume that any organization that accepts cans must be OK with them and any that doesn't want them wouldn't accept them?

Donation bins for nonperishable goods are there for a few reasons.

1. Promote Awareness of the Food Bank, and to create connections with either potential clients or donors. Having a presence that you walk by on your way to buy lettuce can have a long term benefit on name recognition.

2. Improve store relations. Donors buy products from the store at full-markup, and the store has more incentive to continue to support its own community initiatives from the reminder that the store supports the food bank. Grocery stores tend to have some autonomy on the causes they can support.

3. Some people genuinely do not like the idea of donating money to the food bank. They prefer the physical act of buying something to donate, whether it be because they're worried about mismanagement of funds, the money going towards paying staff, or wanting to have a direct impact on the program itself (I only want my money to go towards food). Some people limit their contributions to stuff that's about to expire in a month from quarterly pantry clearing, or when they're about to move.

On a side note, some people don't want to end up on a fundraising list or hassled for donations. Cans are effectively anonymous. A small donation of $10 to a food bank that sends out quarterly fundraising mailouts can mean $6 of your donation went into fundraising.

The ones here in Indy, specifically Gleaner's, will drop palates off at businesses for you to donate non-perishable canned and boxed food. Food banks want stuff they can put in a box and send people home with usually to prepare themselves, not bulk food they have to break down into smaller portions and repackage.

Counter point: Donate in a way that encourages you to be generous.

If it's letting your kids spend their allowance on canned tuna for the food-bank then so be it.

I know some sane, elderly homeless people. They generally prefer ready-to-eat, non-refrigerated foods, not canned foods.

1. Canned foods are heavy.

2. Canned foods usually aren't very appetizing, especially the pantry and seasonal rejects people usually donate.

3. Canned foods usually require eating and opening utensils.

Canned foods aren't what the homeless want or need. Instead of "beggars can't be choosers" arrogant rationalizations, maybe donors should do some research to figure out what recipients actually want and/or need?

As mentioned, shrewd food bank buyers will likely do far better at making use of funds on behalf of recipients than any consumer would buying small quantities not on sale at Whole Foods.

The author is missing the point of the canned food drive.

It isn’t about hampering the buying efficiency for the charity, it’s about the fact that it’s easier to convince people, who may not have much money themselves, to go into their pantry and donate food that they may never use or is close to expiration versus handing over cash.

This also provides the benefit of potentially less food waste in the community, which is always a plus.

Yes, buying in bulk is more efficient to stretching a dollar for charity, but if a person will never donate that dollar, but will gladly donate their food, then you aim for what you can get.

I work for a local church food bank. We don't get these amazing rates they talk about. Does anyone have information on where we can go to get this? We run the food bank out of our local church and have a weekly meal where we buy the food for a fresh meal for 50+ people every week. We also provide a small food bank including toiletries, clothing, and blankets and would love the opportunity to do more.

Call the nearest large food bank (as in, the county food bank that serves a city with a population of X00,000+). I suspect they would be happy to share knowledge, there may even be a meta-organization you can join to get help running your organization.

I don't know where you are or how it's done there, but as a single data point the food bank for Alameda County (a fair bit of "East Bay" in the SFBA) would work with an organization like yours by having you come in and pick out piles of food from their warehouse for free or hugely reduced prices.

Thanks I'll see what I can do with this information. I'm in Massachusetts so anyone with regional or local information would be greatly appreciated as well.

I found this unusable on mobile. so https://outline.com/23nkx4

I think no one should blame people for donating canned goods to food bank as the action is most likely to be driven by the anchoring effect of the name "food bank". When I first read about the title, I was thinking what other food I can donate, donating money wasn't seem to be in the realm of option.

Simply change the name "food bank" to "food fund" will solve the problem.

People aren't concerned about canned food being mismanaged, but they are so with money. That's really it. It will be expended properly.

I volunteer at my local food bank. It is my best day of the week.

Monthly donated food pickups are important as are cash donations and especially grocery stores donating unsold fruit and produce. We have two paid workers and many of us volunteers. Everything seems lean and efficient.

My wife and I have donated to charities for ever, but it is so much better to show up and do some work. I am grateful for this opportunity.

It's true that canned goods don't have the impact that money does, but it's infinitely better than some things people donate. Glass jars have to be carefully set aside for special handling, if they haven't broken yet. Homemade or unlabeled food is simply thrown away. If you're going to donate food, at least donate cans.

That's curious. In many country, food banks plainly tell you they don't purchase food. Their claims is that this way they get leftovers from supermarkets and such, who would otherwise think of selling it to them, and that they don't want to focus on raising money over wasting less food.

I asked the director of the food bank for my area and she said they welcome both cash and imperishable food items; there's a list of such items on their web site. So maybe there's variation on how they work? just go and ask your local food bank what they prefer or how you can help.

I get the impression that food banks' needs vary greatly from region to region; and based on managerial style.

If you want to know what's best for your food bank, perhaps ask them directly?

A foodbank at a local university ran basically autonomously because the donations were food. Walk in, close the door for privacy, and either give or take items at your leisure.

Keep donating canned vegetables, you can eat that stuff raw, it lasts for years, and it's incredibly healthy even when you consider the high sodium levels.

after feeling the "buyers remorse" for every charitable act (small as $5 or large as $1K), I have given up on the concept of Charity. I either feed a person who is hungry, or I dont do any charity (other than volunteering to help).

(I'm just focussing on job creation and improving accessibility)

Why do you feel buyers remorse after making gifts to charity?

If you're going to donate money then cut out the middleman and just give it to people directly.

An organization may have an easier time finding people than you do. Needy people are informed about organizations and seek them out, they don't have to rely on having to know you.

The article explains:

> That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible.

Charities can get the same goods for much cheaper than you or any needy person with no connections can.

I hesitate to call charity outright "immoral", but it gives me the uneasy feeling that it does not really solve any deep problem. I'm sure most people do it in good faith, and it may be especially educative to do it in front of children (e.g., when you help a homeless person in the street).

I still think the need for charity is the hallmark of a deeply broken welfare system. In that situation, the person giving and the person receiving charity become happier, but this is a very limited effect and only servers to fool yourself that the problem is not solvable so you just do what you can. I pretty much prefer to vote for left wing policies that will raise the taxes and then everybody will get to be happier.

Please consider the source when you read this article. The National Post is Canada's right wing "newspaper" filled with misleading articles and half-truths.

This article is BS, and the NP does have an editorial stance I sometimes find annoying (their anti-Trudeau stance, while understandable, is becoming pathological).

But it is not ""newspaper" filled with misleading articles and half-truths." any more than any other leading Canadian newspaper.

Money can be misused. Food cannot.

Don't buy this article at all. The only thing a cash donation can be stretched into is salary for the "non-profit workers".

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