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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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."

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.

> 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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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