Ask HN: What charities do you donate to?

Yours! (http://ycombinator.com/np.html)

I'd love to donate to an organization who's charter was ending the drug war, but I'm not sure I know of one specifically like that. I suppose NORML might be an obvious choice, but I don't feel like picking a specific drug for promotion is where my heart is. I don't really know much about organizations in this field. Anyone?

The American Civil Liberties Union https://www.aclu.org/

The Electronic Frontier Foundation https://www.eff.org/

90% to whatever GiveWell -- http://givewell.org -- currently thinks is best (GiveDirectly, Against Malaria Foundation), 10% to charities I have a soft spot for that I suspect are less efficient (e.g. EFF, Wikimedia, public radio).

Almost all of my donations goes to local non-profits that my wife or I are on the board of or where I intimately know the organization's board, staff, and mission. I also usually support money raising efforts of friends for small amounts (like a walkathon).

The vast majority of the money is going to organizations that provide services to low-income people.

If you are looking for non-profit ideas that help the kind of giving I do, check out Razoo. Another thing those organizations could use is a way to lower operational costs, potentially by pooling with others.

I appreciate what the folks at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund do.

kiva.org -- small loans (usually around $1,000 total, crowd-sourced in $25 increments) made to people for new business ventures, farm improvements, etc. Definitely worth a look!

I go a local orphanage (http://www.stcatherineshome.org/) to donate clothes, toys and sometimes even food. Recently, did a one time online donation at http://www.hopemonkey.org (I'm not affiliated with either of them)

Planned Parenthood http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

Amnesty International http://www.amnesty.org/

The Nature Conservancy http://www.nature.org/

nlnet.nl -- NLnet supports a number of software projects, events, educational activities that strive for an open information society.

Current projects: http://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

There are too many good causes, so I decided to follow my mothers approach: Pick two/three and give them all the donations that I can make. From that point on I ignore every other charity in the world.

The only charity I support that I suspect anybody will have heard of would be the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution; the folks that go out and rescue people at sea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_National_Lifeboat_Institu... )

Usually I donate once a year to my chosen three charities, bot sometimes there will be a small bonus at random times.

World Vision (http://www.worldvision.org/)

The Ayn Rand Institute http://www.aynrand.org/

Milaap Social Venture http://milaap.org

It's basically Kiva for india.

Tabby's Place http://www.tabbysplace.org

Human Rights Campaign http://www.hrc.org/

Amnesty and Naturskyddsföreningen