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Comment by netsp | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a recommendation for a charity with demonstrable results in improving the lives of people in a measurable way?

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Nearly any education reform organization that gets parents talking to other parents through channels not controlled by schools. Often parents can do a lot of self-help without public resources as soon as they can compare notes about what works to help children who need help. Setting up an email list and moderating it can be just about free, and often has great effect.

One example:

http://homeschoolers.org/

Another example:

http://www.mcgt.net/index.html

A third example, with more expensive programs besides the kind of program I just mentioned:

http://www.davidsongifted.org/

After edit: To relate what I say here to what was said in the submitted article, an organization that gets all of its members talking to one another freely through one-to-many, many-to-one, and one-to-one channels available to all members gets a LOT of feedback that other organizations don't get, and learns what works and what doesn't work.

http://givewell.net/ investigates charities to make sure they achieve demonstrable results, they have a list of those that do.

There are also meta-charities like GiveWell and the MIT Poverty Action Lab that investigate other charitable attempts.

Fuck that noise -- if you'd have even bothered to google their name, you'd have found that Givewell are total scumbags:

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/15547/GiveWell-or-Give-em-Hel...

Summaries: http://mssv.net/wiki/index.php/Givewell

They got caught out because they were blatantly astroturfing for themselves and slagging 'competing' charities all over the web. Then it turns out that even by their own generous accounting, more than half of their funds goes directly to their own overhead. On top of that, their 'research' is at best based on getting charities to rigorously assess themselves.

Their rubberstamp board publicly (in the NYT) pretended to fire one of the founders, but less than a year later he was quietly back at his old position.

You would expect that any organisation doing this kind of work would attract criticism. There is a taboo against harming a charities ability to raise funds.

Do you know of any organisation doing similar but better?

There's http://www.charitynavigator.org/, and the arguments against: http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2007/11/charity-navigator%E2...

I'm not sure how any of this discredits their recommendations. E.g. it seems to me the Stop TB Foundation and Partners In Health probably still achieve measurable results.

I certainly wouldn't recommend donating to GiveWell, though. The MIT Poverty Action Lab seems like a much better use of the money.

Grameen Bank, http://www.grameen-info.org/, one of the largest microfinance ventures which you all have been discussing.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as measurable, but the ICRC does a lot of good in a lot of really bad places, and they produce testimonial and other documentation of what activities they can publicly document. (As you may or may not be aware, it's their policy to hold all reports of detainee treatment in strict confidence. Their site can explain why this is better than I can.)

I'm fond of Children International. They're very good about letting you know exactly and specifically what your donations achieve. I suppose any evidence of the effect on people is anecdotal, but in such a well-established relationship, it's also self-evident.

Homeboys Industries, in Los Angeles, which has been very successful in transforming ex-gangbangers and low-income youth into productive members of society.

Legal Aid (anywhere) assists asylum-seekers, wrongfully evicted tenants, and indigents needing legal services.

Microfinancing (non-US operations) in India, China, and the Southeast have done so well that the pioneer of microfinancing received a Nobel.

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