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Comment by RobertoG | Hacker News Reader

Maybe is time for them to modernize of close. I think that Internet make possible new models of charities. A donation can be, at the same time, not local and very personalized.

I would like to recommend watsi: https://watsi.org/

You can donate to concrete people and, they give you an accurate report, after the fact, of what happened. I think we need more charities like them. Maybe something with education?

Disclaimer: I'm not related except as a donator.

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I wonder what it would take to close down the ARC, it is chartered by the US government as a "Treaty Obligation Organization":

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/36/subtitle-III

I second the Watsi recommendation. The combination of their transparency, their 100% donation distribution, and clearly showing me who gets my money/what they get it for has made me comfortable giving to a non-local charity for the first time in years.

I don't think that would scale to disaster relief. You need to organize people on the ground and deal with problems.

More importantly you need to organize WELL in advance, before the specific need is known. If you wait until the hurricane actually HITS, you'll be weeks late getting shelter, food, etc, inbound. That stuff needs to be bought and warehoused in advance.

Stuff can always be shipped from other parts of the world on the moment's notice if you have enough cash ready, so you don't necessarily need to stockpile it on site before anything happens. But what you can't really buy quickly is trained personnel that can organize relief works on site - this alone justifies having them as a standing organization.

I don't think that's really. Lots of speciality goods like survival shelters actually CAN'T be ordered in large quantities on a moments notice. Something like bottle water or MREs, sure. But not so much durable goods.

Most manufacturers these days run super-lean, often not stockpiling inventory at all.

Of course you are right. I was talking in a more general sense that disaster relief.

All kind of charity organizations have problems with accountability.

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