I was thinking about it. I donate to quite a few charities, but they specifically mean something to me. Others I don’t really think about, though they’re good. I guess we all have a threshold or we’d be broke and for many that could be no donations at all or just a fiver the the street guy.
I’ve given money to both charities and people. Here’s the thing about donating, though: you’ll get on all sorts of mailing lists and shit, and you’ll get lots more begging letters, emails, phone calls and texts. You know those PBS/NPR donation drives, where they’re like “We just need ten more donors this hour, it doesn’t matter how much!” or those charities that send you pre-printed labels and say “Hey, just send us five bucks, that’s all we need”? Yeah, they’re harvesting your information. If you even send them a penny, they’ll be back for more, and they’ll sell or trade your information to other charities.
I give money to our local volunteer fire/ems department every year, but I don’t use their pre-printed mailer; I hand them cash when Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny come through on their trucks. I have one of those pre-paid Visa gift cards that aren’t tied to an actual person; if I do an online donation, I’ll use that and give them fake information. The money is legit, the information is good enough to pass, but they can’t come harass me for more.
This includes all donations, by the way - political, religious, civic, charity, social, whatever. Do it in cash or by an anonymous Visa gift card.
Yeah. I gave Kamala $46.50 the day Biden dropped. It was my first political donation (even though I’m old) and i was pretty excited about it. Now i get at least 4 emails per day. I finally started unsubscribing today. Seriously, I’m voting for you, but you’re gonna need to back the fuck off.
Just feel it should be pointed out that money isn’t the only way to contribute. Time is another. Volunteer hours are important for many charitable organizations too.
I prefer to donate time. I’m now president of one local non-profit (in addition to my paying job), and a regular participant in another. Sometimes I’ll donate supplies that we need, but never money.
If a time comes when I have little time and a lot of money, maybe I’ll switch. Donors are necessary. But I know that we need hands more than dollars.
No, but I donate time and sometimes items. I’ve seen how wasteful so many “charities” are. When less than half of what is donated actually goes to the end user that’s a problem. So I donate things that have to go to the end user, or at the very least in support of the end user.
Yeah, it’s tricky that, especially with international stuff. When something kicks off internationally and suddenly a bajillion charity groups appear, it’s troublesome.
And it’s my rule of thumb to just disregard anything from a religion, I won’t even bother checking into them. Whenever there’s been a charity called out for being evil, it’s ironically Christian-based.
4$ a month to wikipedia. It’s the most valuable thing the internet has spawned hands down
i used to give them money, until i saw their finances. they have become dependent on donations increasing year over year even though the running costs roughly follow inflation.
This should really be more widely known. It’s a case study of mission creep and bureaucratization. The cost of keeping the servers running, and even dev work, is at this point a smallish fraction of what they’re pulling in. The is rest going to various forms of outreach and activism. That’s fine, and the money is probably well spent. But they really should be more honest about why they’re asking for it.
We allocate money for the kids to donate to charity. Some loose rules around what does and doesn’t count but generally the kids get to decide.
Not technically charity but I’ve made a push to support OSS and other small-tech projects this past year. Regular contributions of a few dollars a month each to things like the maintainer of my linux distro and the guy that makes Kodi plugins I use, and pushing to financially support commecial OSS such as Proton Mail and Bitwarden. I’m just realising I don’t actually have a list, I should probably work out exactly where my money is going.
