I would have put this in my Diary area, but I wanted more replies than that thread gets. Just done a small ($50) donation to FFA Day 2024. We love both FFA and 4-H, which I was a part of in high school and many-to-most young folks showing livestock at Fairs/Stock Shows, are FFA members. In some of the Fair buildings, 4-H members show off their projects that are great to see. Do you donate to anything? We generally don't, but for this, we decided to do it.
I went to the library to use their copy machine. At a quarter a copy it was $1.00 but I gave them $5.00. I never had a reason to say anything bad about our library system.
Yup. Over time, national & international organizations have fallen off of my list and I've helped out local ones, mostly because of accountability.
Sorry, Mary, we are just different in that respect. That is, telling about donating or even bragging, if that's what it's called. IOW, some people like to brag about something, while others don't. We sort of bragged about the 2021 Dodge Durango GT we bought last Oct., because we like it so much. Some 9 years ago, we would make a donation to The Boot (local Fire Department), when they had that "Boot" at a stop light and their engine was parked in a close parking lot. For some reason, they stopped asking for donations at Christmas time, so "that ended that".
I was with an affiliate of a nationwide non-profit that did free home repairs for qualifying folks (kind of like Habitat but we fixed rather than built, and we did not charge people.) We held (and paid for) the franchise of 2 counties. One day, Headquarters in DC got a new president and I decided to find out how much she was being paid. As I went through the Charity Navigator ratings and their financial statements, I realized that the "High % Of Funds Used Directly For The Mission" included costs for the administrative staff in HQ that we sent our field reports to, as well as a portion of many other pure overhead folks that may have tangentially touch the field operations. I was the general business guy for our affiliate and had a finance background. Had it not been for my insider experience & skills, I would never have realized that the "% Given To The Need" reported by Charity Navigator was full of office workers and had nothing to do with the people (or the materials) in the field. 100% of the local costs are covered by local fundraisers...nothing given to HQ makes its way to the people in need. In fact, the local affiliates pay a franchise fee to HQ, so the money flows the other way. I stopped giving to the American Cancer Society (I lost my father and 2 brothers to cancer) when I realized that "The Search For The Cure" funds were used for "Stop Smoking Campaigns." Regardless of what you think of prevention campaigns, they have nothing to do with researching the treatment of cancer. The ACS no longer gets my money. The local Boy & Girl Scouts get some $$$ from me, but I never buy the stuff they are selling. Charity Navigator et al can only analyze what the business provides them. Some of the analysis requires the context provided by working knowledge of the specific business.
I'm generally skeptical of charities. The world (or at least the United States) would be better if everyone paid taxes, but not so many taxes. While some charities do some good things, the ones that take tax exemptions in order to make things worse outnumber the good that is done, I'm afraid. I contribute from $50-100 a month to our library. Although I haven't borrowed a book in several years, they do a lot of things that are useful to the community, from a bank of computers for those who don't have a computer or a reliable Internet connection (I was surprised to find that there are always people using the computers while they are open, since I thought that everyone had a computer now), to rooms that are available free for meetings, to create podcasts, or whatever, to children's activities, which have not (thus far) included cross-dressers reading to children. I hold my addiction support group at the library each Monday night, and it's a nice room with tables, chairs, a computer, a large-screen television that I use for Zoom connections, and other amenities. When the town voted to close the town-operated library several years ago, volunteers took over it. They've expanded it and have done much more with it than when it was a municipal facility, and the volunteer staff is far more helpful than the paid library staff had been previously.
We had a hard time getting contributions because we provided free labor and got lots of donated materials, so our only costs were insurances. People looked at our financials and said "You spend all of the contributions on overhead." Meanwhile, we're doing about $30,000 of repairs every year and only spending $3,000 on insurance to do it...yet our cash was misspent.