[FRIAM] [501 (c)(3)

Wed Apr 22 20:03:38 EDT 2020

Have you heard of Charity Navigator?  If not, you might want to check it 
out.  They evaluate charities above a certain size with published 
records.  They give the Shriners' Hospital for Children in Tampa, FL  a 
very good rating. (Comparable to Doctors Without Borders, which I like 
very much.)

Joe

On 4/22/20 3:17 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Whenever I get drawn to contributing to a charity, usually based on 
> sentimental TV ads, I send them an email and ask how to access their 
> IRS Form 990, which has to be publicly available, usually via a web 
> page.  The last time I did this was for Shriners' Hospital for 
> Children.  If I read the form correctly, in a recent year they had 
> $700,000,000 in income, paid $500,000,000 in executive salaries and  
> fundraising.  I don't believe remaining $200,000,000 all went to 
> medical and family travel/lodging expenses.  But I may not be reading 
> it right.  Any accountants out there?
>
> Frank
>
> On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 2:36 PM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com 
> <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Heh, it's funny how something you say can be perfectly inverted by
>     the audience to mean the opposite of what you intended. The
>     Telephone Game is always relevant.
>
>     My point to Steve was about "effective altruism", the idea that
>     the philanthropist has any idea whatsoever of the relative
>     optimality of one charity compared to another. My position is one
>     of ignorance and against the (mostly wealthy, tech-savvy,
>     arrogant) person's most likely *mistaken* belief in their own
>     competence, especially in a domain that is fundamentally different
>     from where they operate "professionally". My point to Steve was
>     that meritocracy is a sham and a sibling effect to the Great Man
>     Theory.
>
>     Now, to the extent that my reading of von Hayek (not Friedman)
>     argued for market forces because it is *arrogant* to pretend you
>     can design a system more efficient than the one nature relaxes
>     into, then I would argue for such natural, organic solutions over
>     engineered ones. But that's precisely *because* those who think
>     they can singularly, themselves, engineer a reality better than
>     the one that grew, stigmergically, socially, naturally are most
>     likely wrong.
>
>     But I have *never* insisted there is such a thing as a *free*
>     market. Everything that seems to be "natural" is constrained by
>     the engineering of the agents in and around it, even if those
>     agents are termites or bacteria. Whatever the Robin Hood
>     foundation might mean by "free market", their very use of the term
>     means I would not support them in any way. The term "free market"
>     is a trigger phrase for this delicate snowflake. >8^D And I've
>     already blown several cherries at billionaire phlanthropists.
>     Ptouie. E.g. Bill Gates' magnanimity comes at the cost of decades
>     of slimy and exploitative practices. It's reputation laundering in
>     the extreme. If Bill Gates really gave a flying fsck about these
>     things, he should have begun working on them *before* (or instead
>     of) exploiting the world to make siphon off and concentrate
>     billions of dollars.
>
>     So, I tend to stick with established charities with proven track
>     records including both the united way and the red cross. My tiny
>     personal donations are doled out at the end of the year to
>     organizations like mozilla, MAPS, software in the public interest,
>     etc. with ZERO regard to how "efficient" or "effective" they are.
>     And my real contributions are paying (and voting for) taxes and
>     buying goods and services from the smallest businesses and co-ops
>     I can find.
>
>     On 4/22/20 1:04 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com
>     <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>     > I was listening to a podcast by the guy who runs Robin Hood, an
>     organization dedicated to getting at the institutional roots of
>     poverty.  When asked where we should give money in this crisis, he
>     said, give it where you feel passion, because that is where you
>     are likely to give it again.  I confess I feel passion for these
>     young folks, who in the 60’s would have been  in graduate
>     programs, or art or music schools, teaching, learning, inspiring,
>     but are instead meagerly supporting their passions by making me
>     coffee.  And very good coffee at that.  So that’s where my money
>     goes. Robin Hood
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation> might be
>     better for Glen because “According to /Fortune
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_(magazine)>/ magazine,
>     "Robin Hood was a pioneer in what is now called venture
>     philanthropy, or charity that embraces free-market forces. An
>     early practitioner of using metrics to measure the effectiveness
>     of grants, it is a place where
>     > strategies to alleviate urban poverty are hotly debated,
>     ineffectual plans are coldly discarded, and its staff of 66
>     hatches radical new ideas."^[
>     <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_Foundation#cite_note-fm-2> ”
>
>
>     -- 
>     ☣ uǝlƃ
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>
> -- 
> Frank Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> 505 670-9918
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-- 
Joe

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