Donating Time To Goodwill Projects? 179
jukal asks: "I am in the process of writing a proposal for co-operation between Openchallenge and UNITeS (United Nations Information Technology Service) which is 'creating a global volunteer programme aimed at bridging the digital divide between industrialized and developing countries'. Currently & traditionally contributing as a volunteer means relocating yourself to the developing country to take part as a project developer/manager/specialist. My proposal to UNITeS is, in short, will be that people could participate in such software projects via Openchallenge - while staying in their home country, on their spare-time and while keeping their jobs. The local team in the developing country would, after defining and creating requirements specifications post sub-projects as tasks to Openchallenge. All the contributions submitted to Openchallenge are published under an open source license. My question is: would you for example consider donating some hours to help a goodwill project - if you could do that from home. This is of interest to me, as I would like to be sure that the time we put into building co-operating with a big organization like UNITeS and others in the future. Is not wasted. There is this thread about 'Volunteer Work Abroad' - which is good reading related to the subject. But it did not quite provide me with the answer."
Work with local Economic Development Councils (Score:3, Informative)
We have found that the various city, county, and private organizations are willing to bend over backwards to work with us. Bear in mind, I am not talking about a purely altruistic venture on my own firm's part, but rather a joint venture between a private company and the community, with profits being used to further develop technology-specific public works in the region.
Along those lines... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tax write offs for time donation...? (Score:4, Informative)
Don't know about the USA, but not in Canada. In Canada if you want to count the deduction, you have to sell the software to your church (counting the selling price as income), then donate the equivalent amount of money to the church to pay for it. You don't end up with any tax break because of it; you may even have to pay taxes (because you might be taxed at a higher rate than the charitable deduction).
Duncan Murdoch
Re:Tax write offs for time donation...? (Score:5, Informative)
As for hard $$$, that's definitely deductible as long as it's a legal charity, as far as I know.
Re:Tax write offs for time donation...? (Score:3, Informative)
Geek Corp (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like a concept similar to this. [geekcorps.org]
Re:Tax write offs for time donation...? (Score:2, Informative)
We recognize the value of any donation--cash, goods, or services. Cash is cash, goods and services, if the kind of thing that we would have to pay for in our ordinary course of business, are recognized at what we would have to pay for them.
AFAIK, for tax purposes any donation you make, cash or noncash, is treated as a cash gift. I.e., they assume that you are paid for the good, and that you donate your payment back to them.
Morally, you shouldn't have to actually pay anything tax-wise for volunteering, but you shouldn't necessarily gain any tax benefits from it, either.
This situation brought itself to bear a few years ago, when I learned that a friend of mine was donating not only his time, but also hard $$$ for server space for his favorite charity. What, if anything would he be able to write-off? He uses the server for other projects, so not 100% is for the charity.
Any accountant-geeks out there?
IANAA-G, but if the server is set up to regulary handle other accounts, he could probably get by with marking the cost of a server account as a donation, as well as what someone would pay him for to do the same job for them.
Just document everything, talk to your accountant, and be honest. You're paying the bloke to save you money so as to justify their fee, so let them worry about it.
Re:Tech Volunteering Locally. (Score:2, Informative)
Although techie volunteer programs abroad are wonderful experiences (i've been fortunate to do community technology work in S. Africa and China), you don't have to travel thousands of miles away to do some tech good.
MIT Tech Review Article on Ghana (Score:5, Informative)
Making a telephone call here requires persistence. Roughly half don't go through because of system failures, but that's only the start of Ghana's telephone woes. The country has a mere 240,000 phone lines--for a population of 20 million spread across an area the size of Britain. Moreover, telephone bills are inaccurate, overcharges common, and the installation of a new line can cost a business more than $1,000, the rough equivalent of the annual office rent. Lines are frequently stolen, sometimes with the connivance of employees of Ghana Telecom, the national carrier. Phones go dead, and remain unrepaired, for months. Some businesses hire staff for the chief purpose of dialing numbers until calls go through.
Moreover, even those fortunate enough to have access to the internet find themselves distraught by the knowledge of the incredibly poor conditions in which they must live. One internet cafe owner stated that the majority of users were online in his cafe trying to figure out a way out their country.
The upshot is that much more effort needs to be devoted towards basic infrastructure -- sanitary, transportation, and information -- before an idea like that of the poster's would make much sense.
Bob
Re:Good idea (Score:1, Informative)
Those phrases only further the fiction and add to general ignorance of the facts.