What Organizations Do You Contribute To? 92
Cymage asks: "I usually do my charitable contributions in December, and so I am looking at organizations to give to. I try to give to organizations with different areas of focus. Here are some of the ones I have given to in the past/am considering: Basic Needs (Atlanta) - Food Bank and St Vincent, Promoting Self-Sufficiency - Habitat and Heifer, and Digital Rights/Software - EFF, Mozilla, SourceForge, and BitTorrent. What other organizations, especially technical ones, do you give to and why?"
Charities (Score:5, Informative)
The Ronald McDonald House in particular is amazing. I followed another young girl with terminal cancer that, when she was discharged from the hospital with a week or two to live, said she'd rather live at the Ronald McDonald House for her last few weeks since she'd spent so much time there.
A few (Score:5, Informative)
I'd also recommend Spirit of America [spiritofamerica.net]: whether or not you support the process by which we got involved in Afghanistan and Iraq, this is a terrific way of trying to get it to work out for the better.
libertarian-friendly charities? (Score:5, Informative)
Even though I'm a libertarian, I still like to help people.
Here is the list of charities I've settled on. They are not 100% Pure Libertarian, but I think they honor the spirit of small-l libertarianism. These links are ALL tax-deductible.
Noncommercial Broadcasters (Score:2, Informative)
USO (Score:3, Informative)
Re:before you donate to the Red Cross... (Score:4, Informative)
charitynavigator lists Program Expenses at 91.1% of their budget, this amount includes both material costs of doing their work, as well as labor. Administration Expenses is 5.2%, which isn't great considering their budget, it's probably justified.
What you have found is merely sensational journalism (probably not even journalism) that is expressing the statistics in a way they need to make their story.
The Red Cross isn't made up of volunteers, so they do in fact need to pay the people doing the work.