[HN Gopher] Donate Unrestricted
___________________________________________________________________
Donate Unrestricted
Author : razin
Score : 226 points
Date : 2021-03-07 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (paulgraham.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paulgraham.com)
| danans wrote:
| Notably, certain types of organizations (i.e. CA public school
| PTAs) only accept unrestricted donations for some of these
| reasons.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Usually the way the donor wants the money spent is not the way
| the nonprofit would have chosen. [...] If a nonprofit doesn 't
| understand better than its donors where money needs to be spent,
| then it's incompetent and you shouldn't be donating to it at
| all._
|
| The situation might not be "understand", but "choose". The
| donor's interests in donating might not be 100% aligned with the
| effective mission of the charity.
|
| For one example, I imagine the donor might have a particular
| problem they want addressed, and that overlaps incompletely with
| the activity of the charity, but the charity otherwise seems the
| best vehicle for addressing that particular problem.
|
| For a less admirable example (but still perhaps beneficial to
| society), I imagine a donation might have PR or social status
| value for the donor, and a donation for a particular cause/effort
| sounds better than some of the less-fashionable work of the
| nonprofit. Or the donor might want the PR/status of their name on
| a center, and want to make sure that the center has funds to keep
| paying PR/status dividends.
| chabad360 wrote:
| A way of dealing with this issue that I've seen in the jewish
| community (I only have extensive experience there), is to provide
| sponsorship opportunities: a way for the donor to restrict the
| usage of their money and a way for the organization to get it
| where it's needed. While it doesn't cover everything, it can
| really help reduce the requirement for having donations that can
| be used for anything.
| dantheman wrote:
| Restricted donations can keep the nonprofit from changing is
| focus. For instance, the ACLU is wavering in it's defense of free
| speech - if I were to give money to them, it wiuld have to be
| structured to support the defense of all speech regardless of
| content.
| jmkd wrote:
| Am mid-founding a startup which will give 5% of its profits to
| charity from day 1. Customers won't have a choice about this -
| either the amount or the charities chosen - so this will be
| intrinsic to doing business with us. Trade with us if you like
| that, don't if you don't. Will be on a tiny scale compared to the
| donations PG refers to, but customers (who are donating
| indirectly) will have to trust us, while we trust the charities
| we give to. There's no meddling or options to choose from, by
| design, for the same reasons PG describes.
| breck wrote:
| I would also suggest donating only to non-profits that make
| everything they do as open/transparent/public domain as possible.
|
| In my limited experience there seems to be a correlation between
| an organization's productivity in solving their existential
| problem and how open the org is.
|
| The more secretive the organization (and the less public domain
| content it produces) the more likely it spends a significant
| amount of its resource on fundraising and cushy salaries for its
| management.
|
| Allen Institute, Wikimedia, Internet Archive, are examples where
| $1 in inputs leads to $100 in public domain output.
| splitrocket wrote:
| In the US, you can look up every single non-profit's finances.
|
| The 990 form has almost everything you would want, though, not
| line-item level of detail.
|
| https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/tax-exempt-organiz...
| umvi wrote:
| Wikimedia? last time they were on HN there was a discussion
| about how only a tiny fraction of their donations go to
| Wikipedia and the rest is used for other pet projects most
| people wouldn't necessarily care about. I think the conclusion
| was that wikimedia exists to grow bigger and ask for more
| donations not necessarily to be good stewards of said
| donations.
|
| Otherwise wouldn't they be trying to create an endowment that
| keeps the lights perpetually on at Wikipedia without Jimmy
| needing to beg every year?
| anthony88 wrote:
| I'm not aware that Wikimedia is producing public domain output.
| Wikipedia and wiktionary for example are under CC BY-SA 3.0
| license which is kind of '(L)GPL'.
| breck wrote:
| Ah you're right. That's a mistake. They should fix that.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Wikimedia used to produce an amazing amount of value with only
| a tiny budget.
|
| Lately it's budget has gone up by a factor of 100x, and its
| usefulness/impact has stayed pretty much the same.
|
| Either is was _amazing_ value for money before, or it 's a
| waste of money now. Or both.
| breck wrote:
| > Either is was amazing value for money before, or it's a
| waste of money now. Or both.
|
| Maybe it's a sin wave? I find it more valuable than ever, but
| would agree that it's rate of improvement seems to be
| constant or declining. If they payoff their technical debt,
| and move to better DSLs, they could kick things into high
| gear again.
| splitrocket wrote:
| 100% this.
|
| SO much of what is considered "non-profit dysfunction" is a
| direct result of funders restricting donation utilization.
|
| Only X% for opex, y% for capex, z% for comms, where x+y+z ==
| around 5% of funds donated.
|
| Can't run an organization like that well.
| tims33 wrote:
| Kudos to MacKenzie Scott for helping bring this issue to light
| with her massive unrestricted giving.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| She really is an inspiration. Here's her announcement of the
| gifts and a list of the organizations. https://mackenzie-
| scott.medium.com/384-ways-to-help-45d0b9ac...
| soneca wrote:
| Oh, it's good to be back enjoying a PG essay! :) Even if it is
| just a short message rather than a grandiose statement (maybe
| that's the reason I like it).
|
| I worked with nonprofits (and philanthropy advice in particular)
| for a long time and this is a great message to send. I don't
| think it will change things much, as I don't think PG has as much
| influence in the nonprofit world as he has in the startups world,
| but worth the shot.
| [deleted]
| DC1350 wrote:
| This assumes that the nonprofit has the same goals as the donor
| so it's not always true. Maybe that would be covered by the
| umbrella organization bit, but sometimes there's no organization
| that cares so donors need to leverage existing ones to fund what
| they want.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| "Unfortunately restricted donations tend to generate more
| publicity than unrestricted ones. "X donates money to build a
| school in Africa" is not only more interesting than "X donates
| money to Y nonprofit to spend as Y chooses," but also focuses
| more attention on X."
|
| Seems like you could arrange the donation, get the charity to
| tell you what it would be for, and then use that as the
| announcement. You might get less attention getting descriptions,
| but I feel like it would still be net-moral to get a little
| creative with how you described it.
| l2silver wrote:
| I recently helped to found DigLit.ca, and non profit that helps
| build technology for other nonprofits. What we've found when
| dealing with nonprofits is that a lot of the smaller
| organizations are, suprise suprise, struggling to survive.
| They're trying to carryout their general missions, but unless
| they have some kind of consistent funding model, a lot of their
| energy is turned towards keeping the organization alive. I don't
| think there's anything wrong with that, it's just the nature of
| the nonprofit game. But our organization acts a bit like a
| technology donor, and we've definitely had to restrict the nature
| of our services to mission facing purposes. Aside from the
| technical challenges of contributing to the survival of an
| organization, we've also found that developers want to help with
| problems directly.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I once had an interview where one of the questions asked was
| whether I was on working on non-consumer facing products.
|
| They apparently had past hires be angry about doing so.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| One of the reasons I give big cash envelopes as gifts to be
| deployed as recipients see fit. I do offer symbolic gifts, or
| small cute things, but when the monetary value of the gift is
| large, I give cash.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| When I worked in gift cards one of their benefits was a way to
| give to people with destructive habits without enabling them.
| Though hardcore addicts would just sell the cards for cash
| anyway.
| mattr47 wrote:
| I help direct about $2.4 million each year to various parts of
| the world. We often receive inquiries about donating to a
| specific need or geographic location and we tell them no thank
| you.
|
| If people believe in our mission and leadership, then they give
| without any qualifications to what it shall be used for. We
| provide accurate records, and reports of what the money goes to.
| codecutter wrote:
| As a donor, I would appreciate that. It will help me decide
| whether to give money to charity A vs. charity B. There will
| always be someone willing to accept the donation.
|
| PS: AFAIK, Religious institutions in USA are exempt from
| Form-990 so a donor wouldn't anyway know where the money is
| going.
| Bostonian wrote:
| Here is an essay showing how women's higher education in the U.S.
| was boosted by restricted donations to universities:
| https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2021/02/feminist-college-fun... .
| robocat wrote:
| Nice counter-example from 1890 from article (condensed and
| paraphrased by me):
|
| Johns Hopkins University wanted a medical school. It could not
| afford it, but had said they needed $500k.
|
| Garrett, a lesbian, collaborated with her partner, M. Carey
| Thomas, and they successfully raised $100k and offered it to
| Hopkins on the condition that the medical school admit women
| "under the same terms as men."
|
| Hopkins' trustees accepted the gift and the conditions the
| donors imposed and said they would invest the money until the
| rest of the $500k was sourced.
|
| Hopkins president Daniel Coit Gilman then frantically tried to
| return the money. Although he never explicitly said so, Johnson
| suspects that was because he wanted the medical school to only
| admit men. "You do not realize Mr. Gilman's grim
| determination," Thomas wrote to Garrett, "it is with him a
| death struggle & money means nothing to him."
|
| In December 1892, Garrett made a second offer. She noted the
| fund given in 1890 had risen to $200k, and said she would
| donate the remaining $300k, provided the school would admit
| women on the same terms as men.
|
| In 1893, the Hopkins trustees caved and accepted Garrett's
| donation unconditionally. The Johns Hopkins medical school
| became a national model.
| [deleted]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I like to donate when I know a person involved. I find it hard to
| trust an organization or title. I donate cash to the local food
| bank, which is run by neighbors. I donate to my son's college
| student organization, run by folks he knows. I donate to a guy I
| see on the street frequently, who has been camping since he
| became homeless in 1985.
| gist wrote:
| > If restricted donations do less good than unrestricted ones,
| why do donors so often make them? Partly because doing good isn't
| donors' only motive. They often have other motives as well -- to
| make a mark, or to generate good publicity
|
| Bottom line is this: It's a net loss for non-profits if there is
| a stigma that is attached to people who donate for in part 'the
| wrong reasons'.
| mengledowl wrote:
| "If a nonprofit doesn't understand better than its donors where
| money needs to be spent, then it's incompetent and you shouldn't
| be donating to it at all."
|
| Years ago, I had a startup that was building software for non-
| profits. We spent a lot of time around them, talking to them,
| etc.
|
| This problem of incompetence that PG briefly touches on is
| rampant to a degree that most would never realize. Most large NPs
| are more inefficient than you could possibly imagine with their
| money (if you don't believe me, go look at how much of their
| money goes to administration and how much the people at the top
| are paying themselves). The SMB NPs (the group my startup served)
| were typically run either by narcissists who's real goal was to
| look good to other people, or they were very non-business/money
| savvy and driven by passion (in a negative way). Both of these
| lead to poor decision making, one way or the other.
|
| The narcissists tended to do everything they could to look good
| while doing almost nothing (think: hosting galas to raise
| "awareness" or finding ways to be involved with big important
| people, without actually furthering their mission). They looked
| great in the public eye most of the time and could flaunt their
| "goodness" while secretly treating their employees like trash
| behind closed doors.
|
| Example: the director/founder of one NP I know of that had a
| mission of helping pregnant women in crisis forced her 8 months
| pregnant employee to walk for miles through DC and do manual
| labor for her. She chewed her out in front of the whole team for
| saying she wasn't physically capable and made her cry, demanding
| that she do something that was technically _her (the director
| 's)_ responsibility.
|
| The non-business/money savvy person who is driven by passion at
| least has good intentions, but they let that passion run wild
| without tempering it. This leads to knee-jerk reactions and doing
| things just to do them, without taking the time to play the long
| game or even determine if the action they're taking is helping or
| hurting. It's the classic "give a man a fish vs. teach a man to
| fish" problem, where they don't slow down to look closer, and so
| find themselves perpetually addressing the crisis instead of the
| underlying issue, or creating sustainable solutions.
|
| The NPs that manage to avoid these are so exceedingly rare in my
| experience that it has turned me into a cynic. I just assume that
| there's incompetence at play, and even outright abuse.
|
| Anyway, I agree with PG, I just had to expand on that point
| because it almost felt like a footnote when IMO it is a huge part
| of the problem: finding good NPs to donate to unrestricted.
| Otherwise, you have to settle for incompetence and restrict that
| incompetence.
| macintux wrote:
| > Example: the director/founder of one NP I know of that had a
| mission of helping pregnant women in crisis forced her 8 months
| pregnant employee to walk for miles through DC and do manual
| labor for her. She chewed her out in front of the whole team
| for saying she wasn't physically capable and made her cry,
| demanding that she do something that was technically her (the
| director's) responsibility.
|
| That sounds Dickensian to the point of parody. I would do
| whatever I could to raise awareness of that insanity to the
| board of any non-profit, were I to witness something like that.
| JackC wrote:
| "And to be fair, nonprofits don't try very hard to discourage
| such illusions. They can't afford to. People running nonprofits
| are almost always anxious about money. They can't afford to talk
| back to big donors."
|
| Nonprofits can be realistic about this without being cynical
| about it. I worked with a very good nonprofit that had the
| fundraising mantra "don't give until it hurts, give until it
| feels good." As in, recognize that donors give because giving
| makes them feel better about themselves and the world they live
| in, and that's OK and something to encourage -- you just have to
| connect it to the mission.
|
| That means, yeah, you have to take restricted funds and do
| benefit dinners and other partially-wasteful stuff, and you have
| to emphasize the photogenic parts of your work more than others.
| But more importantly, you have to clearly tell the story about
| your theory of change to your donors, so you're attracting the
| right donors and educating them to support your mission. They're
| the "right" donors because the more they learn about how and why
| you're spending their money, the better they feel about
| themselves and the world. That sets up a virtuous cycle where
| you're adequately funded and you're incentivized to do better at
| your actual mission so you have more to share back.
|
| If you get _that_ wrong, and your donors feel good about their
| donations for fundamentally different reasons than what you're
| actually spending them for, that's when you end up with funding
| undercutting the mission.
| [deleted]
| secfirstmd wrote:
| Very true. I've been running non-profits to help the security of
| journalists and human rights defenders for years
| (https://www.secfirst.org). One of the big issues is that donors
| often only want to fund projects which means core costs
| (accounting, IT or whatever) often are not covered or are only
| partly covered.
|
| To an extent project specific funding also means that some
| organisations have to make sacrifices or do projects that aren't
| central to their mission. Mission creep can happen with some
| NGOs. Without core costs covered it's also a lot harder to
| develop new concepts as there isn't really much room essentially
| for R&D.
|
| Core costs in general also become a bit of a barrier to entry for
| new non-profit ideas and organisations. Core costs usually are
| only granted by big donors and usually will only be granted to
| big organisations. It's very very hard as a small org to get core
| costs paid for so it's hard to scale a lot of things.
| Collaboration in the NGO field is very varied, a lot of big orgs
| talk about it but when it comes down to it, often are very
| lacking. This leads to lots of inefficiency, overlap and
| duplication.
|
| Also the project based funding tends much more towards new ideas
| rather than maintenance. Maintenance and sustaining projects just
| doesn't get the same level of funding. For example we built our
| open source Umbrella App for learning about security with project
| specific funding. Nearly all of which gets spent specifically on
| that project. It's very hard for us to find donors willing to
| fund the ongoing maintenance of the apps. The rest of our core
| costs has to come from our training and consultancy work with
| organisations. That's tricky as we love doing it but it means we
| can't focus as much on our core tool building.
|
| Because of the core cost issues, the non-profit space is often
| very inefficient. It doesn't really have the same culture of
| startup, mergers, takeovers etc. To extent what you often get is
| zombie NGOs which become big and inefficient but soak up the
| donor money and keep smaller/better organisations out of the
| market. The way big donors work, many are very slow and risk
| adverse. So that means for example a lot of the big funders will
| never find any organisation that hasn't been around for at least
| three to five years. Imagine a VC not finding any company that
| hasn't been around for more than three to five years!
| splitrocket wrote:
| This. 100% this.
| bmmayer1 wrote:
| I've done a fair amount of volunteering for nonprofits, one in
| particular[1], and I will say that nonprofits are full of the
| most overworked, underpaid, and passionate people you will meet
| anywhere. They need every penny they can get, and very often
| people mistake nonprofits spending money on essential activities
| like marketing or event planning as "overhead", when such
| expenditures generate multiples of revenue for every dollar
| spent. Wouldn't you rather the $1 you donate generate leverage in
| new donations?
|
| One thing that PG doesn't mention here is fungibility: if you
| restrict your donations, nonprofits will still route unrestricted
| funds to where they need to be spent. It's still sub-optimal,
| obviously, but people who donate restricted don't always
| understand that they don't have as much control as they think
| they do over where funds will be spent, and that's a good thing.
|
| [1] Liberty in North Korea is the best way you can contribute to
| the wellbeing and success of the North Korean people
| directly...one $ donated to resettle refugees can return 100% ROI
| after just 2 years: https://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/
| bradleyjg wrote:
| > Wouldn't you rather the $1 you donate generate leverage in
| new donations?
|
| It depends on where the money is coming from. Suppose I donate
| $100 to a cystic fibrosis charity and using that money they
| convince 10 people to donate money to their charity instead of
| the muscular dystrophy foundation. I wouldn't consider that an
| effective use of my donation. On the other hand I have no idea
| how you'd measure that.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's measured as overhead and/or donation acquisition
| expenses. It's never 100%. You can assume some percent of
| that money goes to such expenses vs actual research (which I
| guess is where you'd want the money to go, or maybe to
| outreach or supporting individuals with cf).
| bradleyjg wrote:
| That's not quite what I'm getting at. A marketing dollar
| that brings in two dollars that would have otherwise been
| spent on coke is good, a marketing dollar that brings in
| two dollars that would have otherwise been spent on a
| different decent charity is not good.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| An additional complication: according to the Centre for
| Effective Altruism, charities vary hugely - several
| orders of magnitude - in their ability to turn dollars
| into benefit.
| geofft wrote:
| I think the question above is whether nonprofits are
| playing a zero-sum game - if donors have set aside some
| budget, and you "acquire" a donation by competing another
| equally worthy non-profit (instead of competing against the
| donor's savings account), it's not clear that this is good
| for the high-level goals of society.
|
| In the long run, it will turn into the same arms race as
| political donations. At the end of the day, every candidate
| is trying to win over the same voters, so the net effect of
| Party X spending $100 million on ads and Party Y spending
| $50 million isn't terribly different from Party X spending
| $10 million on ads and Party Y spending $5 million - it
| certainly does not yield an election that is ten times
| better at reflecting the voters' preferences. And it may
| well yield an election that's about how well the parties
| can market themselves and not how well they can govern.
|
| If cystic fibrosis is a problem that needs ten times the
| spending of muscular dystrophy, but the muscular dystrophy
| folks are ten times better at fundraising, the effect of
| that is to _divert_ funds from cystic fibrosis into getting
| them to be one hundred times better at fundraising than
| they used to be.
|
| (I don't have an answer here, any more than I have an
| answer to how to curtail campaign spending.)
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| > Wouldn't you rather the $1 you donate generate leverage in
| new donations?
|
| No, because donations are a zero-sum game. They're not
| "generating" leverage, they're convincing people to give money
| to them as opposed to giving money to other causes and/or
| spending it for themselves.
|
| I've heard that people tended to give a fixed amount every year
| and charities just competed for that amount; I've never seen
| any evidence that aggressive marketing leads
| people/organizations to donate a higher percentage of their
| income overall. And even if it did, I think the principled
| thing to do would be to convince people to donate more money
| overall, ideally to high-effectiveness charities, not for
| specific causes to compete for getting people's money.
|
| Overall I think 99% of marketing is a blight upon humanity, a
| disgusting morass of callousness and amorality, and a huge
| waste of resources. Any money given for charity that ends up
| going into it should be considered overhead.
| soneca wrote:
| > _because donations are a zero-sum game_
|
| What? No, they are not. Because you never saw evidence, it is
| true?
|
| I worked for 4 years convincing millionaires to start doing
| large donations that they simply weren't doing before. I
| myself started donating a larger amount recently (because I
| am earning more in a new job).
|
| You want to think it's all _" a disgusting morass of
| callousness and amorality"_ , so you decide to think this
| way.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I volunteered for the last few months. One thing that surprised
| me just a bit is how motivated I could be even without any
| money benefits. Also that charity warehouse was better equipped
| than my previous gig at a truck disassembly plant at some very
| large truck renting company. In the former we had a whole fleet
| of powered pallet trolleys or fenwicks, the latter had 2 busted
| manual pallet jacks and 1 fenwick. Go figure.
| [deleted]
| autarch wrote:
| Having spent many years volunteering for various nonprofit, and
| having been deeply involved in fundraising and budgeting, I
| cannot upvote this enough!
|
| Restricted donations add overhead while making it harder to fund
| important things like bookkeeping, rent for an office, and staff
| salaries. If you believe in the nonprofit's mission, just let
| them figure out what to do with the money!
| quercusa wrote:
| On the same note, you are better off making a few large
| donations instead of spreading a bunch of small ones around
| that get eaten up by overhead.
| Black101 wrote:
| Most people let companies donate with their money... i.e.:
| Mcdonald boxes at the cash register...
| amelius wrote:
| I stopped donating (with a few exceptions) because of the general
| lack of transparency in where your money really goes, and the
| stories of fraud, absurd salaries of CEOs/management and cold-
| calling which turns out to be so expensive that the first 1 or 2
| years you are effectively paying for the call center. Etc. etc.
| Kevin_S wrote:
| You should examine the nonprofit's Form 990 if you have
| concerns or look at their page on Guidestar.
| cldellow wrote:
| My wife and I have given reasonably large donations to various
| groups and told them we're not interested in getting push
| communication from them. We'll donate again if and when we can.
|
| The orgs that don't respect that (Medecins sans Frontieres
| comes to mind--multiple glossy mailings per year) get removed
| from the list. It's kind of harsh, but there are plenty of
| deserving orgs to support who are compatible with this stance.
| I understand why, in general, such outreach makes sense, but in
| my specific case, I find it annoying and it doesn't motivate
| me.
|
| I've found the Against Malaria Foundation to be stellar in this
| regard. They were very responsive in getting set up to accept
| Canadian stock when I inquired about it. They did one
| unexpected followup communication, but it wasn't a
| solicitation. Instead, they were considering changing how stock
| donation would work in Canada in order to minimize their fees,
| and wanted feedback on whether it would be a good or bad change
| from the perspective of a donor. They were explicit that the
| feedback was optional, and that they weren't soliciting a
| donation, just effectively doing market research.
| hirundo wrote:
| He didn't mention the little problem of the fungibility of money.
| If a school gets two $100k donations, and one comes with a "no
| stem cell research" restriction, then it usually isn't a problem
| to spend the other donation on that, and the restricted one on
| the road maintenance that would have been done anyway. So a
| restricted donation is really only effectively restrictive if it
| significantly outweighs the rest.
| m463 wrote:
| Yeah, but...
|
| You don't want a situation like tips and doordash either.
| danielam wrote:
| Right, or if funds are earmarked across the board to some
| adequate degree.
| santoshalper wrote:
| A lot of restricted donations are more specific than "no stem
| cell research", which I agree is going to be manageable for
| most organizations.
| ma2rten wrote:
| I wouldn't donate to universities in general. The have growing
| endowments which they don't spend. It also adds the income
| inequality in the US, you are essentially donating to the
| education of rich people.
|
| Note that PG talks about non-profits not schools.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| It really depends on the university. Many do not have
| substantial endowments. Many educate a disproportionately
| high number of first generation or low income students.
| remote_phone wrote:
| Schools like Harvard and Stanford give away free tuition to
| students whose families make less than 120,000. This is
| directly from their endowments.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Universities are probably the main mechanism we have for
| economic mobility in the US. There's almost no where else in
| the US where the government will give a kid from a poor
| family thousands of dollars to invest in their long-term well
| being (and that kid will wind up repaying in taxes their
| education anyways.)
| freedomben wrote:
| I don't disagree with what you've said, but your Note is
| wrong.
|
| PG in the article specifically uses a University donation as
| an example.
| ma2rten wrote:
| But it says that universities are the exception. It's more
| of a counterexample.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Many universities _are_ non-profits.
| human wrote:
| Ok so everybody learned a new word this week: fungibility.
| analog31 wrote:
| Indeed, that happened in the state where I grew up. When they
| started the state lottery, it was with the promise that the
| money would be spent on "education." Sure enough, the lottery
| money went to the education fund, and the contribution from the
| general fund was reduced by the same amount.
| websites2323 wrote:
| Are you from Texas?
| analog31 wrote:
| Michigan.
| websites2323 wrote:
| Interesting. It seems to be a similar story in multiple
| states. I oppose state funded gambling, and this is one
| reason.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| If the alternative is more taxes or worse service isn't
| taxing gambling a good option?
| muti wrote:
| The lottery is effectively a regressive tax. I would
| prefer increasing taxes in a progressive or at least
| proportional scheme.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The lottery is a choice. No one is forcing anyone to
| play. People are going to gamble though, so the state
| might as well take a cut as a way to discourage it.
| superbatfish wrote:
| I agree that fungibility is a hugely under-appreciated (or
| cynically de-emphasized) concept when it comes to funding
| governments via special taxes. (Great example.)
|
| The concept also applies to non-profit donations more
| broadly, but only under the assumption that the size of the
| donation is small enough that it doesn't exceed the total
| amount that the non-profit would have spent on that cause
| anyway.
|
| If you're donating a large amount that exceeds the current
| budget for your chosen cause, then your donation _does_ make
| a difference -- but it 's not quite as large as it seems. It
| might only be the difference between the previous spending
| level and the new level (after your donation and after some
| budget refactoring).
|
| To use your example, if the state was spending $1B on on
| schools previously, then donating less than $1B doesn't
| necessarily make a difference to school funding -- they can
| just push money around. But if you donate $1.2B, then you
| have made a difference -- of $0.2B.
|
| If you're donating to a small non-profit, though, then maybe
| it's easier to find targets in which you could dwarf the
| existing spending on your topic of choice. (Not to say that
| you _should_ , though. I agree with Graham's argument.)
| jefftk wrote:
| This also illustrates how unrestricted donations are much more
| useful to the nonprofit. Funds that can be spent as needed are
| very flexible, and so can fill gaps left by restricted funds.
| rriepe wrote:
| It's a great reason against donating restricted, but wouldn't
| help his overall argument that you should trust the non-profit.
| hntrader wrote:
| > only ... if they significantly outweigh the rest.
|
| Or if it causes over-investment into a specific cause (e.g.
| $100k must go to roads, when the non-profit only wanted to
| allocate $50k to that), which fungibility of money can't
| address.
|
| The more specific the restriction is, the less fungibility is
| able to provide an out.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| Fungibility can add inefficiency even if it doesn't make a huge
| difference in the totals spent.
|
| For example, a friend of mine used to work for an environmental
| agriculture non-profit. A large donation had been made that
| could only be spent buying trees to plant. Now, they planted a
| lot of trees as part of their work anyways so this seems
| reasonable.
|
| The problem was that it did not cover the labor of planting the
| trees, tools for planting the trees, or many related costs. In
| practice, it took them many years to spend all this money
| across many projects, when an unrestricted donation would have
| probably had more positive effects sooner.
|
| Moreover, they had to track how much was spent on trees
| separately for every project so that it could be properly
| accounted for against this restricted donation, which of course
| added administrative overhead.
| ralmidani wrote:
| Over the years my opinion of non-profits has become less, shall
| we say, "charitable"; society has a tendency to glorify non-
| profits because they "don't have shareholders" but, in reality, a
| lot of non-profits give peanuts to those at the bottom (with some
| even working for free) while executives get far more than a
| living salary. And whether you're an educational institution, an
| insurance provider, or an NGO, being an executive comes with lots
| of perks like travel, entertainment, lavish offices, etc. So
| while "no shareholders" is often a selling point for supporting a
| non-profit, there are still people getting an oversized benefit
| out of non-profits, who in some disturbing cases are the founders
| and their family members.
|
| If I wanted to donate a large amount of money to a non-profit, I
| would structure it as a zero-interest loan, and would just keep
| deferring the repayment of the loan as long as the org stays true
| to its mission, compensates executives in reasonable proportion
| to regular employees, etc. Brian Acton (who co-founded WhatsApp,
| and later left Facebook) is supporting the Signal Foundation with
| tens of millions in deferrable, interest-free loans. I think it's
| absolutely genius, and wish more people would follow his example.
| 1shooner wrote:
| >while executives get far more than a living salary.
|
| This is the trope that non-profits should essentially be run by
| volunteers. Which is fine to a degree, but does not scale well
| (that I've seen, anyway).
| JMTQp8lwXL wrote:
| Giving an interest-free loan would not come with the tax
| benefits of a donation to a 501(c)(3). Often times, gifts are
| made with appreciated shares to reduce the giver's tax
| liability. I agree with the problem you point out, but I'm
| unsure of the practicality of the solution for high net worth
| individuals.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| Perhaps donating 1.4x not tax free but structured in a way
| that meets the donors other goals offsets the net cash
| differential from the tax shield in their "evaluation
| function".
| stephen_greet wrote:
| I think that's a really interesting middle ground. Do you think
| it can fall into the same trap as mentioned in the article,
| where it can become "sub-optimal" due to not being as expert as
| the non-profit?
| ralmidani wrote:
| I think it's less prone to that problem if you take a
| holistic approach when evaluating whether a loan should be
| repaid, rather than applying very narrow criteria such as
| "must be spent on a new building".
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| It's exactly the problem in the article, taken to a ludicrous
| extreme. If you want to be able to decide how a nonprofit
| should spend their money, go take a seat on the board (or
| staff).
| chaseadam17 wrote:
| This is even worse than a restricted donation. The nonprofit
| will live in fear of a loan being called and they'll respond to
| that risk by spending lots of time appeasing the donor at the
| expense of using their time helping people, which is likely the
| opposite of what everyone wants.
|
| On top of this, how could a nonprofit make commitments to
| people (often people in very vulnerable situations) knowing
| their funding might get called at any moment? If a donor wants
| this much control over a nonprofit, they should just start and
| fund one themselves.
|
| In terms of nonprofits taking too large of salaries, I'd trust
| beneficiaries to decide what's appropriate. I often feel like
| some donors care more about low salaries than they care about
| how much the people being paid are helping others. I'd happily
| pay a CEO $1M to create $100M in impact over paying a CEO $100k
| to create $500k in impact, the latter being much more common
| imo.
| elcomet wrote:
| But the non-profit is spending the money, and is not earning
| any money. If you decide to ask for repayment, how could they
| pay you back?
| ralmidani wrote:
| I doubt someone who wants a pet foundation to succeed would
| ask for repayment unless they really dropped the ball. Of
| course, this assumes the person doesn't anticipate needing
| the money, which in the case of the WhatsApp co-founder is
| true.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Absent anyone else willing to pay for whatever it is they're
| doing, they can't and would go bankrupt. That's the point.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Invest the money with non-zero interest, return the original
| money, and use the extra to... realistically, pay the salary
| of the person who did the investing.
|
| Yeah, if I had a non-profit, I would just plainly refuse.
| furyofantares wrote:
| > If I wanted to donate a large amount of money to a non-
| profit, I would structure it as a zero-interest loan, and would
| just keep deferring the repayment of the loan as long as the
| org stays true to its mission, compensates executives in
| reasonable proportion to regular employees, etc.
|
| Not sure if I'm missing something, but this sounds totally
| ridiculous to me.
|
| You give 1M to someone you think is going to spend it well, and
| they do; why isn't that the end of the transaction? Why do you
| forever have a gun to their head?
|
| Maybe you've got all the best intentions about what would cause
| you to call the loan back. But after they've taken donations of
| this sort, why would anyone continue donating to them? They've
| built up liabilities to 3rd parties, I'm not interested in
| potentially paying off their loans instead of doing good work
| if some of those 3rd parties change their mind.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| The problem is you have a huge principle-agent problem with
| these non-profits. In a standard corporate structure,
| shareholders elect members of the board who can replace the
| management. But who elects the board of a non-profit? Why not
| those who donate to them? There has to be some reliable
| mechanism to impose accountability by those who give funds.
|
| Now lacking a mechanism for accountability, people give funds
| with all sorts of strings attached. But wouldn't it be better
| to give funds with a voting interest attached to the board
| instead?
| zachlatta wrote:
| It's very common for the board members of a nonprofit to be
| its largest donors.
| Kye wrote:
| Having access to money doesn't qualify someone to help do
| whatever the organization does.
| akiselev wrote:
| In any sizable nonprofit, the vast majority of the board
| is not involved in actually carrying out the work of the
| organization. They are there for oversight and political
| capital.
| ralmidani wrote:
| There could be sunset provisions (e.g. if a loan is deferred
| for 10 consecutive years, it is cancelled), this would
| encourage continued giving rather than massive one-off
| donations.
| cambalache wrote:
| Year 5 the president embezzled 800k and ran away leaving
| the non-profit effectively broken, now you are pissed and
| want your 1 MM back. I think you should go for a walk and
| meditate this better.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| No organization would accept a donation of this form. If the
| size of the donation was large enough to be compelling, it
| would also put the organization at risk. Having a looming
| loan of millions of dollars at risk if you upset someone
| isn't viable, especially given that the implication is that
| this would last indefinitely. A nonprofit that took loans
| like this over time would very quickly end up with potential
| debts much, much greater than they could ever hope to repay.
|
| Op mentions sunset provisions in a sibling, but at that point
| the difference between this and a recurring donation is
| marginal.
|
| Just donate a smaller amount on a recurring basis. You reduce
| your risk that the nonprofit will upset you, without making
| their existence tenuous.
| philsnow wrote:
| Agreed, if a non-profit takes enough of these that any one
| loan (or any group of loans) makes up a majority of their
| assets/income, they've implicitly taken on a new board and
| are more beholden to the "money board" than to their actual
| board.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Right, in practice this would result in either the
| nonprofit giving you a board seat, them refusing your
| money, or increased overhead either via some kind of
| insurance policy that they pay into that would cover you
| recalling the loan, or them just refusing to spend your
| money until the deferment period expires. But those last
| two probably result in you recalling your donation
| because the premiums on that insurance would be
| ridiculous, so they wouldn't be effectively using your
| donation.
| ernestipark wrote:
| Is there any way to do this easily from a legal and contractual
| perspective? The other piece here is that if it's a loan you
| miss out on tax deductions, thereby potentially reducing the
| total amount you could give. That also limits the more tax-
| advantaged ways you can give money (e.g. long term appreciated
| stock if you're in the US).
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I imagine someone donating millions is using a donor advised
| fund to do the lending. By using a fund, they can recognize
| the donation for tax purposes while lending the money to a
| separate non-profit.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I'd be surprised if any donor-advised fund could or would
| do this. You don't have control over that money once you
| donate it, you can only ask for it to be granted to a
| nonprofit.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| If I were any of the half dozen non-profits I've worked with, I
| would be unwilling to accept that loan because it is a
| completely unreasonable amount of risk to be beholden to some
| untrustworthy random person for any important sum of money, and
| a completely unreasonable amount of work to be beholden to some
| untrustworthy random person for any unimportant sum of money.
|
| Start your own foundation and manage your own money. This isn't
| genius, it's ignorance.
| [deleted]
| brnt wrote:
| Anybody who's discussing the quite unique tax situation around
| charity in the US, should give Dark Money by Jane Mayer a read.
| This uniqueness isn't by accident, and only is called charity
| as a minor, inconvenient side effect.
| heliodor wrote:
| What uniqueness would that be?
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| > If I wanted to donate a large amount of money to a non-
| profit, I would structure it as a zero-interest loan, and would
| just keep deferring the repayment of the loan as long as the
| org stays true to its mission
|
| This flies totally in the face of Paul's post. His point is to
| donate unrestricted to non-profits you _trust_. If you can't
| trust the organization or need to put controls in place to
| prevent them from doing something bad, you should find another
| organization to donate to or need to check your ego.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| I don't think it's so black and white. The leaders at the
| organization could change and they certainly aren't going to
| give you your money back.
| theptip wrote:
| So plan to give $x/N per year for N years, and stop
| donating if you don't get the results you want.
|
| I don't see a reason to make things complicated; every bit
| of overhead reduces the net impact your dollars are going
| to have.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| What if the complication keeps them moving in the
| direction you want? That may make your dollars have
| additional impact rather than less.
| [deleted]
| coldtea wrote:
| > _but, in reality, a lot of non-profits give peanuts to those
| at the bottom (with some even working for free)_
|
| and more often than not, peanuts to those they supposedly help
| too -- when they're not directly tax scams, covert foreign
| influence operations, or merely scams...
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| There's a huge fallacy where people believe that non-profits
| are supposed to be inherently more equitable and nicer than
| for-profit companies. And people who believe this fallacy get
| upset by executive pay at non-profits and turn to sites like
| Charity Navigator to find charities where 99 cents of their
| dollar goes to charity.
|
| But the fact of the matter is that paying salaries to people
| who bring in more money than they make is a good strategy for
| everyone, that's why non-profits do it. Even if MegaCharity A
| only spends 60 cents of its income on charity but MiniCharity B
| spends 99 cents of its income on charity, MegaCharity A is
| still doing better for humanity if their annual income grows
| every year due to the strength of their marketing.
| MegaCharities can raise awareness exponentially and actually
| change the outcomes of some of the problems in our worlds
| because they have the power to raise enough money in one place
| with one cohesive plan to actually fight these things.
|
| I grew up next to St. Jude Children's Hospital. Everyone has
| heard of them. They bring in billions every year. They have an
| entire marketing wing and a well-compensated C-Suite (compared
| to other non-profits). They have way way way more impact
| because of all these things than most other medical charities
| for children. No other non-profit in the world can offer
| completely free medical care to children from anywhere in the
| world and fly their families to live near them while they're
| cared for without spending the kind of money they do on
| marketing and executives.
|
| Non-profits need executives, and people with the credentials to
| be executives have to choose between non-profit jobs that pay
| 1/8 of what for-profit jobs do. Sure they make more than a
| living salary while their employees struggle to make ends meet,
| but that's true of every type of organization. And in the end,
| they won't join non-profits at all if the money they sacrifice
| to do so is too high.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| > can raise awareness exponentially
|
| Is there anyone left that isn't aware of breast cancer? What
| is more awareness spending getting anyone at this point
| (aside from non profit executives)?
| namdnay wrote:
| The money a charity raises doesn't come out of thin air. It
| comes from the hard work of the people who donate. Charity A
| may do more, but it's taking a lot more money from people to
| do it.
| samvher wrote:
| I think there are different parts to this though. Paying
| large salaries to personnel that do fund raising can be
| frustrating as a donor because to an extent this is a zero
| sum game: funds for one NGO mean less funds for another, in
| many cases. So it doesn't feel like you're paying for social
| good. Another is that while, sure, it makes sense to pay good
| people well, another part of the discussion is that others
| among the employees are underpaid. Not-for-profits are to an
| extent expected to stay outside of harmful side effects of
| capitalism/economics (I'd say it's even in the name) and
| cutting costs on part of your labor seems somewhat in
| conflict with that.
|
| Of course all of this is the result of pragmatism and a focus
| on whatever it is that's being optimized for (some aggregate
| impact measure which is unlikely to include employee welfare
| to a large extent).
| jseliger wrote:
| A lot of what you see in nonprofits and public agencies is
| about signaling: https://seliger.com/2012/03/25/why-fund-
| organizations-throug...
| rvnx wrote:
| 55 million USD just in salaries at Wikipedia per year, that's
| plenty of money to swim into :)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, and they keep asking for donations as if Wikipedia was
| in constant danger of being wiped out. Pretty screwed up.
| closeparen wrote:
| Shareholder return and the wages of skilled labor/management
| are _very_ different things! No one is getting rich off a
| nonprofit merely for putting capital into it, is the point.
| Nonprofits still buy things that are expensive, including the
| efforts of skilled and effective people.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| How do you understand law firm partnerships in this wages vs
| capital model?
| closeparen wrote:
| That's a good question. I think it's one of the few ways to
| convert labor to (meaningful) capital, comparable to being
| a founder or early employee.
|
| The CEO of a nonprofit may be a well paid associate, but he
| is still just an associate. The kind of excess revenue that
| would flow to a partner's profit sharing check has to be
| reinvested in the mission instead of disbursed to somebody
| in cash just because.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Does it? I know hospital system CEO's get performance
| pay. Maybe if the numbers were sufficiently egregious and
| a newspaper (if a local one still exists) decided to do
| an expose the attorney general would intervene but I
| think in general some of these non profits are better
| modeled as perpetual partnerships run for the benefit of
| partners than they are as mission driven organizations.
| bar101 wrote:
| > efforts of skilled and effective people.
|
| This has been a truism for more than 100 years and has been
| mocked for as long it exists. There are entire "Yes Minister"
| episodes about "we use the usual formula: comparison with
| wages of industry leaders" (they use chairmen of BP and IBM
| for comic effect).
|
| Also highly recommended is the episode where Sir Arnold
| leaves the civil service and looks for a suitable successor
| who will put jobs his way ... sorry, ask him to undertake the
| jobs.
|
| Excerpt: Sir Arnold: Also, I would like to be
| chairman of the Anglo-Caribbean
| Association, which would give me an
| opportunity ... Sir Humphrey: ... to be of
| service. Sir Arnold: Precisely, especially during
| the winter months.
| m463 wrote:
| I'm uncertain of the reality of deferable interest free loans,
| but I agree for the need for checks and balances when it comes
| to non-profits.
|
| I think the key would be clarity of mission.
|
| It might be as simple as maintaining a letter-grade of B or
| above on charitywatch.
|
| I would hope it would be something with more teeth though, like
| requiring signal to be end-to-end encrypted (for real, not like
| zoom)
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Zero-interest deferrable loans are an amazing idea. I suppose
| you'd have to be a substantial investor in order to get the
| non-profit to accept such a deal.
| samspenc wrote:
| Not so sure since as others have pointed out, the non-profit
| would have to repay the loan. Plus a lot of non-profits'
| "business models" aren't tailored around repaying donations.
|
| Think of some of the performing arts, dance and music
| programs in some of the largest cities that are structured as
| non-profits and charge $20 in ticket fees. If they lost their
| donors, they would have to charge $100 to $200 in ticket fees
| just to break even.
|
| And that would happen if they got zero-interest loans as
| well, since they would be on the hook for paying back the
| loans and have to cover those.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > the non-profit would have to repay the loan
|
| Only if they ever strayed from their mission. That ought to
| put a limit to how much corruption they think they can get
| away with.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| As a corollary if you feel like you want to make a restricted
| donation to a particular organization, don't donate to that
| organization. Find one that's better aligned with your values.
| mcguire wrote:
| Wow. A Paul Graham essay I completely agree with. Will wonders
| never cease? :-)
| dougb5 wrote:
| Not so long ago the author warned that non-profits are a "magnet
| for sociopaths" because "their defining feature is to make no
| profit" and there's "no intrinsic accountability".
| (https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1124254508232663040?lang=en). I
| thought this was an odious and wrong thing to say for many
| reasons and it made me think that while he clearly has a lot of
| experience with non-profits of a certain kind or scale or
| connection to tech VC, maybe it's not so broad-based. And it's
| hard for me to square this attitude with this new blog post: If
| there's no intrinsic accountability, then how do unrestricted
| gifts help? Shouldn't gifts provide some of that accountability?
| The best interpretation I can come up with is "Apply very strict
| conditions to where you decide to donate, but when you do, do it
| unconditionally".
| buss wrote:
| As a board member of two nonprofits, I STRONGLY agree with pg.
| Restricted donations are not only an administerial headache, they
| strain the donor/recipient relationship and lead to suboptimal
| spending.
| satya71 wrote:
| Agree 100%. I wrote a short essay [1] about the problem why
| charitable donations cannot achieve the intended effect.
|
| [1] https://snmishra.wordpress.com/2016/03/11/why-tax-
| deduction-...
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Wow, P.G. almost gets it. The most unrestricted donation is
| paying your damn taxes. Get rid of the philanthropy loophole,
| raise the taxes, and lets invest our surplus democratically.
| latchkey wrote:
| This article touches on non-profits, but I feel it comes from a
| deeper well. We are wired in our culture around how we give
| donations.
|
| We only give money to people who we think would spend it most
| wisely. We walk past all the people in San Francisco on the
| street because we know that if we give them money it will only go
| to more drug use. We drive past the person on the left turn lane
| because we don't want to encourage him to be there.
|
| When I spent 2 years traveling by motorbike all over Vietnam,
| Cambodia and Laos, I saw first hand what donations do from
| birth... little kids in the middle of nowhere would run up to me
| and say hey DOLLAR, give me DOLLAR. They were trained for that.
| danans wrote:
| > little kids in the middle of nowhere would run up to me and
| say hey DOLLAR, give me DOLLAR. They were trained for that.
|
| And why not? It seems like rational behavior on the part of the
| kids/families given their circumstances and their incentive
| systems.
| latchkey wrote:
| My point is that some other foreigner drove past them before
| me and gave them money. Just like the person sitting on the
| left turn lane learned it from somewhere. I wasn't arguing
| that the behavior is rational or not. I'm talking about how
| we are wired in our culture around giving donations and it
| isn't just about how donors dictate how non-profits spend
| their money.
| geofft wrote:
| I mean, the real problem with Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos is
| the illegal war the US fought there to maintain the value of
| the dollar.
|
| Charitable donations are by definition a response to a failure
| of society in one way or another (regardless of whether your
| political views consider it a failure of the market, a failure
| of government, or some of both). Even in the ideal case, they
| exist because some problem is so bad that someone feels morally
| compelled to give their spare money to try to solve it. We
| donate to provide water to certain places in Africa (or
| Michigan) because there isn't reliable infrastructure there,
| but we don't need to donate to provide water to San Francisco.
| We donate to specific medical research goals because the
| funding system for medical research (again, whether it's
| government-backed or market-backed) isn't investing in some
| problem, and we think throwing a bit of money at it might cause
| us to happen on a cure, and at the same time we complain about
| how other medical costs for different problems are out of
| control. We donate to legal activism nonprofits because,
| bluntly, we believe our justice system will fail to be just
| without that intervention. We donate to Mozilla because there's
| no money to be made in selling web browsers thanks to the
| various vertically-integrated competitors but we think
| independent web browsers are still valuable. And the Gates
| Foundation donates to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos because the
| kids there quite frankly will never grow up to be Bill Gates
| without rebuilding some infrastructure first.
|
| (Or, of course, charitable donations are PR - a way for the
| Andrew Carnegies of the world to deflect questions about
| whether they've quietly caused more failures of society than
| they're currently loudly fixing.)
|
| The reason that your town needs a food bank is that there are
| people in your town who can't just afford food and need to rely
| on the whims of people who believe in private charity in order
| to not starve to death. Running the food bank is great, and I'm
| glad that there _are_ people with those whims, but making it so
| that nobody in your town has that problem would be even better.
| It doesn 't matter if your answer is "more taxes to support
| welfare" or "more teaching people to fish," either of them is
| more sustainable.
|
| I'm not saying we shouldn't donate to worthy causes. I do,
| quite a bit, and I think those of us who make tech-industry
| salaries do in fact have a moral obligation to do that for as
| long as these failures of society exist. But let's admit that
| it's a second-class approach.
|
| Donations cannot solve problems. They can at best soothe the
| effects of a problem. There isn't really any fundamental
| difference between the guy with a sign on 101 asking for a
| dollar every day, the kid in Vietnam asking for a dollar every
| day, and the New York Public Library emailing me to ask for
| many dollars every day. Or, ultimately, even the beloved local
| for-profit business with a Kickstarter to save them from
| shutdown asking for a (hopefully) one-time pile of cash to make
| rent. _All of them_ feel like their best shot is to hope for
| donations. Let 's figure out where they should be getting funds
| from instead.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| I work at a non-profit, and, anecdotally, I think it is more
| complicated as there might be 3 areas of funding concentration:
|
| 1. Areas that are overfunded because restricted donations tend to
| concentrate there.
|
| 2. Areas that leadership want to fund, and would direct
| unrestricted donations to.
|
| 3. Areas that neither restricted donations nor leadership want to
| fund and thus tend to be chronically underfunded (e.g. payroll
| and staffing in certain departments)
|
| I think thoughtful restricted donations have a place then, but a
| key is understanding of the industry and transparency in
| operations
| [deleted]
| capableweb wrote:
| > Which means a restricted donation is inherently suboptimal
|
| Maybe so, but maybe it's a compromise as well. If not, no funding
| at all would have been given which maybe would be a net-loss
| long-term. Receiving money to do research might not always
| include research you want to do, but you'll gain more experience
| overall and do better once you get to the research you want to
| do.
|
| I'm thinking from the perspective that if I got to choose where
| my taxes went to. If I could decide which areas 50% the money
| goes towards, I think I would have been more happy paying taxes
| and maybe would add more, in order to fund efforts I believe in
| personally.
| jonhohle wrote:
| At least in AZ, we have several tax credits that allow you to
| donate to organizations in certain categories. Unfortunately
| it's a fixed dollar amount and not a percentage of liability.
|
| I agree, it would be nice to control where more tax money was
| directed.
| pavlov wrote:
| Elections are how you control where your tax money goes.
|
| Micro-earmarks by voters would create enormous imbalances.
| Police get so much money for equipment that they can't spend
| it all, while public defenders go unfunded.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Micro-earmarks by voters would create enormous imbalances
|
| How sure are you about this? Would love to see some
| research into how things would work if taxes were more
| "crowd-fund" oriented.
|
| > Police get so much money for equipment that they can't
| spend it all, while public defenders go unfunded.
|
| Maybe in some places today it would go like that, and in
| others to opposite. Considering the huge wave of "defund
| the police and fund social work" in the US today, I think
| the balance would be the other way.
| jonhohle wrote:
| The donations are categorized: organizations the at help
| the working poor, schools (woefully underfunded in AZ),
| foster and adoption organizations.
| jariel wrote:
| The third restriction is 'purpose gifts' i.e. build a stadium and
| put my name on it, which seems entirely fair to me.
| gist wrote:
| > Many donors may simply never have considered the distinction
| between restricted and unrestricted donations. They may believe
| that donating money for some specific purpose is just how
| donation works. And to be fair, nonprofits don't try very hard to
| discourage such illusions. They can't afford to. People running
| nonprofits are almost always anxious about money. They can't
| afford to talk back to big donors.
|
| In other words they smartly are thinking they don't want to kill
| 'the sale'. When businesses sell products do they typically list
| all the potential downsides or defects in their product or
| service when doing so might discourage the purchase?
|
| Maybe as I said in my other comment they realize that less money
| would come in because they would rain on a parade going on in
| someone's mind.
|
| Example let's say someone wants for vanity purposes (an entirely
| valid reason) to have a building named after them. The non profit
| (could be a school or some research institution) then says to
| them 'well you know we can do that but why don't we put the money
| toward this cause instead after all why does it have to be about
| you and your family name being perpetuated!!!?'.
|
| That's an exaggeration sure (in terms of how the words would go.
| However principle is that the person donating would then have a
| negative ie 'the wrong reasons' attached to what they were
| convincing themselves was a selfless act.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I worked in Accounting (the dept that did it, not the one that
| taught it) IT at a major public university for several years.
| Something like half of the software complexity was in keeping
| track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that it was spent
| on only what the source approved it to be spent on. Whether the
| source was the federal government, the state, corporate donors,
| or wealthy individuals, they all had strong opinions on what the
| money could be spent on. It was much easier to get money donated
| for a new building, than to maintain an old one, so you can have
| a situation in which new buildings are being built while old ones
| fall apart.
|
| The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of the
| budget was under the control of the president of the university;
| it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the money was
| controlled by the source, not by the administration.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of
| the budget was under the control of the president of the
| university; it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the
| money was controlled by the source, not by the administration.
|
| I consider that good news, actually, because it makes
| restricted donations meaningful.
|
| I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless,
| because if I donated $x of restricted donations to cause A, the
| organization would simply take $x of unrestricted donations
| that it was planning to spend on cause A and instead spend them
| on other causes. All of my money technically went to cause A,
| but de facto it didn't.
|
| I still assume that's the case for regular, non-university
| charities.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money
| (and I am _not_ saying such expectation is always wrong),
| perhaps you just shouldn 't give them any.
|
| On the other hand, if you trust that someone wants to do a
| good thing, they probably have more information about the
| topic than you do, so you should give them freedom to
| actually act on that information. Like, maybe you think "X is
| way more important than Y", but maybe the lack of Y is
| actually what prevents them from doing X efficiently, so your
| restriction to only use the money for X is not helpful, even
| from the X-maximizing perspective.
|
| Like, sometimes your mission is to distribute food to
| starving kids in Africa, but you can't organize your
| volunteers until you buy a new computer, because the only one
| you had just broke. Then someone gives you a paycheck with
| big letters "only use to buy food, I don't want to see you
| wasting money on computers". Yeah, thanks a lot, dear
| condescending saint.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money
| (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong),
| perhaps you just shouldn't give them any.
|
| This is indeed the approach I've been taking with some
| climate change charities: most of them have an "advocacy"
| component, and while I'd like to support effective
| emissions reduction projects, I'm not willing to contribute
| to the preaching for individual asceticism.
|
| I have no issue giving to "some project + a proportionate
| share of central/overhead costs".
|
| Unfortunately, it's often extremely hard to find a charity
| that is tax deductible where you live, part of employer
| matching programs, effective in running projects you want
| to support, _and_ not performing activities you
| specifically don 't want to support.
| theamk wrote:
| Now all cases like this, many nonprofits have multiple
| independent projects
|
| Like Mozilla foundation, which has a number of separate
| "initiatives"
|
| Or Wikimedia, which partially works on Wikipedia.org
| website, but also works on a number of projects not
| directly related to the main website.
| agumonkey wrote:
| These kind of problems might be a good soil for some blockchain
| based things to reach actual utility. It pains me to see how
| difficult giving can be (even if it's justified) and having a
| solution to make it leaner would be very much welcomed.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > keeping track of each dollar's origin, and making sure that
| it was spent on only what the source approved it to be spent on
|
| Why not just keep a separate fund for each purpose and as these
| donations come in you route out the portions to the desired
| fund? If that is what's done then what's the difficult part
| that I'm missing?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Part of it was that each source wanted to be able to audit
| _their_ money, and have traceability. So in some sense it was
| just what you say, but that roughly doubles the amount of
| work done for accounting software. It also meant that most
| private-sector software was insufficient for the task.
| [deleted]
| jasode wrote:
| _> complexity was in keeping track of each dollar's origin, and
| making sure that it was spent on only what the source approved
| it to be spent on. [...] they all had strong opinions on what
| the money could be spent on._
|
| Understand your frustration but the public was outraged when $1
| million of a librarian's donation was used for a football
| scoreboard.[1]
|
| Yes, the university did comply to the exact letter of his will
| (only $100k was restricted for library and the rest was
| unrestricted) ... but the public thinks the _spirit_ of his
| donation was ignored.
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/search?q=librarian+donation+used+for+...
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Universities are literally the sole specific institutional
| exception in the essay:
|
| _> There are a couple exceptions to this principle. One is
| when the nonprofit is an umbrella organization. It 's
| reasonable to make a restricted donation to a university, for
| example, because a university is only nominally a single
| nonprofit._
|
| The article doesn't say what to do when donating to a
| university or college. So, when donating to a university, do
| also donate in a _relatively_ unrestricted way. But donate
| to:
|
| 1. a department (in small amounts),
|
| 2. a scholarship fund (in medium amounts),
|
| 3. an endowed professorship for a specific
| department/discipline (in large amounts), or
|
| 4. some important component of the physical plant (in
| "Gates/Allen" amounts).
|
| Not to the university as a whole.
|
| At least that's what I've witness as being effective.
|
| Oh, and if you donate to scholarships, make sure the
| university/college plays ball. If they won't at least match
| 4% of the principle, just set up the scholarship an
| independent thing and let the kid choose where they go. Why
| donate a student scholarship to a specific school whose value
| is literally just the sustainable withdrawal rate? What's the
| point of that? Certainly not to help a student. Your donation
| will turn into a chair on the deck to be rearranged. But lots
| of donors get suckered into doing this.
| saurik wrote:
| I mean, when funds are unrestricted, they "should" become
| fungible; so, when I give unrestricted donations I _also_
| make it clear that I don 't want them to try to tell me "we
| used _your_ money to do X "... that way, I can look at
| anything I want on campus that was improved and think "I did
| that :)". If the university is spending money on bullshit,
| then probably they just don't deserve donations at all :/.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| The problem with that is, in part, that they ignored the
| spirit of the donation, but also that the proper amount for a
| university to spend on a scoreboard is twelve dollars and
| thirty-seven cents.
|
| OK, that's a bit unrealistic. I could build them one for a
| few hundred, though, and they could pay a student $50 to flip
| over the numbers during the game.
| remote_phone wrote:
| > I could build them one for a few hundred
|
| No, you couldn't.
|
| It has to keep working for years/decades, be maintainable,
| survive bad weather conditions, etc. even if you made the
| scoreboard out of wood and painted it, it would have to be
| large enough so that the stadium could see, the paint would
| fade and it would take weeks to make it, etc.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| You're right, I couldn't.
|
| But I could buy one off the shelf for $25k! That's how
| much scoreboards cost if you want to show the score, not
| play full-color video. LED panels are cheap if you only
| need to show text. It's keeping up with the Joneses
| that's expensive.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| So rebuild it every time as necessary. It will take a
| long time to eat into $1MM
| lrem wrote:
| See, they evaded a recurring cost!
| bradleyjg wrote:
| The proper amount to spend is zero. There's no reason for
| universities to be running minor league football teams with
| unpaid labor. On the contrary that's the exact opposite of
| "charitable".
| throwawaygh wrote:
| I mean, a few hundred for a score board seems right. Even
| a few thousand for a piece of infrastructure that can be
| used 20+ years for several different sports is not so
| unreasonable. Even rural middle schools will sometimes
| spend that much on scoreboards.
|
| In University I participated in a club sport "funded"
| exclusively through the student government -- really more
| of a tax rebate than anything else since only 60% of what
| the climbing "team" paid in student fees we got back to
| buy ropes, biners, rent a van for outings. That sort of
| stuff.
|
| College sports do serve a real community-building
| purpose. Just... a few hundred or maybe low thousands
| total per sport instead of a few tens of millions for the
| main sport.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Fundamentally, you're correct. However, when working for
| a university, I was well aware that private sector
| donations (and maybe even state funds) went up or down
| depending on how well the football team did. A losing
| record for the football team ought not to result in lower
| private sector donations towards scientific research or
| scholarships at that university, but apparently at most
| universities it does. Universities that ignore this fact
| do so at their peril.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| I don't expect universities to spontaneously do the right
| thing. I'm hoping the courts force them to at least stop
| exploiting the pro athletes that make them so much money.
| wpietri wrote:
| Definitely. One of my modest proposals that will never
| happen is that colleges go back to teaching, and football
| and basketball become more like baseball, where they have
| minor leagues as a way of getting players. The jumbling
| together of college and professional-in-all-but-name
| athletics is absurd, and egregious exploitation of
| "student" athletes to boot.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> It was much easier to get money donated for a new building,
| than to maintain an old one, so you can have a situation in
| which new buildings are being built while old ones fall apart._
|
| That seems logical enough to me.
|
| I mean, if every new building is an unprofitable drag on
| university finances, they wouldn't be building more of them. At
| the very least a building should pay for its own upkeep, if not
| its original construction costs.
|
| And given that the fundraising department will surely want to
| tell rich donors that buildings are good for the university,
| simultaneously saying that the previous buildings were all
| _bad_ for the university would be a very confusing message.
| entangledqubit wrote:
| I'd love to hear insider stories about how misaligned
| fundraising department metrics can end up being for the
| university.
|
| Regarding donating buildings in general, Andrew Carnegie
| seemed to get a lot of prestige leverage when he funded
| thousands of public libraries by paying for the buildings
| while requiring the locals to pay the upkeep and operation.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > if every new building is an unprofitable drag on university
| finances, they wouldn't be building more of them.
|
| No, you then need a steady supply of new buildings to provide
| funding to fix the old ones/replace the old ones.
| andrewfong wrote:
| Reminds me of the story about the Yale donor who wanted a
| cathedral, but Yale wanted a gym, so they built a gym that
| looked like a cathedral.
| https://www.gpsmycity.com/attractions/payne-whitney-gymnasiu...
| HuShifang wrote:
| Yup. They're really into the medieval aesthetic there -- the
| Hall of Graduate Studies was built in the 1930s IIRC, and
| they splashed the stone walls with acid and purposefully
| cracked some of the stained glass windows to make it all look
| that much more Oxbridge-y....
| temp8964 wrote:
| The article mentioned the Gates foundation which has terrible
| records in education initiatives:
|
| - The big failure in small schools initiative:
| https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/th...
|
| - The big failure in teacher evaluation initiative:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-melinda-gates-foundatio...
|
| - The big failure in Common Core initiative:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/...
|
| Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/
| scythe wrote:
| >Now it is funding anti-racist math: https://equitablemath.org/
|
| In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have
| specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally
| taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the
| distributive property consistently, and simply understanding
| how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent number
| or expression -- I have _multiple_ students messing these up
| pretty much _every week_.
|
| With that said, this website is extremely discouraging. There
| are five "steps" on the front page but no specifics, and
| buzzwords everywhere, suffused with no-duh filler content and
| paraphrased repetition.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| I imagine that it will turn out to be a mixture of a few
| valuable insights, and a lot of politically motivated
| bullshit. The insights will be used as an excuse to push the
| politics.
|
| It would be nice if someone could extract the good insights
| and publish them separately, maybe just on one page of paper.
| For example, here are some ideas that come to my mind:
|
| * For minority students, make sure that the language itself
| is not a major obstacle. Maybe in a perfect world everyone
| would get a teacher who speaks their preferred language. But
| a simple useful thing you can do here and now is to print a
| dictionary of words you are going to use in the following
| lecture. Like "triangle = el triangulo", except this is of
| course a stupid example, but there are probably also good
| ones. So the student doesn't get stuck merely because you
| used a word they didn't understand. Depending on how much
| work you want to spend here, you could even provide a short
| summary of the lecture. (Review it with someone who speaks
| the language and understands your subject, don't just use
| whatever Google Translate throws at you. If you don't know
| such person, you could probably find someone on Facebook.)
|
| * Do not assume everyone has an access to internet. If it is
| important, print it on paper and give the paper to kids.
|
| * Check whether your examples are not culturally foreign to
| the students. Again, a silly made-up example, but don't use
| "two apples and two apples equals four apples" as an example
| for kids from a culture that doesn't know apples (or even
| might have a taboo against apples); just use oranges or
| whatever. Or just make sure you use a wide enough range of
| examples.
|
| * Try to get some insight into what their culture expects
| from your students. Maybe asking questions is considered
| impolite, or trying to answer a question unless you are 100%
| sure, or admitting that you know something that your
| classmates don't know, or admitting that you don't understand
| something. Try to find a workaround; discuss your solution
| with people from given culture.
|
| On the other hand... I have downloaded some documents from
| that website and the language they use is horrible. Bad faith
| assumed everywhere, there is no such thing as an innocent
| mistake or ignorance, everything is "racism" and
| "supremacism". Come on; if you are trying to tell people they
| should be more empathetic and helpful to each other, the
| least you can do is stop being an aggressive asshole towards
| them. Calling someone a racist twenty times in a day, just
| because they e.g. teach math using the traditional methods,
| that definitely is not a way to make friends with anyone who
| has a shred of self-respect. (Yeah, it's not about making
| friends, it's about signaling being "holier than thou".)
| temp8964 wrote:
| You are 100% correct. It is critical race theory (CRT)
| decorated with a few pedagogical insights. Those
| pedagogical insights have been well known. They can stand
| alone and do not need those CRT BS at all. Also, they are
| never a major issues in math education.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Never? Really? That's a strong claim.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| > In my limited experience, a lot of students seem to have
| specific weaknesses with the subjects that are traditionally
| taught in middle school. Manipulating fractions, applying the
| distributive property consistently, and simply understanding
| how to dereference a variable by inserting an equivalent
| number or expression -- I have multiple students messing
| these up pretty much every week.
|
| Yeah, this is a frustrating one.
|
| I've been catching up my little brother on some math stuff,
| and I can see him slowly getting better with distributivity,
| but it's _tough_.
|
| The frustrating thing is I have a _really good_ sense of what
| error he 's likely to make and why, but I also know that when
| I try to explain it it's just going to confuse him and he's
| going to think "your explanation makes sense to me, but my
| explanation also made sense to me and apparently it was
| wrong, so how the hell am I supposed to know how to solve
| this?"
|
| I feel like this is a problem that could be solved with
| technology, but existing solutions are really terrible at it.
| I looked at Brilliant, but it does the same "explain
| complicated mathematical concepts with words that sound
| logical (and pictures) so the next time the kid tries to
| understand a complicated thing they'll come up with their own
| logical-sounding explanation and be completely wrong and get
| stumped" thing.
|
| EDIT: I think something like an equivalent of Human Resource
| Machine, except for proof solvers, would be really nice.
| lowercased wrote:
| https://equitablemath.org/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
|
| I dug in a bit and found that and... as progressive as I
| would like to think I am, I'm 100% confused as to how "focus
| on getting the 'right' answer" and "independent practice is
| valued over teamwork" is... 'white supremacy' showing up in
| math.
|
| HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I missing
| something obvious?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > HN may not be the place to discuss this, but... am I
| missing something obvious?
|
| The Gates Foundation are likely giving money to these
| efforts so as to balance out the heavy "learn to code"
| focus of most other SV-tech educational efforts. It's the
| anti-white-supremacy equivalent of buying carbon offsets
| for your dirty energy use.
| human wrote:
| You are so right and it's sad to see.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| HN is unfortunately the extremely wrong place to discuss
| this :( Language like that can be used by bad-faith folks
| here to push the (false and ridiculous) idea that the
| Equitable Math people don't care about mathematical rigor
| or logical reasoning.
|
| The idea is that those attitudes encourage
| hypercompetitiveness among children and inappropriately
| reinforce the idea that math grades are a measure of
| "inherent ability."
|
| - "Independent practice is valued over teamwork" encourages
| a classroom where the "best students" come from families
| who can afford private tutoring
|
| - "focus on getting the right answer" means that teachers
| don't get an appropriate sense of where students are
| actually struggling, and again incentivizes the affluent
| privately-tutored student who doesn't have to worry about
| explaining their answer.
|
| It is not that either of these are inherently "white
| supremacist," but they are inherently poor measures of
| mathematical understanding. The racism connection comes in
| by the fact that these are measures which can be "juked" by
| affluence, and that students from rough backgrounds are
| unfairly penalized. Given that racism in US teachers is
| also a big problem, it can lead to ugly situations like
| "Jimmy is dumb at math and can't do Algebra II" rather than
| "Jimmy makes a lot of dumb sign errors and needs specific
| practice."
|
| In particular: these are (nominally) race-neutral
| criticisms of US public education with especially acute
| impact for black students, but also affect white students
| from tougher backgrounds.
| temp8964 wrote:
| You are exaggerating lots of things here.
|
| - The link between "Independent practice is valued over
| teamwork" to "private tutoring" is very weak.
|
| - The link between "focus on getting the right answer" to
| "private tutoring" is very weak.
|
| - No. Those measures do not particularly unfairly
| penalize students from rough backgrounds. No matter what
| other measures you propose, affluent students can benefit
| more.
|
| - No. Racism in US teachers is not a big problem.
|
| - Focusing on right answers and using standardized tests
| actually help students from tougher backgrounds. Not the
| other way around.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| Racism in US teachers is in fact a big problem, as is
| racism among doctors and bankers[1]. And focusing on
| standardized test scores almost always hurts poor
| students because it rewards families who can afford
| private test preparation[2]. These are scientific facts
| with a great deal of evidence - evidence which is
| considerably more compelling than "it sounds good to
| Hacker News."
|
| You are just wrong. You cannot just make things up
| because they are ideologically convenient. And I am so
| sick of having the same zombie arguments with people who
| are recklessly indifferent to the facts at hand.
|
| > In this sample, we found no significant association
| between occupation and level of bias (see Table 4). That
| is, teachers held levels of implicit bias, explicit bias
| as operationalized using a feel- ing thermometer, and
| symbolic racism that were not statistically different
| from the levels of nonteachers. This result persisted
| through all five models. That is, this lack of
| relationship held despite controlling for demographic
| factors (Model 2), educa- tion (Model 3), political
| preference (Model 4), or all of these characteristics
| combined (Model 5).
|
| > In conclusion, we have found that teachers' [anti-Black
| and pro-White] bias levels are quite similar to those of
| the larger population. These findings challenge the
| notion that teachers might be uniquely equipped to
| instill positive racial attitudes in children or bring
| about racial justice, instead indicating that teachers
| need just as much sup- port in contending with their
| biases as the population at large.
|
| > Researchers, including those who work for the test
| companies, have known wealth is strongly correlated with
| outcomes on standardized tests for years. There are
| several reasons why. Wealthy students attend higher
| ranked schools within more financially resourced
| districts. Richer families can afford more tutoring, test
| prep and enrichment activities. The College Board never
| claimed that test prep could improve scores until it was
| available for free online, at which point the evidence of
| improvement came rolling in. Standardized tests are
| better proxies for how many opportunities a student has
| been afforded than they are predictors for students'
| potential. Consequently, tests weed out budding low-
| income students instead of creating equitable access to
| institutions that help build wealth. This is why many
| colleges have abandoned using standardized test
| altogether.
|
| [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X
| 2091275...
|
| [2] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-
| avenue/2019/05/17/student...
| temp8964 wrote:
| > And focusing on standardized test scores almost always
| hurts poor students because it rewards families who can
| afford private test preparation.
|
| All the other measures (extra-curricula, projects,
| presentations, reports, etc.) benefit richer family much
| more. Standardized test is the only thing poor students
| can work hard on without needing much help / resource
| from parents. The solution in the article [2] you cited
| is giving money to kids.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Racism in US teachers is in fact a big problem,
|
| _Your own fucking quotes_ contradict that.
|
| > teachers held levels of implicit bias, explicit bias as
| operationalized using a feel- ing thermometer, and
| symbolic racism that were not statistically different
| from the levels of nonteachers.
|
| > In conclusion, we have found that teachers' [anti-Black
| and pro-White] bias levels are quite similar to those of
| the larger population.
|
| At least put in the effort to find citations that don't
| directly admit that the claim you're making is false.
| miltonsopus wrote:
| I think that you have missed the point. It is implied in
| his argument that if the level of racial bias in teachers
| is no different than in the larger population, then there
| is a problem with racism in US teachers (as a result of
| their being a problem with racism in the US).
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > if the level of racial bias in teachers is no different
| than in the larger population, then there is a problem
| with racism in US teachers (as a result of their being a
| problem with racism in the US).
|
| And if the level of murder in teachers is no different
| than in the larger population, then there is a problem
| with murder in US teachers (as a result of there being a
| problem with murder in the US).
|
| _Even under the grossly unsubstatiated assumption_ that
| there _is_ particularly a problem with murder in the US -
| rather than some specific murderers (or white
| supremacists, as the case may be) who know perfectly well
| who they are and will not respond to 'raising awareness'
| about 'anti-murderism' - presenting that as "Murder by US
| teachers is in fact a big problem." is _at best_
| ridiculous cherry-picking.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Replace "teachers" with "police" and you do get a
| reasonable argument. In a situation where someone has
| outsized authority and influence, even a baseline level
| of <bad thing> is worse than normal. If you're looking to
| affect outcomes most significantly, reducing "racism"
| amongst teachers is probably going to be more impactful
| per $ than reducing it amongst the general population.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Replace "teachers" with "police" and you do get a
| reasonable argument.
|
| Not really. I'm fine with a baseline level murder by
| police (at least to the extent that I'm fine with where
| that baseline is in the first place, which is admittedly
| not a given), provided there is also a baseline level of
| punishment for said murder. The problems with police tend
| be either that there is a _higher_ level of murder by
| police than the general population, or that there is a
| _lower_ degree of punishment for it.
|
| Also, of course, I don't grant that there is a problem
| with racism in the general population in the first place,
| since white supremacists and social justice warriors
| combined are substatially in the minority. You _might_ be
| able to make a credible case that racial _bias_ is a
| (minor but worth addressing) problem, but noone 's done
| so lately, and you'd need to _start_ by making it clear
| that the thing you 're talking about is fundamentally
| distict from a explicit belief that one race is
| inherently better or worse/more or less valuable than
| another, as white supremacists and social justice
| warriors believe.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| We aren't talking about simply a baseline level of
| murders, but murders due to (or influenced by) racism.
| Even if you're okay with a baseline level of murders by
| police, whatever that level is, I hope you'd have
| problems with a distribution where the victims are solely
| black people (or to be more real-world, where murders of
| black people are punished less severely and less often,
| thus giving greater incentive [or equivalently, less
| disincentive] to kill people of a certain race).
|
| In such a situation, the same "amount" of
| racism/discrimination/implicit bias has an outsized
| impact due to who wields it.
|
| The same applies to teachers. If a random person believes
| that black people are predisposed to academic failure,
| that's bad sure, but won't negatively affect many black
| children. If a teacher who teaches black students holds
| that belief, that will influence how that teacher teaches
| those students.
|
| > social justice warriors belive
|
| This is a mischaracterization of what anyone I know who
| would consider themselves a "social justice warrior"
| believes, so I think at least some of your objection is
| due to a misrepresentation of the statements being made
| by these people.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| joshuamorton,
|
| Anyone who says things like "social justice warriors
| believe one race is inherently better than the other" is
| just a toxic racist troll and not worth engaging with.
| It's stupid and _deliberately_ dishonest, not some good-
| faith misconception.
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| No it doesn't, the specific point is that racial bias is
| just as bad among teachers as it is every other
| profession. I never said teachers were _more_ racist than
| other people, in fact I very specifically said:
|
| > Racism in US teachers is in fact a big problem, as is
| racism among doctors and bankers[1].
|
| If you want to argue that racist doctors and bankers
| aren't a problem then feel free. But don't project your
| problems with reading comprehension onto me.
| arp242 wrote:
| A number of these things are just good general advice.
| Others a bit less so.
|
| The explainer on "focus on getting the 'right' answer"
| (page 65) is actually pretty okay. For example it
| encourages to "Engage with true problem solving" such as
| "What are some strategies we can use to engage with this
| problem?". That seems pretty good to me. It goes on to say
| that "teaching math isn't just about solving specific
| problems. It's about helping students understand the deeper
| mathematical concepts so that they can apply them
| throughout their lives". Again, this seems fairly on-point
| to me for middle/high-school math.
|
| People seem to have taken this part in particular a bit out
| of context and ran with it. They mostly mean "having
| students than semi-mindlessly solve equations to get the
| right answer isn't really teaching them all that much about
| math". I think most here would agree with that.
|
| I find the explainer for "Independent practice is valued
| over teamwork or collaboration" (page 61) really weird
| though: "it reinforces _individualism_ and the notion that
| _I'm the only one_. This does not give value to
| collectivism and community understanding, and fosters
| conditions for competition and individual success ". At
| some earlier point there was also a swipe against
| "capitalism".
|
| Overall, I found it mostly good with some bad mixed in.
|
| But ... I'm from a region in the Netherlands with a fairly
| homogeneous white population, and attended a school where
| almost everyone was white; my class certainly was. I can
| confidently say my math classes sucked, for quite a number
| of the reasons listed in that article.
|
| But was this because of "white supremacy culture"? I don't
| think so. That seems like a really narrow view on things.
| Sometimes bad teaching is exactly that: bad teaching.
| Nothing more, nothing less.
| lowercased wrote:
| I'd initially missed 'explainer' pages - I was clicking
| what looked like links, but they weren't initially
| working.
|
| Even after reading some of these pages, things still
| don't make much sense. If there's a link to 'racism', I'm
| still not seeing it.
|
| Another weird one was "teachers enculturated in the USA
| teach math the way they were taught math". But... I was
| under the impression that we'd been using 'common core'
| stuff for the past 10+ years, and a big complaint is that
| teachers can't teach it because it's not how they
| learned.
|
| Very little of these explainers seem to make any attempt
| to connect the racism angle, which is disappointing.
|
| As you pointed out, bad teaching can just be bad
| teaching, and doesn't have to have any other explanation.
|
| A few others I saw:
|
| "Have students create mathematical definitions in their
| own words in groups, and bring the groups together to co-
| construct mathematical definitions as a class."
|
| Unless there are agreed-on definitions up front, how
| would you determine if anyone is correct or not?
|
| "Let's get into partners and do a thinkpair-share. We
| will incorporate everyone's ideas and try to synthesize
| them."
|
| I had 'group work' 30+ years ago. It sucked. It assumes
| that everyone even cares, or cares enough at the same
| level.
|
| "How do I dismantle power structures in the classroom?"
|
| Classroom Activity: Flipped learning, where students
| teach concepts to other students.
|
| That's just creating other power structures.
| temp8964 wrote:
| The good things you found in there have nothing to do
| with race. Also they are well known in math education.
| It's not like the authors discovered / created those
| pedagogical insights. They are using those pedagogical
| insights to push their political agenda.
| scythe wrote:
| >I'm 100% confused as to how "focus on getting the 'right'
| answer"
|
| In my opinion, there is a problem here, but it's being
| expressed wrong. The complaint should be: "focus on getting
| the right 'answer'", with _' answer'_ called out, i.e.,
| that writing a number or expression that satisfies the
| problem setup is the primary goal. But this tends to teach
| students to take shortcuts when we need to teach _fluency
| in reading and writing mathematical notation_ ,
| particularly, as I mentioned, basic notation: fractions,
| parentheses, variables and exponents.
|
| Is this "racist"? Not _per se_ , but it happens within a
| system where the higher-class students go to schools that
| have highly qualified teachers and innovative methods (e.g.
| IB) while the unnecessariat are consigned to schools which
| have only "proven their worth" through standardized test
| scores and which teach students to pass the same; what is
| unfair is that this substandard understanding is mostly
| taught to the already-disadvantaged.
|
| But the whole site is written like this: the
| recommendations of the experts have been filtered through
| seven proxies of PR teams, not all of whom seem to be
| _trying_ to offer comprehensible and reassuring
| explanations.
| miltonsopus wrote:
| Since seeing the original comment I have spent the last 2
| or 3 hours reading about this. I started on the website and
| with that document and was confused myself. I also didn't
| notice the explainers later in the document (the links
| didn't work for me either).
|
| I watched a webinar linked from the website which covered
| the material in the document, but the presenters didn't
| cover a 'what is and what isn't racist in the maths
| classroom' checklist, rather they showed how to use the
| document in your teaching/preparation. They did note at the
| beginning that a level of awareness about antiracism is
| required, and at the end linked to several sources
| regarding racism in the curriculum and racism in the math
| classroom (and beyond).
|
| I had seen a meme recently about 'math is racist' and I
| didn't get the reference at the time, I'm guessing it's
| about this foundation. Everybody knows that math is not
| racist and nobody is claiming it is. The problem is that
| governments are racist, institutions are racist and
| classrooms can be racist.
|
| There is a mind view that many people hold which
| automatically assigns people of colour a lower expectation
| of academic achievement. The government announces new
| educational reforms citing statistics that people of colour
| achieve less academically. These reforms pay for additional
| teaching time or 'interventions' which amount to a few to a
| dozen hours of extra teaching which is supposed to achieve
| something that the five year old was unable to learn in the
| 36000 hours they've lived so far and 'level the playing
| field'. Teacher evaluation bars people of colour entry to
| eighth grade math though they have the grades. Math
| questions as recent as this decade ask you how many plants
| of cotton can 400 slaves pick in 120 days or how many
| slaves can you fit in a slave ship with x and y dimensions.
|
| There is nothing in the brain of people of any race (or
| gender - maths is sexist too!) that stops them from
| comprehending mathematics. So why do white boys do math
| more good? Then go on to earn the good STEM degrees and
| high-paying STEM jobs disproportionately?
|
| Math focusing on the right answers in the classroom is
| discouraging for anybody who is already discouraged.
| Similarly, having a hard time understanding and being
| afraid not only to get something wrong, but to question the
| authority can be scary, especially when you are growing up
| in an environment where questioning some authorities can
| incite conflict.
|
| As another comment suggested, it is generally good advice
| for any math teaching. The same goes for teamwork over
| individual work - being able to explore and approach the
| problem as a group, and work through it vocally with others
| as a collective _can_ be encouraging and is also a good
| opportunity to learn from other perspectives. From the
| perspective of race, I would agree with the guide which
| mentions the problems of 'individualisation' in the
| classroom, how this can lead to competitiveness and further
| discouragement of those who are struggling.
|
| Most of the principles in the guide seem like best practice
| to me for any group of young mathematicians. Especially
| those who do not feel like they can be mathematicians or
| have any place doing mathematics. Despite its diverse
| history, success in mathematics in popular culture is
| associated with white men. That is my view at least, and
| whether that view has been developed because of my own
| internal racism or because that is how mathematicians were
| depicted to me in TV and cinema I don't know.
|
| I think there is a lot to unpack here, I am happy that some
| discourse on the subject has started here. I am looking
| forward to learning more about this topic and about myself
| and those around me and thank the original commenter for
| bringing it to my attention, though I think they realise
| themselves that racism in the classroom is a problem which
| NEEDS to be tackled.
|
| I made a HN account for this so I am sorry if I have missed
| any commenting conventions. I am on mobile so do not have
| any citations but would be happy to provide them when I
| can.
| flaque wrote:
| The tone of these articles is really unfortunate.
|
| Very much positions the donors as bad guys, their own admission
| of failure as proof that they're bad guys, and that the
| problems are fundamentally unsolvable and that we shouldn't do
| anything.
|
| It's fine to note programs that don't work; but schadenfreude
| in fully-funded experiments with the goal to help children is
| counter-productive.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| Well, Gates _is_ a bad guy. He was a robber baron who decided
| that stealing a whole lot of money makes him the world 's
| leading expert on everything. He has no training in pedagogy,
| epidemiology, sanitation, or really anything else relevant to
| the missions of his organization, yet he seems to actually
| believe he's a Great Scientist Using Evidence-Based
| Approaches to Save the World. He lives in a $200 million
| house yet has funded a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to
| convince people he's generous.
|
| I laugh at Elon Musk when he thinks getting fired from Paypal
| means he knows how to run a car company. I also laugh at Bill
| Gates when he thinks stealing the worst desktop operating
| system makes him a doctor.
|
| We can't overthrow our masters. At least let us make fun of
| them.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >yet has funded a billion-dollar propaganda campaign to
| convince people he's generous
|
| And let's not forget the scummy secondary benefit of Gates
| donating tons of money into soneth education. It
| undoubtedly is going to have some influence on what
| computers they use and teach, further entrenching Microsoft
| as place.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| > He has no training in pedagogy, epidemiology, sanitation,
| or really anything else relevant to the missions of his
| organization
|
| I'm confused by this statement. It only counts as training
| if you did it around age 20? Or what makes you think that
| someone who is spending this much time, effort and money on
| a given topic would not arrange for appropriate (or rather,
| excellent) training on it?
|
| Or is this something you conclude by starting from the
| assertion that Bill Gates must be a bad guy?
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| If you were to choose someone to lead one of the world's
| largest charities, would you choose to hire some random
| guy and train him from scratch or would you choose an
| expert in public health?
|
| If you were to take some random bozo off the street and
| put them in charge of the Bill and Melinda Gates
| Foundation, they would learn a lot about medicine and
| sanitation and education and so forth. It would also be
| obviously stupid. Yet that's pretty much the way the
| current system. Our society hands control over massive
| amounts of resources to rich people because they made
| money doing entirely unrelated things.
|
| It's even worse here. William Henry Gates III is rich
| because of his malicious and illegal actions as the head
| of Microsoft. He is _worse_ than a random bozo; he 's
| been selected to be powerful because of his bad behavior.
|
| Maybe you think Gates's tenure at Microsoft wasn't
| completely destructive. I disagree, but whatever.
| Substitute in your favorite brain-dead celebrity or "job
| creator". The problem is the same: we hand over control
| of our institutions to morons because they have money.
| westurner wrote:
| Unbelievable.
|
| Rather than diminishing the efforts of others, you could start
| helping by describing your own efforts to improve education (in
| order to qualify your ability to assess the mentioned and other
| efforts to improve education and learning)
|
| In context to seed and series funding for a seat on a board of
| a for-profit venture, an NGO non-profit organization can choose
| whether to accept restricted donations and government
| organizations have elected public servant leaders who lead and
| find funding.
|
| Works based on Faust:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_based_on_Faust
| sjg007 wrote:
| Successful schooling involves a parental component. We probably
| need a way to pay parents to help their kids with school.
|
| The other thing I noticed with the pandemic and distance
| learning is that kids do really well in small groups (2-4 kids)
| and extremely well 1:1. This is a tutelage model. I felt that
| the classes that went best for my kids incorporated the small
| group style. In this model, the general education itself can be
| recorded and the small groups live which work really well.
|
| I think this is the future but there's a lot of push back on
| that.
| danans wrote:
| > The other thing I noticed with the pandemic and distance
| learning is that kids do really well in small groups (2-4
| kids) and extremely well 1:1.
|
| Small group learning has been a standard part of education
| for a few decades.
|
| It is way too early to make claim that the pandemic version
| of this has improved things. Anecdotes thus far have pointed
| to some kids doing well in pandemic small groups and 1:1
| while others are doing terribly, but data about the effects
| has not even been collected yet, much less analyzed or
| conclusions drawn.
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's always way too early or way too late in the let's do
| nothing world.
| temp8964 wrote:
| > We probably need a way to pay parents to help their kids
| with school.
|
| Check this great interview: Glenn Loury & Roland Fryer
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RL1peNBAnns
| sjg007 wrote:
| That was a great interview. I wonder if we could engage
| college grads and college students with tutoring jobs that
| reduce their student loans at the national level. You could
| do some amount of tutoring and get a credit reduction. This
| way you don't have to do a Teach for America type job or
| work for a nonprofit but maybe get a little help paying
| things down.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Maybe a good idea, if combined with vouchers / education
| savings credit.
| sjg007 wrote:
| What do vouchers and education savings credit do?
| temp8964 wrote:
| Give money back to family to spend on education as their
| own choice.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| Most startups fail, and we often talk about how that's a good
| thing. Absent capital constraints, why is that different for
| charitable initiatives?
|
| Gates is devoting resources towards nuclear (Terrapower) and
| nuclear has a terrible track record in effeciency (LCOE) and
| generation as a total percent of fleet capacity. Should he stop
| trying there? I would argue it isn't. I would argue the same
| for trying to improve education.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Not the same.
|
| Try failed engineering wouldn't harm anybody (except wasting
| money).
|
| Try bad social policy, could harm people you experimented on.
| It also has broad impact on the society.
|
| Quote: "..., there is nothing inherently wrong with trying a
| reform and having it fail. The key is learning from failure
| so that we avoid repeating the same mistakes. It is pretty
| clear that the Gates effective teaching reform effort failed
| pretty badly. It cost a fortune. It produced significant
| political turmoil and distracted from other, more promising
| efforts. And it appears to have generally done more harm than
| good with respect to student achievement and attainment
| outcomes."
|
| https://www.educationnext.org/gates-effective-teaching-
| initi...
| fossuser wrote:
| Therac-25? There are so many other examples, this comment
| is just wildly wrong.
|
| Trying things has some inherent risk of failure, but that
| doesn't mean it's not worth working on hard problems. It
| just means you do the best you can to account for that risk
| (and learning from it to not make the same mistakes again).
|
| Edit: You added the quote which I don't disagree with in
| sentiment (I don't know specifics of the policy in
| question).
| temp8964 wrote:
| If you care about education reform, I guess you must have
| heard of the Common Core. In the field of education
| reform, almost nobody thinks a national standard is
| critical / essential to the education reform in the
| country. It created huge huge political turmoil for many
| years. Both left and right were against it, but it got
| pushed through. Now it is gone, nobody cares. Imagine the
| resource wasted on this meaningless effort which could
| have been used for something else.
| gnu8 wrote:
| Bill Gates made all of that money by destroying Netscape, Be,
| and countless other companies. His dog shit software like
| Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer set internet security back
| by about ten years. As far as I'm concerned he is a force for
| evil in the world and he should shove his resources up his
| ass. He doesn't deserve to be a part of the solution to the
| world's problems with energy, education or anything else. He
| isn't allowed to "buy" being a good person. He isn't one.
| macintux wrote:
| I think the world was a worse place when Bill Gates was
| heading Microsoft. I think it's a better place now that
| he's heading a massive charitable foundation.
|
| Life is complicated. People are complicated.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Interestingly, its still their money, and still their choice
| where to use it.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It is money made by shitty business practices, and now that
| the great Gates has realised that there is indeed an upper
| limit to personal hedonism they've elected to do the
| voyeuristic hedonism - now with the intermediates of poor
| people everywhere; or as similar to how Morty put it, "just
| sounds like masturbation with extra steps."
| temp8964 wrote:
| Yes. Even when they are probably doing more harm than good.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| We learn. That's not harm.
| pfortuny wrote:
| At the expense of others. That is.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Not so much? Hard to do worse than we already are :)
| rdiddly wrote:
| The one restriction I insist on is that they leave me off their
| mailing list! I get it, the odds are good that a previous donor
| will donate again, but especially for small donations it ends up
| feeling like all I accomplished was to purchase a bunch of spam &
| kill some trees!
| donate12301923 wrote:
| So, let's unwrap this.
|
| You make some money. Which is taxed in various ways. The pie gets
| bigger, the state (and the People) are getting a cut.
|
| Then you are told you should do more. And you also think, well,
| why not help the world?
|
| Then you are told: but don't waste your time volunteering at a
| shelter -- better work and donate your money instead.
|
| OK, so you don't get the satisfaction of seeing the _humans_ you
| help but you know that at least your donation helps, maybe, the
| same humans you want.
|
| A restricted donation gives you some agency into improving the
| world. You are still abstracted away, you don't really see the
| humans you are supposedly helping, but at least the money only
| goes into improving the world into some dimension that needs
| improving and that you consider relevant.
|
| But no, what you must do is just donate unrestricted. That is,
| have no agency, have no interaction with actual humans in need,
| be just a wallet that helps, maybe, something as defined by the
| entity that receives the money. Your only choice is who spends it
| and how much to give them.
|
| At this point, how about we bring this to the logical conclusion
| that THERE SHOULD BE NO NONPROFITS. Clearly, if those with the
| already taxed money can't have an opinion, why should those
| nonprofits know what's what? You know who could spend the money:
| the State!
|
| So, abolish non-profits, and make the State as the sole decider
| of how things get spent. Then you can donate unrestricted to the
| State or just push for some taxes being raised.
| macintux wrote:
| > but don't waste your time volunteering at a shelter -- better
| work and donate your money instead.
|
| Bad advice.
|
| Volunteering is vital. I'm not sure why anyone would argue
| otherwise.
| sneak wrote:
| This highlights an issue that the article doesn't touch: how to
| choose trustworthy donation targets?
|
| It implies you should not to trust places with your money if you
| don't trust them to allocate it, which is correct, but how to
| know who to trust?
|
| I generally stick near-exclusively to GiveWell as a result.
|
| https://www.givewell.org/
|
| Each year they use a small fixed percentage of donations to
| research the most human benefit per dollar spent, and then use
| the remainder on that one single thing, maximizing the positive
| impact per dollar. The only thing the donor needs to know is that
| they have it handled. Any money you give them will go 100% to the
| thing they have determined is maximum impact that year. (One year
| recently it was mosquito netting, to prevent malaria, if I recall
| correctly.)
|
| This might sound like an ad but I'm not affiliated in any way,
| just a happy donor who is glad they exist.
| amznbyebyebye wrote:
| Why does he write like an SAT reading comprehension passage
| bmn__ wrote:
| It's called an essay, my good man.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Build state capacity, pay taxes.
| splitrocket wrote:
| Yes, but until then, the dam is still leaking like a sieve, and
| any hole that can be plugged needs to be plugged.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well I do pay taxes, but your strategy does raise the question
| of how well the state spends money. There are many people in
| the world who, for good reasons, neither trust their government
| to spend the money well, nor feel they have any realistic
| chance at improving the problems in their government.
| Government money is often a big target for corruption, and just
| as malware tends to get written for the software with the
| biggest market share, corruption tends to accumulate wherever
| the most money is.
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| I strongly disagree with this. If I were donating a large sum to
| a non-profit that helps poor children, I would absolutely earmark
| it with a stipulation that it must be used to help poor children
| who grew up as I did (poor, no opportunities for other
| aid/scholarships because, well we all know why).
|
| In any nonprofit or mentorship situation, I always make sure to
| reach the children who grew up like me because they truly have no
| means of assistance.
| santoshalper wrote:
| From the outside, it really looks like it's more about you than
| it is about helping anyone else.
| remote_phone wrote:
| But the end recipients are getting the money, so who cares?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Are they? Or is it sitting there in an account labelled
| "children named Tom who live in a town of between 10,000
| and 11,000 people and got a C in math in 2003"?
| randomsearch wrote:
| Because the charity knows how best to spend it, not you (as
| explained in the essay).
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| They don't though, they just think they do. Their goals
| are largely motivated by current politics.
| codecutter wrote:
| Sorry if I sound harsh, but I wonder if such a donation will be
| purely to satisfy one's ego. We give donation because we
| believe in the cause and feel good by donating. When I give
| donation, I give it unrestricted and sometimes even if it is
| not tax deductible.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| Aren't you already choosing to donate to a non-profit that is
| focused on this mission? If they're mission-focused, they
| presumably know how to best spend their money to support that
| mission.
| kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote:
| No, because there are literally no organizations that would
| have helped children like me. Not a single one.
| [deleted]
| kevmo wrote:
| This is why billionaire philanthropy is such a scam. It's just a
| tax-free way for oligarch to create societal infrastructure that
| further entrenches their hegemony.
| no_wizard wrote:
| And yet a constant theme I keep hearing on HN and other places is
| that "I would only donate if I could support X initiative at Y
| foundation"
|
| Mozilla comes to mind here. People often claiming they would
| donate if they could support only specific parts of the
| organization.
|
| This article shows there is much more nuance to think about here
| than just supporting a specific part of an organization
| autarch wrote:
| > People often claiming they would donate if they could support
| only specific parts of the organization.
|
| I think this may simply reflect lack of faith in Mozilla as a
| nonprofit. People don't trust them to use an unrestricted
| donation in a way that they think is good.
| marcinzm wrote:
| With Mozilla it's more that there is no way to donate money in
| a way where any of it will ever help the initiative (Firefox)
| you care about. Mozilla the foundation does not work on
| Firefox, Mozilla the corporation works on Firefox. Money flows
| from corp to foundation, not the other way around. So it's more
| of an issue of there being no non-profit that supports Firefox
| development. Or another way of saying it is that people don't
| like the current Mozilla mission statement and if it were
| different then they'd donate.
| temuze wrote:
| Also important: donate regularly.
|
| Ad-hoc donations make it difficult for a nonprofit to plan their
| budget. It forces them to spend a lot of that money to solicit
| more donations.
|
| My friend made a tool to donate anonymously and regularly to non-
| profits: https://sublimefund.org/
|
| Less spam, better for the non-profits. It's a good combination.
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