They're usually given for a fixed period of time to do something grandiose by the end of it and the NGO has to report how they've spent every cent of it, usually at the end of that grant, but sometimes along the way as well (every X months). Not to the IRS, but to grant-givers.
The vast majority of non-profits are political and social lobbying efforts. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to fill out a form.
I would love to see requirements that 75%+ of all non-profit revenue has to pass through to the community, that non-profits may not transfer funds to other non-profits, and that directors and officers cannot be compensated and have very modest limits on expenses.
Nobody wants to give you a huge grant to continue doing what you're already doing, you only get grants for doing something completely new and grandiose. If you're lucky, you may get like 20% of the grant to cover your other expenses that don't come with a caveat of having to spend it on something completely new.
Then there's a relatively tiny amount of organizations that processes the vast majority of funds. Universities, hospitals, big FOSS organizations, etc. Those are the ones that are actually interesting.
At most I advertise my for-profit website and try to gain personal fame, but if I was trying to do those 2 things, I'd spend it directly on those 2 things.
Kids benefit and I second-hand benefit.
Actually most non profits are a massive jobs program for the middle and lower middle class. The side effect is that some problems that the government or the private sector won’t touch, get a slight more attention while providing tax benefits to people who contribute.
Directors of non-profits that have enough money for this to matter are doing this as a full time job - are we going to eliminate every competent director from working here if they can't afford to stop getting compensated for their work?
Your suggestion would cripple non-profits doing all sorts of important and beneficial work.
Here's a surprisingly factual Teen Vogue primer:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-profit-industrial-comple...
Looking will blow up too many cushy deals for too much of the Powers That Be. A great deal of it is non-show "chairmanship" jobs for the family and friends of politicians. Legal bribes.
Feeding Our Future was another fine example of the shenanigans that go on in the US. Power Forward Communities was setup with $100 and captured $2 billion in EPA grants; caught while still doing only token work and not yet having been drained into the pockets of the favored. Abundant Blessings in CA was another nest of fraud; in criminal court right now.
Seems like you can't go more than a couple days without another non-profit scam mess hitting headlines.
Throw-down on some EPA effort As If That Is Typical, is intellectually dishonest. Mitigation and remediation are expensive and take time. And also there is substantial abuse and greenwashing. So you throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.
"Its all a scam" says the barstool attorney, doing nothing.
The actual org itself acts as an umbrella to coordinate work among the participating non-profits.
Who watches the watchers?
Because if it's no one, then all we're doing is vouching for what could easily be scams set up by who knows who to steer our money to dubious organizations for who knows what purpose.
We shouldn't trust the watchers any more than we should trust, say, Feed the Children. Or Medecins Sans Frontiers. All these organizations should be watched in a comprehensive fashion.
Personally, the more I look into GiveWell the more I think it's an amazing way to donate
apt username
Not saying that there's not grift in the nonprofit world, but my experience with a lot of people who work in this space is that they're good stewards of the funds and very dedicated to trying to help the world be a better place.
One of my groups of friend groups has a lot of people who work at non-profits that are really dedicated to good causes. They are people who care and wanted to find jobs with purpose. The companies they work for aren’t, as far as I can tell, trying to grift or swindle.
Yet their overall efficiency looks a lot like this chart: Very little money makes it out of the program because it’s so expensive to pay for all of their staff, office space, and meta-activities like doing more fundraising.
From the outside looking in, there is a lot of malaise and inefficiency that just gets accepted at this level. They know they’re taking a pay cut relative to private industry so they, in turn, put in less effort. Many of them invite us to meet up in the afternoons because they’re “working from home” or just leaving the office early. Every time they encounter hard work the solution is to hire more people. Some of them switch to for-profit companies for a while before coming back to non-profits for the laid back working environment. It’s just accepted, to them, that non-profit means it doesn’t have to be efficient or a lot of work.
Maybe my second hand experience is unique to this little bubble I’m in, but whenever I see statistics like this I think it’s more normal than not.
Maybe I wasn’t clear, but even if they did put in 8 hour days they wouldn’t be close to the level of stress that we associate with burnout. This isn’t a self-protection measure so much as a lifestyle choice.
But this just goes to show that we need watching and monitoring infrastructure even for the organizations who claim to be watching and monitoring on our behalf. We have to know who's full of it, and who is acting in a more trustworthy fashion.
What you point out is a huge miss. There is little chance that it wasn't intentional. There should, at minimum, be an explanation presented as to why they did that?
That's an extremely misleading statement. For instance, a food bank giving away food to a pantry does not count as "direct aid and grants" (at least, if they're defining that as "Grants and other assistance to domestic individuals." from the I-990" ). The salary for the warehouse worker operating the food bank is also not counted in that 92%.
Other cherry-picked statements like "32% of donors trust charities less today than they did five years ago" (not giving the percentage that trust charities more, or any other way to contextualize) make it clear that this is just a hit piece.
At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're presenting. Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? When you remove them, the numbers and percentages radically change. Not only that, it doesn't feel like the average person sees a food bank and a university, or a hospital, (and certainly not a university hospital), as the same sort of "charity". When you start digging deeper into the numbers, it just looks like they were lumped in to make the less resourced charities like food banks look bad.
Maybe there was some other reason they had for using this amalgamation? But they should be forthcoming with what that reason was.
Ask the IRS / congress, this isn’t some arbitrary grouping it’s what charity means in the US.
I do think it’s worth asking that question, but ask it of the people who can do something about it.
Because if you don't have shareholders and like to raise money that's not from VCs, it is convenient to have the donors get a tax deduction.
Otherwise you can run a business with little to no tax without being a non-profit.
> Most of this spending isn’t waste. Hospitals need staff. Universities need facilities. Even small charities need people to run programs. The problem isn’t intent. It’s that the reporting system was designed to satisfy the IRS, not to show donors where their money went.
The complaint seems to be that the form filed with the IRS has the information the IRS is interested in, not the information whoever made the site wants.
The reality is that I know how the places I donate my money and time to use their money because I’m not relying on their IRS filings to get that information. I would suggest others do the same and donate to places where they understand what the org is doing and where the money is going.
For every combat soldier in the Pacific Theater in WWII there were roughly 4.3 support soldiers. I don’t think anyone questions the fact you needed all those people for support and not direct action.
They wouldn’t disagree with what you say. The point they’re making is we don’t know. Maybe 92% of the remaining money is being spent usefully towards programs and 0% as overhead. Or maybe 0% usefully and 92% as overhead.
The IRS disclosure requirements are not sufficient to know. And yet we will give those donating to both organizations the same tax breaks.
The argument is to increase disclosure requirements for organizations through which so much money is passing so that we have a better idea as to how nether those tax breaks we’re giving are actually giving us any value in return.
I've worked for two such companies in my career (and partnered with a few others) and both of them were really just normal businesses that used their non-profit status as part of their business model. They used that status to position themselves as an objective second party to various governments and businesses and signal trust. They also internally represent themselves as something different from commercial businesses, just with a weird way of mopping up profit at the end of the fiscal year. At one I was a researcher and the other a low-level executive.
At the working level, both paid slightly under comparable jobs in the private sector, were often very top heavy, and spent lavishly on facilities and had large internal R&D programs that often went nowhere but acted like overamped hands-on training programs that expressed themselves in additional expertise they could offer their clients without having to turnover staff.
I often had multiple personal offices, subsidized mid-level restaurant quality lunches, laboratories, assistants, and research budgets stretching into the low millions of dollars. This was in addition to the regular work we were contracted out to do, which was often either direct work on fairly cutting-edge S&T like programs or providing special advisory and expertise services to those same customers.
All of the companies I know in this space are also fairly top-heavy with, executive and administrative pay helps sop up any profit.
The law requires these companies to report quite a bit of information about their financials into the public space every year [1]. Some of the executives make quite extraordinary pay.
(which can include golf courses, heh)
0dayman•1h ago