When the Giving Gets Tough

I think GiveWell's heart is the right place, but the mission is best suited where there are local eyes to verify the nonprofits. Most philanthropists give their money locally to help their community and causes and hold Board seats on more then one charitable organization. In Houston, the Greater Houston Community Foundation set up DonorHouston.org, a free, comprehensive online resource designed to make the connection between funders, donors and nonprofits easier, more strategic and user-friendly. The DonorHouston system is comprised of more than 100 indicators and data fields focused on four categories of information: general information, management and governance, financial history and program performance. Kansas City has a very similar site called DonorEdge.org. Both are managed by each city's community foundation, so there is pressure by each foundation's board and management teams to ensure that the data is properly managed.

"Their mission was to gather and disseminate exhaustive data on the effectiveness of charities."

The National Center on Charitable Statistics has been around for over a decade. A little longer than the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute, of which it is now a part.

Frankly, this poorly researched piece reads almost like an advertisement for GiveWell. The crime is not only astroturfing, but that their founders Karnofsky and Hassenfeld used the same false identities to raise doubts of financial improriety in other not-for-profit fundraising organizations. A much better summary of what Givewell was up to is available at the MetaFilter Wiki [1].

[1] http://mssv.net/wiki/index.php/Givewell

Alex I don't want to shoot the messenger. I only paid attention to these couple of cyberherpies featured in this article because I followed your links to the metafilter wiki, otherwise I wouldn't give these turgidstans a blink in a moments worth of daily eyelid movement. I support what your comments say because I believe that the real juice of interaction exists below the line in interactive dance with what appears above the line. In this comment itself I've sprayed out enough of my own negative labels to win a "latrine of the year" contest, and so while I also value a toothgrit watchdog or well-intended fierce activism, and the creation of community labels such as "astroturfing and sock puppeting", I also want to value standing behind the journalist, the teacher and the public servant. Yet I don't think the path to higher quality media is going to come from how we label negative people or how we segment diseased social behaviour. If we focus too much on life as a disease, even more of life begins to look like a disease. We cease to focus on anything remotely healthy, we don't even bother tabulating all the healthy things we do, the ones that are really worth labelling, because IMHO we can learn far more from a labels like that. We end up like the medical practice today, watching a "Patch Adams" movie and wondering where the medical world lost the plot while they were prescribing their social medication. No one on our planet has ever achieved anything by focusing on the removal of hypocrisy and that is because hypocrisy is invariably impossible to remove. In that regard the intelligence of daily house-cleaning is always way more powerful than any social agenda or improvement program this world can invent or conjure; and that's what made me realize that I cannot make my life about cleaning other people's houses. People generally focus on how much they have bled rather than how much they have read including the writer of this piece. We all do that in lockstep stereotypical fashion and label generation is proof IMHO that we are being hormonally active in our honourable impulse to protect the world from other hormones. It is honourable to stand up and fight for something we strongly value, that is why IMHO mankind has invented its extreme child prodigy, culminating often in a social collective called "war". Ultimately when all of this compounded result ends in this big bang because thats what the collective habit of trying to clean other people's houses becomes in its final expression. Our well intended focuses therefore often leads us to the biggest hypocrisy of all where we all become friends again, (call it norming, storming, norming if you want) where at a national level we become a league or a united nations and as a human family we engage in reparations, the ultimate hypocrisy of global atomic institutionalism and activism - to repair that which we united together to inadvertently "improve", defend or destroy. Yet we don't just do that on the national scale, we do it on the playground as well, and my best friends were often the ones where our value arguments became full blooded fist fights, or at least at my school where I had plenty of spectators to urge me and my opponent on. We are therefore tribal as our environment allows us to be, but we also live in an increasingly digital age of mechanical computers, where technology doesn't fight, it simply processes and so I realized from this that process trumps tribalism. So why do I write this, because I don't want to rag, even remotely, on the shortcomings of this writer, I want this writer to be on our side, I want to move out of our vertical identity siloes and acknowledge smart people on the horizontal, and then we can start looking at the kind of scum that media think that we need to be aware of (and allow pondscum to live in harmony with the intelligence floating in the rest of the horizontal). An undue attraction and attention towards scumbags, does not really uplift the quality of my own life in any significant way, as does watching the profile of the next nutcase on the next voyeuristic media special. So today I realize that I cannot prevent a world that is continuously daily conditioned to view life as a disease or as a product to buy, but I sure can start exploring what a healthy world looks like by looking at my own self, and for me to do that Alex, I need to read metafilter wiki that describes to me what healthy human behaviour also looks like, and that is because my friend, I am tired of labels that just add to my internalized memory that there is something extremely problematic with the world. I want to find a way to stop the label machine manufacturing away in my own head, so that I can ultimately be free to look at my developing world from a far healthier perspective; where I acknowledge Alex as Alex and Anya as Anya without pretending that I have anything remotely in common with both or that we are friends or blood-brothers or oxygen-sisters of a common cause. I simply want to remove the unnecessary boundary above the line and below the line that I have continuously created in my own head, where I improve the quality of my own listening by noticing the quality in other people's voice, as well learning to silence my own voice in the accompanied learning. I know that when I can walk through this world in a silent manner, I will have witnessed the first sign of my own intelligence, and to do that I have to learn to think differently and I guess here came the real positive coming from all of this spiel today. I talk too much, and from now on I will leave it to all you guys to do the talking and maybe, just maybe your collective voices might figure it out, for maybe at last, today I have discovered the only label that should have mattered all along, what it means to "be" than to "have" freedom......M.

Wow! What Mark Zorro said. That's my kind of comment. I appreciate the dedication our public servants accept as their burden to bear and I grieve those whose ambition is compromised by their expedience. Things are never what they seem and I suspect that there is a great deal more to this story than a couple of good-guys gone bad. It's that Response of the Organism to the Toxic Environment thing I get hung up on. The Mark of Zorro on this article speaks to me so pungently that I just need to paraphrase his words about disease - If one is looking for it, one will find it.
I still wonder whether the article would get the same response if the writer was looking for the health of these young men's quest at GiveWell.