Giving Tuesday

Comments (Archived):

1. Thanks Fred for the sustained leadership on the critical task of expanding computer science into the city’s (and nation’s) public schools. Your work has changed hundreds of thousands (at least) of young lives.I hope everyone here on AVC finds a school or classroom to support on Donor’s Choose today.

   1. I decided to match Fred’s $500 with $500 of my own across two different schools, one in the Bronx and another here in Brooklyn: https://uploads.disquscdn.c…Who in the AVC community wants to keep the momentum going? Maybe someone would like to fund the following project in Staten Island? https://www.donorschoose.or…

      1. Question Rob, how does the math work when Verizon is matching? Does the net amount appear automatically to fully fund a donation?https://www.donorschoose.or…

         1. It adjusted in the “shopping cart” page, which left me more money to do a larger second project.

   2. I didn’t list donor’s choice in my list below but have been donating through it since Fred wrote about it years ago.Love the personal notes that you get that show that your donation does something tangible for real people.Great org!

2. Neither do i. It’s a yawn.

3. Love this.About a year ago, I sat next to one of the founders of SwingLeft on a flight and honestly, every Saturday for the last year I’ve sat down and spent a weekly budget to support elections and people I care about.Education, action and donations all in one, work for my political giving big time.https://swingleft.org/As a big animal rights supporter and the owner of a sight-inhibited cat, I am a huge supporter of this org that basically just rescues blind cats.They have a massive volunteer community cross the country that whenever a blind cat is brought to a shelter (all are killed almost immediately btw), they literally go there and drive them to this shelter in the Carolinas where people like myself, help pay for their care.https://blindcatrescue.com/I truly appreciate being a supporter of this community.My biases are now open to all!

4. Maybe there’s some value there for computer science or computing more generally, but my guess is that in that program there is more value from working, accomplishing, working in small teams, being in a room with 30 people all busy working, communicating, not being bored, not sleeping or misbehaving in class, getting interested in learning, thinking and figuring out, etc.

5. Given all the desperate need in the world, how much time and/or money should a person donate to charitable causes?How should that change if a person’s net worth or annual income is $10,000 versus $500,000 versus $10 million versus $500 million?Is it better to donate a lot today or a huge amount in the future (essentially the future value of the today donation)?

   1. Give a lot today and then give a huge amount in the future. Give until it hurts and then give some more.

   2. It’s not up to anyone else to dictate what someone should do with their money and it doesn’t matter what the income level is either. But to answer the other part of your question if you are giving you will get the biggest buzz by giving amounts over time vs. all at once.

      1. Thanks for your reply @le_on_avc:disqus.I’m not dictating – I’m trying to learn what other people here think, to foster a discussion and help inform my own opinions and decisions.

6. thanks fred for this great post.nuru international has a donor matching the first 15k given today. nuru is the charity i believe yields the highest ROI for any monetary contribution in terms of positive impact on the world not achievable by free markets. they invest in helping those in extreme poverty acquire the education they need to become farmers to feed themselves and generate enough of a surplus to sell. in this way, the most impoverished economies can be built up in a bottom up style, so that they are eventually self-sufficient and capable of growing and innovating on their own, like the digital economies most of us are accustomed to and participate in. the founder is awesome — here is his google talk: https://www.youtube.com/wat… if you want to be a part of today’s drive: https://give.nuruinternatio…another cause i donated to is wolfgang halbig’s defense fund, the 72 year old former school safety advisor, florida state trooper, and military veteran being sued by the parents of the alleged sandy hook victims. wolfgang is slandered routinely but is simply a modern day citizen journalist being attacked simply for doing his job with courage and integrity. you can donate to him at [email protected] or via check/money order at Sandy Hook Justice, 25526 Hawks Run Lane, Sorento, FL 32776

   1. nuru is the charity i believe yields the highest ROI for any monetary contribution in terms of positive impact on the world not achievable by free markets. the founder is awesomeHey – It may be a good idea (if you want to encourage people to donate) in your comment to give a brief summary of ‘why’ and not require someone to click a link to find out what ‘Nuru’ is all about. Or watch a video for the answer.See what Arnold Waldstein did in his comment as an example.

      1. great point — thanks! i tweaked my original comment accordingly

7. The story of those children is REALLY bad, sad, worse. Kids in broken families, single parent families, foster care, shelter care — really big bad bummer.It is VERY lucky they are in NYC with its surprisingly generous education, social services budgets. Lots of such kids get much, Much, MUCH less help, concern, care, etc.We SHOULD do that, SHOULD try to solve that old, persisting problem. With good work, we SHOULD be able essentially to solve it in a few generations.But a solution will NOT be easy, e.g., can see the now old PBS Frontline piece on Michelle Rhee (spelling?) who tried hard in the DC schools. Net, she was trying to push that big rock up that big old hill and had it roll back on her and back down the hill — she flopped.But, we DO know how to make the problem worse!!!! Keep the southern border open — admit people from a culture ~150-200 years behind the US. Better still, admit people from a culture 500 years behind the US; no extra credit for thinking of where to find such people.When find self in a hole, the first step at getting out is to STOP DIGGING.An old remark is that a revolution is always kicking in the rotten door. Well, if the door is not rotten, then work to make it so. So, if the US has much worse social problems from poverty and a lot more poor people voting for Democrats who WANT such problems so that they, the Democrats, CAN get votes and that central one word, POWER, then work to add rot.And power for what? Power is a universal advantage for nearly anything. So we should do the usual, look for the hidden agenda and follow the money.The hidden agenda? Okay, how about the old one, likely older than the “oldest” one — slavery. That is, have a class based society with a readily identifiable, exploited, laboring underclass, or as if Zuck, Page, Brin, and the Koch brothers didn’t already have money enough. And all this race based slavery heavily from the Democrats who keep accusing everyone else of despicable “racism”. Or supposedly it was Alinsky who articulated the strategy of doing dirty stuff and then defending by accusing opponents of just that dirty stuff. E.g., do dirty stuff with the Ruskies and then accuse, non stop, Trump of doing dirty stuff with the Ruskies. As long as the media is brain-dead and the propaganda arm of the Democrat slavers keeping the citizens uninformed, the Alinsky strategy might keep working.REALLY good that NYC has funds enough to have a chance of making real progress on that problem, but at least we shouldn’t try to make the problem worse. IIRC, we fought a war over slavery — let’s don’t have another one.Finally I wish the Republicans, including Pence, would just STOP it, QUIT it, DON’T do it any more. Same for Hannity, occasional people on Fox, etc. Just QUIT it — calling Trump a “conservative” and praising “conservative principles”, values, approaches, what the heck ever.Conservatives were like Goldwater — brutal, cruel, dog eat dog and may the devil take the hind most some close to Nazi eugenics garbage based on some brain-dead reading of Darwin, “survival of the fittest” and let the rest have no right to live and should die off.Trump is just NOT a “conservative”: Best I can tell, he’s a common sense, realistic, perceptive, effective, compassionate MODERATE. Since no way are the conservatives going to vote for Nasty Nancy’s people, the conservatives have no one to vote for but Trump. And being a moderate, Trump stands to be able to get some votes from some Democrats. To heck with “conservatism” — flush it. Same for calling Gorsuch and Kavanaugh “strict constructionists” — strict is usually scary stuff, crucial, e.g., for a surgeon before cutting but a bit too severe otherwise.

8. Another resource: https://www.givewell.org/“High impact giving opportunities that are supported by in-depth charity research.”Givewell is one of the cornerstone organizations in the effective altruism movement, which seeks to use reason and evidence (as opposed to anecdote and personal relationships) to find the most impactful ways to give. Examples include bed nets for malaria prevention (latest evidence suggests that approx $8,000 given in this manner saves the life of a child under 5), direct cash transfers to poor households in Kenya and a global deworming initiative (interestingly the deworming initiative is probably the most important and highly scaled educational intervention since deworming medicine costs pennies for child and means they won’t get sick and skip school. Right now the program serves around 100 million children a year and costs far less than $100mm) .But it’s not the interventions, it’s about the outcomes. A lot of giving is predicated on the assumption “I think x is important, so I give to x.” A better approach is “I think x outcome is important, I will give to x, y or z if those interventions drive that outcomes.