The Deets

Before Christmas, Google sent me a gift card to thank me for making them rich. The gift card was redeemable for $100 in donations at DonorsChoose.org - a site that coordinates donations with teachers who could use some funding for their classrooms.

I threw the $100 toward a math project at Burroughs Community School in Minneapolis. That went toward the $493 the teacher requested for the project.

Here’s a response I received after the project was fully funded:

The site offers a pretty cool way to connect with teachers in your local community. Even if you don’t have a diem to donate, try looking up some schools near your home to see what motivated are working on.

If you’re a Deets reading teacher with a project listed on Donors Choose, let me know. I’ll pimp it here to help get it funded. Or, feel free to link to it in the comments.

Michael Krieger over at the Minnesota Lawyer Blog has a bone to pick with the charitable lunch policy of the law firm, Simpson Thacher, who offers summer associates a $60 per diem for lunches. Any money NOT used goes to charity. But is that really charitable? Michael doesn’t seem to think so:

‘Chow for Charity’ hungers for conscience

The essence of charity—to me at least—requires a conscientious act of selflessness. And Chow for Charity doesn’t pass muster.

The $45 donated to Legal Aid is money that the firm had expected to pay anyway, so there’s little conscience. And eating a $15 meal versus a $60 meal hardly constitutes sacrifice—someone who trades extravagance for abundance shouldn’t sit at the same table as, say, a Red Cross or Children’s Law Center volunteer.

Here’s how I see it: Simpson Thatcher is enabling charitable contributions with real dollars. However, by leaving it up to summer associates to decide how charitable they’d like to be, they’re likely exposing summer associates to real-life charitable decisions that they’ve likely not encountered to date due to their previous lives as students. There is a conscientious act of selflessness here, but it’s outsourced to their associates.

It would be interesting to find out what Simpson Thatcher does with the data they gain from this experiment. Do they make more offers to the more charitably generous associates? Do they reward the networking skills of those who spent a lot, but spent well?

It seems like putting decisions like this in the hands of associates could lead to more considered decisions. Frankly, partners could write checks that dwarf this without much conscience.

One thing I noticed while doing my taxes this year was that I didn’t donate enough money to charities. That’s based on my own arbitrary judgment, of course, but I bet a lot of people reading this would feel the same way if they thought about it.

I’ve found that I’m most likely to donate to charities where I both believe in the cause and have a friend who’s vested in the cause in some way. It may be due to their work, and event they decided to participate in, or as a result of a medical issue they’ve contracted.

Here are a few organizations I’ve donated to and trust based on personal connections. I haven’t researched the efficacy of any of these, but donated based on the relationships I have with the people who suggested donating:

- American Foundation for Suicide Preventions

- American Cancer Society
- Epilepsy Foundation
- Lambda Legal

Take 5 minutes and $25 to make a statement by supporting a non-profit that matters to you.

Then tell your friend about the donation you made.

It will be the best $25 you spend all day.

Interesting discussion on the St. Paul Issues List at E-Democracy regarding the smoking ban and its effect on pull tab sales:

E-Democracy.Org: default

The smoking ban has improved the health of those who patronize and work in bars but I still hear a terrible gasping coming from these establishments.

It’s the sound of charitable gambling organizations on life support. The city has offered to help bars add patios to offset the smoking ban; what are they offering nonprofits that rent space in these bars?

To me, this raises the larger question: Should charities be pull-tab dependent?
Assuming the smoking ban IS the cause of the drop off in pull-tab sales, shouldn’t charities simply find a different way to seek out the un-spent money? Perhaps something that would put a larger percentage of the pull-tab expenditures to work for charitable causes?