On Monday I was exchanging a few messages with an old college friend about how to evaluate charities when I remembered a bit of relevant (if unplanned) reporting I had done back in 2005.
On Thanksgiving weekend that year, I was visiting a friend who was volunteering on the Mississippi Gulf Coast after hurricane Katrina and not intending to do any work at all. But as I went along on her rounds, I was so shocked by the situation that I spontaneously decided to interview residents, volunteers, politicians and experts and produce a freelance report.
The result was “Everything’s Broken,” published in Salon that December.
I drafted the piece straight-out start-to-finish during a one-night stay in a hotel in Mobile, Alabama. After seeing the devastation caused by the mega-storm, I couldn’t sleep so I got out my laptop and got to work. These many years later, I still think it was one of the best articles I ever wrote.
Here are a few excerpts:
More than three months after Hurricane Katrina's jagged front edge tore into Mississippi's Gulf Coast like a runaway chainsaw, East Biloxi remains a shattered community of poor people living amid their ruins, facing an uncertain future.
Stark remainders of death are still on display everywhere. On warm days, the stench of undiscovered pet carcasses still seeps out from under the ruins, and mud litters the landscape like dried lava flows. Sheets of plywood buckle over gashes in homes that stand split and crushed, their contents splayed about like guts from rotting bodies.
Bits of dried cloth, their colors faded and coated with dried muck, hang rigidly over the trees, acting as sentinels guarding the ruins below. Birds don't land here anymore.
At first glance, East Biloxi looks like a ghost town. But poke around a bit and people start emerging from inside their crushed houses, from tents pitched out back, or from some of the new FEMA trailers that have recently arrived. Most of the survivors still seem to be trying to just grasp the scope of what has happened to them. They are confused as to why so little help has yet arrived.
East Biloxi, and the other small towns of the Gulf Coast, as well as the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, are places where the poor are poor in so many ways. They can't read or write well, and don't have the skills or clout to get what they need out of government bureaucracies or private insurance companies. They can't see a way out of their traps. Lacking much effective political leadership or advocates, they are dependent on the good people still showing up, willing to help.
Katrina laid bare a dirty secret in America -- a secret with many names. We know it's about race and class but it's about other things as well, things less easily labeled. The storm provided a visible reminder that progress in this country for some always comes at a cost to others. One thing about living in a society that regularly scrubs itself of its collective memory is we keep having to relearn the lessons of the past.
I reported that the big charities like Red Cross and Salvation Army, which had raised many millions of dollars during the initial phase of the storm relief, were nowhere to be seen by the time of my visit, leaving small grassroots groups and church congregations to do the hard work of getting residents the help they still badly needed.
This had an immediate impact.
My former colleague from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Perla Ni read it and decided to start a new organization, GreatNonprofits, that would rate the efficiency of charitable organizations by soliciting reviews by clients, staffers, board members, funders and other stakeholders.
Ever since, GNP has been a go-to source for people trying to determine which groups to donate money to, not only after disasters but for all kinds of charitable purposes.
Anyway, all of this came up in the course of my conversation with my old friend. One of the things I told him, based on what I learned from my reporting and followup work in 2010 with GNP, is that you cannot necessarily conclude that a particular nonprofit organization is inefficient simply by looking at the amount of administrative expenses it has versus its charitable expenditures.
This is because in order to remain competitive, NPOs have to pay their top executives enough money to at least be within competitive shouting distance of what they could earn in comparable private sector jobs.
It takes great skill and management expertise to efficiently and successfully run a non-profit. It also takes top-flight development work to raise the money not only to help clients but also to retain staff. This requires networking and fundraising skills, including good proposal writing and effective meetings with major donors and foundation executives.
That said, there are most definitely cases where charities raise lots of money but distribute very little to the people they are supposed to be helping. See “St. Jude’s Unspent Billions,” a great job of investigative reporting by Pro Publica.
It is understandable for a donor to want to see as much of his or her donation go straight to the intended recipient, perhaps a storm victim or an underpaid teacher, as possible. But we have to keep in kind that the charitable donations we make, which are tax-deductible, are in most cases distributed by staff members working in jobs that are underpaid with poor benefit packages. This is a prescription for burnout, which plagues the nonprofit sector.
It’s been said that the nonprofit sector accounts for only 5 percent of the U.S. GNP but 95 percent of the socially-responsible GNP. Understanding how the sector works, how best to both keep it accountable and ensure that it can be sustained is a worthy goal for journalists like those at CIR and Pro Publica aiming to make a difference.
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NOTE: My conversation about giving was with Doug Heller, a friend from The Michigan Daily in Ann Arbor in the 1960s.
TODAY’s HEADLINES (6/1/22 — 33 stories from 22 sources):
St. Jude’s Unspent Billions (Pro Publica)
Everything’s Broken (Salon)
EU leaders agree on Russia oil ban 'in principle' (Reuters)
Europe’s Partial Russian Oil Ban Is Flawed, But Necessary (Bloomberg)
Russia Extends Control Over Key Ukraine City as U.S. Plans to Boost Kyiv’s Firepower (WSJ)
Ukrainian forces were still holding out in Sievierodonetsk, resisting Russia's all-out assault to capture a bombed-out wasteland that Moscow has made the principal objective of its invasion in recent days. (Reuters)
Pro-Russian forces: One-third of Severodonetsk under our control (NHK)
Cracks Show in Western Front Against Russia’s War in Ukraine (WSJ)
Brussels ready to propose tariffs on Russian oil as fallback after embargo (Financial Times)
A ‘terrible nightmare’: Treating Ukraine’s wounded civilians (AP)
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov denies Putin illness (BBC)
Ukraine's destruction of Russian artillery systems and armoured vehicles with Turkish Bayraktar TB2 aerial drones has made "the whole world" a customer, according to its designer. Selcuk Bayraktar, who runs the Istanbul firm Baykar with his brother Haluk, said the drones had shown how technology was revolutionising modern warfare. (Reuters)
Canada Plans to Ban Handgun Sales and Possession of Assault Weapons (NYT)
There were at least 12 mass shootings over Memorial Day weekend. — Across the U.S., from California to Michigan to Tennessee. Several took place at parties, and one at a Memorial Day event. At least eight people were killed and 55 injured. (WP)
President Joe Biden offered more thoughts on efforts to pass gun control legislation. "The Second Amendment was never absolute. You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was passed,” Biden told reporters at the White House on Memorial Day. He named Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) as possible “rational” Republicans in efforts to seek compromise on legislation. [HuffPost]
The maker of a gun used in the Texas shooting has a history of controversial weapons ads (CNN)
Trump was 'stunned' by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger's Republican primary victory: report (Business Insider)
Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote (NYT)
Progressives take a leaf out of the conservative playbook to target school boards (NPR)
The June primaries already ballooning with big money (Politico)
Euro zone inflation hits yet another record high as food and energy prices soar (CNBC)
Stocks fall on Wall Street, heading for another losing month (AP)
How to Really Fix Higher Ed — Rather than wiping the slate clean on student debt, Washington should take a hard look at reforming a broken system. (Atlantic)
VIDEO: Residents in Southern Mexico Prepare for Hurricane Agatha (Reuters)
AP PHOTOS: In Kabul, cemeteries a part of Afghan daily life (AP)
When Shipping Containers Sink in the Drink (New Yorker)
Substack Drops Fund-Raising Efforts as Market Sours (NYT)
Hundreds of mummies were discovered in an ancient Egyptian necropolis. (WP)
14th-century samurai sword found in car at Swiss border (Guardian)
Best exercise time may differ for men and women, study suggests (BBC)
Man To Sail Around World To Decrease Awareness Of Important Issues (The Onion)
***
TODAY’s LYRICS:
“Everything Is Broken”
Bob Dylan
Broken lines, broken strings,
Broken threads, broken springs,
Broken idols, broken heads,
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain't no use jiving
Ain't no use joking
Everything is broken
Broken bottles, broken plates,
Broken switches, broken gates,
Broken dishes, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken
Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground
Broken cutters, broken saws,
Broken buckles, broken laws,
Broken bodies, broken bones,
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath, feel like you're chokin',
Everything is broken
Every time you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face
Broken hands on broken ploughs,
Broken treaties, broken vows,
Broken pipes, broken tools,
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling, bull frog croaking,
Everything is broken
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