Recently, Bill Gates announced that the Gates Foundation will be giving away all of its money by 2045. That decision by one of the world’s leading philanthropists prompted me to pull up the following essay from my archives. I originally published it in 2022. The title of this essay comes from a lovely Vince Gill song about the giving spirit.)
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The other day I was exchanging a few messages with an old college friend about how to evaluate charities when I remembered some reporting I had done back in 2005.
On Thanksgiving weekend that year, I was visiting my girlfriend 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 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.
My conversation about giving was with Doug Heller, a friend from The Michigan Daily in Ann Arbor in the 1960s.
HEADLINES:
Trump Says Gifted Qatari Plane Will Be Temporary Air Force One (Bloomberg)
Schumer announces blanket hold on DOJ political nominees as he demands answers on Qatari plane (CNN)
Republicans Raise Concerns Over Trump’s Plane Gift as He Heads to Qatar (WSJ)
Trump lauds Saudi Arabia as he unveils AI and defence deals (Financial Times)
Trump’s Middle East trip marked by potential private business conflicts (WP)
How Donald Trump Jr. is cashing in on his dad’s presidency (Business Insider)
GOP heavyweights join bipartisan bashing of Trump Qatar jet deal (Politico)
Trump announces U.S. will remove sanctions on Syria (Axios)
Trump trade war faces legal challenge as businesses, states argue his tariffs exceeded his power (AP)
China Called Trump’s Bluff (Atlantic)
I was surgeon general — Trump’s nominee is not fit for my old job (The Hill)
FDA and RFK Jr. aim to remove fluoride supplements used to protect kids’ teeth (AP)
CBO: 7.6 million would go uninsured under GOP Medicaid bill (Politico)
Iran proposes partnership with UAE and Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium (Guardian)
WHO warns of permanent impact of hunger on a generation of Gazans (Reuters)
Harvard loses an additional $450 million in grants in escalating battle with Trump administration (AP)
How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump (New Yorker)
Intelligence on Earth Evolved Independently at Least Twice (Wired)
ChatGPT may be polite, but it’s not cooperating with you (Guardian)
AI therapy is a surveillance machine in a police state (Verge)
A new AI tool can predict your biological age from a selfie. (WP)
Experts Agree Giant, Bioengineered Crabs Pose No Threat (The Onion)
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