Doing something vs. doing more

Here’s another post from 2011, noting an internet phenomenon.  We were going to do a big post on it, but then XKCD summed it up beautifully in just a few panels.  Here’s what we had:

People who do something small sometimes get yelled at for not trying to reform an entire system.  This sucks.

In reality, we CAN make small changes, but grappling with a large change may not help people in this lifetime.  Some people focus on only the big needs, but we only have a limited amount of resources and doing something is generally better than doing nothing, so long as your cause isn’t something based on hate.

As a 2022 update:  One of the things that bugs me is that white men and Republicans often get passes for not doing anything at all, or for being actively harmful, while people who are trying but aren’t at the top positions of power get condemned for not doing enough.  I’d be happier with the “you’re not doing enough” if those same people would spend as much energy shaming the bad guys who are actually doing bad things, or who are doing nothing at all.  Let’s have more protests of individual evil Republicans, even though there are a lot of them.

We Need Diverse Books: Where Revanche’s Most Commenting of 2021 Prize went

If you recall, Revanche of A Gai Shan Life won this year’s most commenting award again!  For her prize she got to choose a charity for us to donate to.

We Need Diverse Books

is a 501(c)(3) non-profit and a grassroots organization of children’s book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people.

Here’s their Charity Navigator rating.

We contributed $50 in honor of Revanche.

Annual charitable giving

Political action is really important.  Voting rights are under major attack and fascism is creeping every closer in the US.  So you can and should call your political representatives and donate to the campaigns of people you want to be your representatives (also donate locally!)!  It’s just as important this year as it was two years ago or four or six or eight.

That said, you can also donate money directly to charitable concerns.

One thing I’ve been doing a lot of lately– every time I see news about Republicans trying to censor LGBT books, I go over to donorschoose and search for LGBT and donate $25 to one of the classrooms.  There aren’t many (and half are in California…).  I initially tried to look up books by authors of LGBT YA that I liked, but came up blank.  Still, rainbow face masks and pride stickers aren’t nothing.  (There are a few books, but mostly non-fiction.)  Maybe you want to do the same thing but every time you hear someone trying to ban “critical race theory” you search for “diverse books.”  Or fund teachers buying books on those banned lists!

You also may want to check in with a local librarian to see if they’ve been getting threats from organized fascists about stocking books that support underrepresented minorities, and if so, give them your thanks and support both verbally and with a donation.  (I’ve been deliberately checking out books on the new banned lists– some of them have been pretty good!  Though there are a LOT of angsty graphic artists out there who are maybe not my middle-aged demo.)

Planned Parenthood needs your money.

We need the ACLU  to help us fight fascism.

Help pro-choice women Democrats get elected to office with Emily’s List.

Here are some charitable donations pages from previous years.

Grumpy nation, who are we missing?  Where should charitable dollars be going this year?

Holiday Donations!

So, a lot of people need your dollars this year.  The federal government isn’t doing its job.  One thing that you can do even if you don’t have money to donate is call your senators and tell them to stop letting Mitch McConnell take Covid relief hostage to allowing firms to put their workers in danger without fear of lawsuit.  Because that’s what is happening– Mitch McConnell won’t even allow a relief bill to go to the floor unless companies are legally allowed to be negligent.  And if that gets passed, there will be a race to the bottom because only negligent companies will be able to compete.  People need relief and they need workplace safety.   We cannot have a bill that forces negligence on companies.

Mitch McConnell is refusing to bring a relief bill to the floor unless it wipes away all COVID-related lawsuits filed that allege injury or death due to corporate negligence. There already are legal protections for businesses acting *reasonably.* This is a license to kill. pic.twitter.com/EWaPTvUw96

— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) December 11, 2020

So, with that in mind, if you have dollars, people need them.  I think the best place for those dollars this year is anything that provides children with basic necessities.  So– donate to a foodbank, either your local bank or a state spinoff of Feeding America, or Feeding America itself.  Kids need food most of all.  Money is the best gift because they can use it to buy in bulk, but your unexpired cans, dry goods, diapers, toiletries, etc. are also useful.

A lot of people are having more troubles with anxiety, family problems from too much proximity, and so on.  There are a number of different crisis hotlines you can donate to.  The suicide prevention hotline, the crisis text line, and for LGBTQ folks, the Trevor project.  For victims of abuse, there’s the domestic abuse hotline, but you may want to look up a women’s shelter near you to donate to, either cash or in-kind.

If there is a non-profit for refugees near you, check out their webpage.  I bought some things off an amazon list for the one in our nearest city.

As state and local budgets get cut, you may want to donate to libraries.  I donated to the state library that’s letting me get free e-books, though I do that every year.  They have a lot of programs for kids in the city in which they are located, which has been having spotty schooling, and I want them to be able to keep that up.

If you’re on twitter, a lot of folks have been spreading the word about smaller projects– when they look legit and the donation is in-kind (like, on their list are things that probably don’t have a ton of resale value but are things that people need), I will often buy something off the amazon list of one of these projects.  It’s not that I don’t believe people with gofundmes are deserving, it’s that I don’t know if the person running the gofundme is actually legitimate or a scammer.  So I bought some reasonably priced kitchenware off one of these lists.

Here are some charitable donations pages from previous years.

Grumpy Nation, what charities would you like to highlight? Post in the comments below!

Where did Debbie M’s donation go?

Debbie M won our “most commenting of 2019″ contest.  That means she got to pick where we donated our previous month’s blog earnings to.  How much did we donate?  We topped it up so that we could give $50.

Where did she pick?  Rainforest Foundation, Inc.

According to Debbie M:

They work with indigenous communities to help them continue preserving rainforest habitat. This protects the environment, fights climate change, and protects human rights. They explain all this better themselves: https://rainforestfoundation.org/what-we-do/

Here’s their Charity Navigator site.

Don’t forget to update your community rewards

Community rewards being when a company gives some % of what you’ve purchased to a charity of your choice.  They get the tax credit for donating, but you get to say where to the donation goes.

We got an email from the local library that noted they’ve got a community rewards thing going with our local grocery store.  I checked to see what we were signed up with, and it turns out to be the local private school that DC1 went to that has since gone out of business.  Our grocery rewards ($4.51 in the last quarter) were going to support their daycare center… which isn’t really a great use of the grocery store’s money.  After determining that DC2’s elementary school wasn’t signed up for rewards (though the richer elementary schools out by our favored grocery store were…), I went and changed ours to the local library, even though it’s closed for renovation until the summer.

I had remembered to update our amazon smile when the private school went out of business (our amazon smile now supports the closest planned parenthood)– though I need to be better about remembering to actually use it and not just the regular amazon as I buy this year’s holiday presents.

Do you use community rewards?  Where do you send your reward dollars? Do you remember to update them?

Where Leah’s donation went

Leah won our “most commenting of 2017″ contest .  That means she got to pick where we donated our previous month’s blog earnings to.  How much did we donate?  We topped it up so that we could give $50.

Where did she pick?  Advancement Project

According to its website:

Advancement Project works in deep partnership with organized communities of color to dismantle and reform the unjust and inequitable policies that undermine the promise of democracy through the development of community-based solutions to racial justice issues.

Here’s their charity navigator page—  looks pretty good.

 

Our annual charitable giving page

Time to get those charitable ducks in order, especially if you’re not going to be able to itemize under the new tax laws next year.

This year is probably a good one to do the Donor Advised Fund.  We’ve opted not to just because we want more flexibility right now with so much uncertainty, but your situation may be different!

Planned Parenthood : They need us more than ever before

RAINN :  help people impacted by sexual violence

CAIR :  Help Muslim victims of prejudice

Donors Choose (though, to be honest, I think the wobble chairs everyone in my [not poor] town wants are expensive and a waste of money– but there are a lot of teachers in lower income districts that want books and pencils and math supplies)  Note:  I am incapable of clicking on this without donating something.  I am such a soft touch for learning.  Ugh, #2 just sent me another link I had to fund.  Stahp!

WNDB:  We need diverse books!

ACLU :  One of the things standing in between us and fascism

EveryLibrary.org :  Helps political actions to fund public, school, and college libraries

EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation) seems pretty relevant right now

Emily’s List:  Help pro-choice women Democrats get elected to office!

Previous posts:  2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, (we have a couple posts in 2012 on charity, but I’m not finding a holiday one), 2011, 2010

Grumpy Nation:  Link us up to your favorite charities!

Communal vs. individual school supplies

Update:  FDR quote from the FDR monument in Washington, DC (Thanks Leah!).  I found it as the last slide on Peter Diamond’s history of Social Security changes.

It seems like across much of the US, school supplies for elementary school have moved from being individual (you know, where I was the only kid whose mom followed instructions and bought the 12 pack of crayons instead of the 48 pack, and a couple of kids even got the 96 pack that had gold and silver and a built-in-sharpener) to communal, where the school list will, for example, request two 24 packs of crayons, crayola-only, to be collected and distributed across the classroom.   Back in my day only the Kleenex was communal.

This has caused some complaining across the personal finance blogosphere.  There’s a reluctance to subsidize children whose parents can’t or won’t buy school supplies for their own children.

I disagree with that sentiment.  I like having communal supplies because it makes it easier for kids who can’t afford school supplies. I do wish that we could what we did when we were living in a blue state and give money to the PTA to buy in bulk instead of buying new supplies individually. And I wish our current state was like the blue state we were in before and solicited donations so the school could own the calculators instead of the kids. I feel really bad for the kids whose parents can’t afford to buy calculators or rent instruments or go on field trips or get school supplies. (The district does have a pantry that accepts donations for kids who get free and reduced lunch, but it’s mostly clothing and hygiene supplies.)

It seems so much more humane to do it communally instead of individually.  Of course, it’s still not as humane as everyone’s tax money going to support future generations of Americans, but it’s much better than the idea that kids should be penalized for their parents being poor. Or that kids should have to rely on religious charity because people aren’t willing to give a little extra unless the “worthy poor” end up being indebted to a Christian organization for something that should be a right for all Americans.

Because funding to schools keeps getting cut in the interest of lower taxes, more and more of what used to be funded by schools is now funded by parents.  We’ve had to pay for orchestra music/instrument/uniforms and every field-trip and individual science experiments and many more things on top of more historically standard calls for empty toilet paper tubes and pot-luck dishes.  We’ve been doing directed donations for other kids each time we get one of these requests for our own kid, and there have been a lot of them, but we’ve generally had to take the initiative to ask about it ourselves (only the science teacher added donations for other kids to requests). And I just feel really bad for kids on the other end whose parents can’t or won’t provide for them who have to ask the teachers what to do when they don’t have the money. I remember just not going on field trips to ball games or amusement parks as a kid– not wanting my parents to have to worry about the money and not wanting to ask for charity (my parents would have died of embarrassment)– and that would be something like once every three years since all the local educational trips were covered. There’s so much less covered here.

In contrast, the year we were living in a blue state they flat out asked for a (recommended) largish donation at the beginning of the year from people who could afford it and some smaller amount for school supplies for people who didn’t want to shop on their own and that was it– and that money covered supplies, field trips, computers, calculators, and the arts program. There were also a limited number of free musical instruments that the school owned that anyone could rent if they jumped through a few hurdles, or the richer people could pay to rent through local music stores without jumping through hurdles. Kids didn’t have to feel bad for not having stuff because it was supplied for everyone.

Obviously that’s not possible in an impoverished district.  For those, federal or state funding is really needed to fill in those gaps.  But most of the commenters on these blog posts who are complaining about having to subsidize other people’s kids can afford to pick up more supplies than their individual kid will use at the back-to-school sale, and if they can’t, then someone else can pick one up on their child’s behalf.  And they’re not complaining about the expense so much as the unfairness of having to help a child that isn’t their own (though they don’t put it in those words… I think/hope if they did they might check themselves and not share that sentiment).  It sucks that parents have to buy basic supplies when children are America’s future taxpayers and we should all be subsidizing education through taxes, but failing that, this is one area where I don’t at all mind secular charity from those who can afford it.  Especially if it means some kid doesn’t have to constantly be reminded that they don’t have what everyone else has.  And you better believe we’ll be giving additional unrequested directed donations to our children’s schools this year, especially with DC1 in a 56% poverty elementary school.

And, as a reminder, Donorschoose is a fantastic charity that helps out kids and teachers in districts where having some parents buy a second set of school supplies isn’t possible or isn’t enough.

Ask the grumpies: How do you decide on donations?

Another activist economist asks:

What is your donation strategy right now? Are you giving to more places, or more to places you were already supporting? I was torn at the end of last year and just did the latter. Trying to decide what to do for 2017.

#2 says:  Both!

#1 also says both.  I think I must have the warm glow version of donating because I am totally just giving to places as they come on my radar.  I have no strategy at all for this stuff (my only planned giving is to my alma mater and DC1’s former private school).  Something horrible happens, I donate to the relevant agency or agencies, it makes me feel a little better.

I know that’s not optimal for the organizations in question (based on graduate public finance*), but it’s optimal for me!  Plus it’s a strategy shared by a ton of people since whenever I give, the news says that organization has just received record amounts.

Another activist economist replies:

If lots of donors share that behavior, it might become optimal for the organizations (getting small amounts from huge numbers of people)? Also, maybe your strategy (or non-strategy) means you donate more over the course of a year than you would if you explicitly made a budget for donating and only gave to a few places. Which is better for the places getting your money.

I have been holding back so far this year since I’m torn. For instance, a friend of mine started supporting this local organization that gives financial assistance to women who can’t afford abortions. But is it better to give to them or Planned Parenthood or split between the two? I’m leaning toward only PP.

I’ve given to both! Because I cried super hard when my sister told me that she was working with an organization in [City] that provides rides and housing for women seeking abortions and had someone staying in her spare bedroom for 3 days because the woman had taken an 8 hour bus in from [a neighboring state] to get an abortion. So I gave $100 to that organization to make the crying stop. Planned parenthood is where we regularly give whenever one of these things comes up in the news, plus it’s where many of our blog proceeds end up going.

While DH remains employed and with the mortgage gone and our retirement accounts maxed out and DC1 no longer in private school and no firm plans going forward for major expenditures, we can afford to just give money whenever so we don’t really need a strategy (still, this has always been how we’ve donated, it’s just that before it was much smaller amounts in grad school and I’d have to cut back on our grocery expenditures to make up the difference). We should be giving more, but I keep thinking, what if we have to move to Paradise permanently? We don’t have enough money in non-retirement non-529 accounts to buy a house in a decent school district, and renting would still be difficult on just DH’s salary. So mainly it’s the emotions that get me to part with my pocketbook even though we should be giving much more than we do.

Another activist economist replies:

I look forward to reading the responses [from the grumpy nation]!*** I should probably stop thinking about what would be optimal and just give when I feel like it. The reality is that my total giving across the year would likely be higher if I did that. But it is hard to turn off the little voice in my head that asks “if you give that $50 here are you taking it from somewhere else where it would have a bigger marginal impact?”

Yeah, I don’t listen to that little voice. It gets shouted down by the, “Look, do you want to stop crying right now or not?” voice, because I have very little impulse control. And since I don’t have a set budget constraint on charitable giving, there’s more likely to be crowding in** than crowding out of giving.

Plus it probably helps that I wasn’t all that convinced by grad PF’s discussion of optimal charitable giving given that most non-profit’s revealed preferences are to go all out and accept lots of little donations from people like me (and then sell my contact info to related organizations that could crowd out my donations to them…).

Agree about the crowding in (probably true for me too) – I don’t have a fixed budget either, exactly. (Though because I am a procrastinator, during normal times I tend to do all my donations at the end of the year, so then I am thinking about the total amount I want to give for that year.) But there’s a budget in the sense that I have an upper bound even if I don’t know exactly what it is. And that is what that little voice reminds me of. Hmmm….

*Graduate PF, if I’m remembering the lecture correctly, suggests that rational individuals interested in making an actual difference rather than just feeling warm and fuzzy should donate large sums to a small number of charities so other places don’t waste money trying to get more money out of you and you’ll have a bigger impact on that organization and more say in what is done with your money. I am obviously just motivated by warm fuzzies. Plus I’m not sold that that’s a bad thing, as you will see in our discussion.

**”Crowding in” in this context means that giving some money makes it more likely that you’re going to give more later.

*** emphasis added

Grumpy nation, do you have a donation strategy?  Do you have a set amount you give each year, or do you give on a case-by-case basis?  Have you had to make any sacrifices for giving?  What makes  you decide to give?  How do you pick who to give to and how much?