The Observer, January 28, 2005
Volume XXXVII, Issue 15
Buffalo Bias: Tsunami philanthropy is possible for college students
It will be a while before anyone on this campus becomes the next John D. Rockefeller or Kelvin Smith, but should we wish to become philanthropically active, now is the time. In the past month, since the tsunami disaster, opportunities to donate money have presented themselves everywhere. How do we know which of these organizations we should donate to? What should we give?
The question of what is easy: to help victims of the tsunami crisis, we should give money. Period. For local charities, supply drives are valuable and welcomed, but for a tragedy of this magnitude money is the one thing aid groups want. The Red Cross will buy its own supplies with the money it receives from donations. It may seem that donating supplies is a more direct way to make a difference, but one dollar, even if only 82 cents of it get put towards relief efforts, goes farther than supplies that don't meet the specific needs of aid workers.
I use 82 cents because that's what your dollar actually provides. That is, 82 cents of every dollar you give to the American Red Cross. According to the Better Business Bureau, one of many groups that review and rank charities, the U.S. Fund for UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) comes in high at 88 cents per dollar, and Oxfam America comes in at 76. The rest of the dollar goes to administration and fundraising costs.
These numbers change slightly with the group doing the rankings – according to Charity Navigator, the American Red Cross spends 91.1 cents of every dollar on its aid programs. (In the event you're interested in how an institution like our noble university ranks, Case gets a very high ranking from Charity Navigator – right up with the Red Cross and every school hoping to gain or maintain prestige.)
Because they do not provide a complete picture of a charity's work, these numbers are not the entire story. When donations rush in unsolicited, as they have in the past month, an agency gets more return for its fundraising efforts; this phenomenon explains the statement on Oxfam's website that 90 percent of your donation will go toward the rebuilding of tsunami-devastated areas.
At the same time, given the rush of donations, charities are taking advantage of the situation to fund programs in other areas of the world. And why shouldn't they? The situation in Aceh, Indonesia, near the epicenter of the quake, is no doubt more immediate and devastating, but it does not make poverty, disease, and injustice go away in other parts of the world.
It's important that we do something; for a college student, writing a $100 check to Doctors Without Borders is probably not the most reasonable thing to do, big-hearted as it is. Case's chapter of the Global Medical Initiative is providing a reasonable alternative: its donation boxes, available around campus, will collect funds for UNICEF. Weatherhead students are encouraging classmates to bring in what they would normally spend on lunch and donate it instead; I particularly like these two drives, partially because they remind me of the donation boxes I filled as a Catholic school kid. Also, I like their premise – that we can each do a little (put the change from a cup of coffee into a UNICEF box) that will add up to a lot.
Immediately after the disaster, to encourage and facilitate donation, Google put links to charities such as the International Red Cross on its site. At this point those links have been removed because their novelty – and thus their effectiveness as spurs to donation – has worn off. The links are gone; the need, in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, is not.
