GRANTS AND DONATIONS: Who Gets What % of your Contribution?

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© SGHolland Sep. 2022

What percentage of my gift actually gets to those needing support?

This week I read that a famous Favre is in trouble. He applied for what sounded like a very altruistic wad of money to help poor children.
But how much of the large gift (write-off for the mega donor) went to the poor children?

A lot of the dollars granted to Favre went into luxury stuff for him and his buddies. Only a fraction went to the poor children.

There are truly altruistic famous people who actually give their gifts to the people they are trying to save, or rescue. But how are we to know
who these conscientious donors are? I mean which bucket should we confidentially throw our coins or dollars into?

The donor/donee set-up can be huge (like Amazon) or shabby, corner-solicitor types. Types like the woman who was very visibly filthy from head to

toe, as described to me, and was asking for donation of money to keep her fed and sheltered; but this woman could not take just any kind of donation!

The filthy lady had to accept paper money only. No checks. No coins. Odd. “Can’t help you,” said the guy pulling away from the corner as the light changed.

At the US Post Office where I worked for eleven years as a Rural Carrier we were given, annually, the opportunity to donate from our paychecks to charities of our choice.
The Post Office supplied us workers with a fat book listing all the charities anyone could imagine. It was really a reference in small print about
everything from the Red Cross and the starving children in Peru, to the local collections for Habitat or the Girl Scouts. The amazing thing they
included in their informative tome was info about each charity’s disposition of money received. Of great interest to me was that it stated the
percentage of each donor’s gift that was taken out for “business and legal expenses.” Nothing wrong with that. Running a charity is
surely costly when you consider the personnel and supplies that are necessary to run an organization of any kind. I wonder how some of the charities manage
to deliver the money collected to the places of need without grabbing a lot of it in transit. What percentage of my gift actually gets to those needy?

But astonishingly, some of the most heart-warming charity givers were so huge and well promoted via all public media in offices in
so many places that needed running expenses, and of course, needed postage to send out a huge amount of solicitations to
everyone in the USA.

AND those familiar rewards for people’s gifts to the cause. Rewards like a baby tree, or a bunch of Christmas Cards, or a canvas satchel for
shopping, or a great looking shirt, or mug. These must have been part of the overhead of running that charity, right?

The rewards are as elegant as the glossy solicitation mail…

The more you give, the bigger the reward!

I have been very tempted to return the nice glossy gifts they sometimes lure you with back into the heavy solicitation envelope
and ask them to give me compensation for returning the goods to them.

I sometimes use my artwork on the fronts of small note cards with envelopes that people can buy for stationary.

I charge a few bucks for a few cards. It is only an adjunct to my exhibit of paintings and carvings. It costs me something to
have these items printed. Yes, I get a discount for larger orders from the printing company. So, I figure out what to
charge for those cards. Not many people are really coming to my exhibit to buy cards. Sometimes they will buy
a few.

I’m sure that the big charities get a fabulous discount for the reams of stickers and cards and stationery they stuff into
very discounted postage envelopes they send out to each person with a postal address.

Why is this bugging me? Something wrong here. Advertising is terribly expensive. Think of donors like Bill Gates Foundation or Apple or AARP who are thanked so much for generosity to the arts and sciences and space programs.

How many o-rings were responsible for the horrible crash of the elegant space shuttle that crashed before our eyes, back a few years.

How many political posters were printed for the last election? How many TV ads did political groups invest in?

How much of each donation to PACs during the election went for paper and ink?

How many bullets did people’s investment in the NRA buy for poor people?