Making it Meaningful: Choosing Charitable Giving

I love giving to organisations that do work which speaks to my heart. Last year, I gave to several organisations I admire in lieu of giving family members gifts and they seemed to appreciate the gesture (most of them, anyway). Diwali has already passed, but there are plenty more opportunities for giving in the coming months!

It can be hard to choose the right non-profits to support, though. With some big names like the Red Cross and GOAL rocked by scandals, choosing organisations who do work you want to support and do it well is even harder. In 2015 and again in 2016 friends asked me what groups I choose to support, so, rather than doing a massive Twitter thread or an overlong Facebook post, I’m compiling a list of some of my favourite groups here.

I’ve broken the organisations down by topic area to try to make them easier to navigate, but it’s still pretty long and you may not find exactly the type of organisation or issue you’re hoping to support. For more information on ways to research organisations you love, I listed some good tips (including plug for Charity Navigator and GuideStar) in my post on voluntourism.

Rohingya Refugee Crisis

The Rohingya are an ethnic group that has lived in the Rakhine region of Myanmar for centuries. Unlike the rest of Myanmar (which is majority Buddhist), the Royhingya are muslim and the Burmese government is actively engaged in an ethnic cleansing campaign in addition to denying the Rohingya citizenship (making them stateless). Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled into Bangladesh, but the borderlands are underdeveloped and do not have the resources to keep the refugees safe and healthy. This area is particularly close to my heart and we have given several times to support relief work in the Cox’s Bazar region.

BRAC is leading the way to provide relief to the refugees. I’m a long time BRAC fan and they deserve it.
Action Against Hunger is providing nutritional support to refugees in the Cox’s Bazar region. Nutrition is a key Social Determinant of Health, so supporting this work can help improve lifetime health for these people.

Water and Sanitation

Clean water and waste management go a long way to improving health. When Bangladesh eliminated open defecation (that means pooping outdoors), it was a tremendous leap forward toward improving the health of the country. Diarrhoeal disease is a leading killer of children under 5 and many of those deaths could be avoided by improving access to clean water. If you’ve ever lived or worked in a place without clean running water, you know how long it can take to perform basic tasks like brushing your teeth, washing the dishes, or rinsing off vegetables to eat. For many people, these challenges are too much to overcome and they have no choice but to consume unsafe water.

Charity: Water was one of the organisations our family chose to support at Christmas (Rónán chose them!) and we love the work that we do.
Toilet Twinning is a fun way to support improved access to toilets around the world and delight your poop-obsessed child. For £60, you “twin” your toilet with another in a country that has need for improved sanitation.
Miya: We lose a lot of water in the process of bringing it to your home through leaky pipes and other inefficiencies. Miya is working in several countries to help improve the efficiency of water delivery, which conserves one of our most precious resources and can help reduce the cost for municipalities to deliver it to our homes, schools, and offices.
Flint Child Health and Development Fund: Flint, Michigan hasn’t had clean water since 24 April, 2014. That’s three and a half years. That’s just not acceptable, but the FCHDF is helping to deliver much needed supplies and care for the long-term health needs of children who have been exposed to lead.

Children and Youth

Rónán with his Spreeha preschool friends in Dhaka

The Spreeha Bangladesh Foundation uses three pillars to break the cycle of poverty: healthcare, education for children, and skills training for adults. As part of their mission, they operate preschools in slums in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They’re fantastic enough that I sent Rónán to one when I was working in Dhaka in 2015. I love Spreeha and am proud to support their work as a scientist and as a human.
NightStop: We don’t often think about what happens to foster youth when they age out of the system, but we should be because far too many of them experience homelessness or housing instability when they "age out" of the foster care system.* In the UK, I like NightStop as a group working to help keep youth from sleeping on the streets. If you’d like to learn more, they were featured in a Channel 4 documentary.
My Stuff Bags provides children with comfort items, basic essentials, and a sturdy bag for their belongings when they are removed from their home. When children are removed from their families or moved between foster homes, they often have to put all their belongings in whatever paper or plastic bag is readily available. Precious things have to be left behind and it can feel like your most special belongings are being treated like rubbish. MSB has been providing bags to children affected by Hurricane Harvey.
UNICEF is a steady partner for children’s rights and welfare (though I admit their charity ratings are a bit below what I like to see). They provide a wide array of goods and services to support child welfare and touch lives all over the world.
It's not just for children, but the Hispanic Federation is helping Puerto Rico recover from the devastation of Hurricane Maria and they absolutely need it.

Human Rights and Social Justice

We all know (or should by now) that the world isn’t always a kind or equitable place. Thankfully, there are people out there doing good work to make our communities better places.

Human Rights Watch works globally to document human rights abuse to help end injustices. You can’t change what you don’t see.
Trans Lifeline: Trans Lifeline is a (free!) service for transgender individuals to reach other to a trans person when they are in crisis. They operate in Canada and the United States.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has no time for nonsense and has a long history of actively fighting against oppression. They work on issues ranging from children’s rights and LGBT rights to immigrant justice and criminal justice reform. They also maintain a heartbreaking map of hate groups in the United States.
The Water Protectors intersect a lot of spaces here, but I thought that human rights would be the best categorisation for them. The Water Protectors were the group of brave humans who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline to defend their treaty (and human) rights against infringement. They were brutally treated by the state, federal, and local law enforcement officers who were stationed there and mostly ignored by the Obama Administration. Their legal fund helps them continue their work.

Reproductive Health

Marie Stopes: I don’t think I need to give a ton of explanation about the ways that reproductive rights have eroded in the United States, but did you know how difficult it is for people anywhere in Ireland to access an abortion? The Republic of Ireland has completely banned them unless you’re literally dying (#RepealThe8th) and it’s just as challenging to get one in Northern Ireland. Marie Stopes operates a clinic in Belfast that provides the abortion pill and helps cover the costs for women from Northern Ireland and the Republic to access care in England. Marie Stopes also helps provide abortion services in other countries which restrict access.
Planned Parenthood offers contraception, cancer screenings, and abortion services. They’re good and supporting them is always an excellent choice. (Planned Parenthood Global is also pretty fab.)
The Guttmacher Institute researches reproductive health issues and makes their work accessible on their website. You can’t fix problems without understanding what they are and Guttmacher is working to make that happen.
Abortion Access Network is quite Pacific Northwest Specific, but they make a big difference for people in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington who need an abortion and can’t afford them. Idaho has a super (not) great law that bans private insurance from paying for terminations, so it’s particularly important for people that live there.

Infectious Diseases

Communicable diseases are bad. They kill lots of people and cost the world billions of dollars in lost productivity every year. Viruses don’t have real butts, but you can still kick them in their symbolic bums. (I know I haven't listed any chronic disease groups out properly, but the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is well worth your time.)

Gavi is an international group that helps offset the cost of countries purchasing vaccines. They eventually scale back aid as countries no longer need it, but they're a huge force for good in making sure that no child dies from a vaccine preventable illness. I have a post discussing vaccines in more detail here.
The Carter Center has brought the world very, very close to a world without guinea worm—an incredibly painful and easily preventable affliction. In 1986, 3.5 million people suffered from guinea worm infection. In 2016, it was 25 people. We’ve only ever eliminated two diseases in the history of humanity (smallpox and rinderpest). This will be Jimmy Carter’s legacy and is certainly worth supporting.
The Infectious Disease Research Institute is working on incredibly important tasks like developing new antibiotics for diseases like tuberculosis. I love them and I hope you’ll love them too.
Center for Infectious Disease Research is another Seattle gem, but they do fantastic work globally to research diseases like HIV and malaria, moving us closer to vaccines and cures.

Animal Welfare

Animals are pretty cute (don't touch bats) and are well deserving of some love this holiday season.

Bat Conservation International helps protect our precious flying mammals around the world from habitat loss and diseases like White-nose Syndrome. Please, don't touch bats.
The Audubon Society is pretty North America-centric but is still great. They do a Bird Count every year to monitor the health of wild birds across the country and provide education to young and old birders. Rónán attended Nature Camp with our local chapter all summer and we attend free Rookery everts year round.
The Snow Leopard Trust is based in Seattle, but is invaluable to supporting the conservation of our family's favourite big cat. Snow Leopards moved off the Endangered Species List this year (in part because of the work of the SLT), but they're still vulnerable to extinction and need our help.

Public Lands

Coral Reef Alliance helps protect some of the most gorgeous places on Earth (and has pretty impressive financials).
National Trust: If you're in the UK, the National Trust does a bang up job keeping your wild spaces wild. I'm certainly looking forward to enjoying them this spring.
The National Parks Service maintains America's treasured public lands and its employees provide critical education to visitors about the value of those spaces. Our tax dollars support the NPS, but donations are important too as budgets are cut and Congress threatens to sell off our shared spaces for private development.

Giving Livestock

You may have noticed that I haven’t listed any organizations for giving livestock as gifts. This is completely intentional. While there’s something romantic about donating a cow or a chicken to a family in need, there are several good reasons to not do this. The first is that it’s not effective—livestock need to eat food (sometimes a lot of it) and drink water (sometimes also a lot of that) and that’s not something that every family can afford to give up. The second issue is that livestock gifting programs feed into the larger, more insidious global problem of paternalism.

I will freely admit that the idea of giving livestock is heartwarming. The image of a cow’s milk and calves lifting a family out of poverty in some far away country appeals to a deep part of the way that we usually engage with international development. The reality, however, looks very different.

Cows drink as much as 30 gallons of water every day. In a place with limited clean water (read: most of the planet), that’s an enormous burden for a family to take on.
The majority of the world is lactose intolerant. Giving milk to people who cannot properly digest it is not an effective way to promote adequate nutrition.
Will introducing new grazing animals to a region cause overgrazing and damage fragile landscapes (which can lead to other problems like soil erosion in the future)?
Will the family know how to care for the animal?
Will introducing new animals into a community increase the risk of zoonotic diseases like avian influenza being spread to new areas?

The issue of paternalism is a bit murkier to wade into. The most common reason I hear for not just giving cash (“direct cash transfers”) is that the recipients “won’t use it wisely.” What we find when we give either conditional or unconditional cash transfers, however, is that recipients do use them in ways that would generally be understood as “responsible.” Money pays school fees for daughters; allows a family to start a business; or buys a tin roof for a house or a motorbike allowing the family to better access education, healthcare, and their workplaces. Even if they did use the money for less “responsible” purchases, though, so what and who are we to make that determination. Poor people also deserve nice things. They deserve to eat healthy foods and meet their basic needs so that they can live a healthy life.** Their children also deserve to go to high quality schools and they deserve to live a life that isn’t misery at every moment. Humans have a basic right to not live in the kind of abject poverty that most humans do in fact experience.

Direct cash transfers are often stigmatised as “handouts” in many wealthy countries, but the entire state of Alaska receives direct cash transfers and no one shouts that the Permanent Dividend Fund is a “handout” because everyone gets it. I regularly hear people ask if it’s “true that everyone in Alaska just gets a check every year for living there,” but they never follow my answer with some line about welfare ripping apart the fabric of America. Yes, some people buy vacations they otherwise couldn’t afford (flying in and out of Alaska is really expensive) but plenty more use it to pay their student loans or offset the cost of living in Alaska. If you haven’t been, a gallon of milk is $6 and fresh produce is almost inaccessible in the medium-sized-city-by-Alaskan-standards my partner grew up in. The PFD isn’t a lot (usually between $1,000 and $1,500 per person) but it makes a big difference in the lives of the people who receive it. Direct cash transfers work well (certainly better than giving chickens and goats) and are an excellent way to help alleviate the health effects of poverty.

*I was a coauthor of this report.
**I was also a coauthor for this policy proposal.