5 ms·

>Non profit ceos make 100s of thousands of dollars a year. That money comes from cash donations. People don't want to line a ceos pockets they want to help thei

>Non profit ceos make 100s of thousands of dollars a year. That money comes from cash donations. People don't want to line a ceos pockets they want to help their neighbor. Do you think this factor outweighs the efficiency factor from the article? Worst of all, the average consumer is buying their canned goods at four to five times the rock-bottom bulk price that can be obtained by the food bank itself. That $1 you spent on tuna could have purchased $4 worth of tuna if put in the hands of non-profit employee whose only job is to buy food as cheaply as possible. The savvy buyers at the Calgary Food Bank, for instance, promise that they can stretch $1 into $5.

CodiePetersen 7y ago
Yes considering depending on the nonprofit large percents of that one dollar donation go to other things like advertisements posters shirts etc. By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth. So what's more important getting someone off their feet to participate in their community or money.
- al2o3cr 7y ago
  By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth. Bullshit. In the US, charities are required to file detailed financial statements and tracked by sites like Charity Navigator. One that was spending 50%+ on overhead would be a major outlier. For some real data, I typed in "food bank" on Charity Navigator and picked the first result: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=9682 https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... 97.3% spent on programs and services delivered.
  - CodiePetersen 7y ago
    Right and their program expense is "Distributing food". What do you think that vague description of a program encompasses. Paying drivers? Paying the manager of the drive by the hour? It tells you very little of what your money is actually going to. Now I don't mean to knock the people of Brazos Valley Food Bank, they might all be volunteers and they might all work out of a volunteers garage, in which case you bet your ass if I knew for a fact I would be donating hard cash and probably even volunteer when and what I could if that was my neighborhood. But I'm not going to donate to some giant entity that can "scale". My entire point of the comment was that the author paints a picture that your food donation hinders operations and youd be better off to donate just one dollar instead of one can. So I pointed out all of the local cases where your donation goes just the right amount and from volunteers and for people who aren't going to complain about what efforts you are going to put in.
    - lidHanteyk 7y ago
      I picked a food bank that I remember volunteering with when I was in high school: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=6419 https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... "Food distribution" here is everything that the food bank does to put food in front of people. Storage, logistics, networking. As an example, I worked in a warehouse alongside forklift operators, carrying boxes of food between refrigerators and packing distribution boxes destined for delivery. As another example, this food bank owns and operates community gardens. They also have a dedicated "Meals on Wheels" program for taking prepared meals out to senior citizens and the infirm. The fantasy of working out of a garage is crushed by the basic nutrition needs of human beings. A single working garden is half a garage on its own, and a walk-in fridge is another half a garage. We generally want to imagine a food buffer of two weeks. A single block-sized warehouse can be far more practical for county-sized food banks than a network of restaurants, garages, church basements, or other small repositories. Edit: While I might not have been compensated with cash, the forklift operators were employed. Many volunteers were, like me, in various programs that required that they volunteer with the community. Employment with the food bank generally meant additional responsibilities; they couldn't ask volunteers to do certain kinds of dangerous things.
    - mr_crankypants 7y ago
      I don't really want to knock anyone, either, and volunteering is great, but I find the implication that there's something skeevy about paying a fair wage to the people who supply a charity's backbone labor to be kind of bothersome. Subtextually, there seems to be a peculiar double standard being presented: Paying retail prices for in-kind donations, which implicitly covers the wages of all sorts of retail and distribution workers associated with the grocery store, as well as lining the pockets of the grocer store's owners and, if it's a public company, shareholders, is just fine. But providing cash donations is bad, because then the charity might use some (presumably less) of that money to pay its own employees to do those jobs? And paying them money is bad, because they should be getting all that labor for free? It's hard for me not to see that as a tacit allegation that one's time and labor are inherently less valuable when they're being given to an organization whose mission is to help others instead of one whose mission is to make its owners as rich as possible. Which, personally, I think that my opinion runs close to being the exact opposite of that. If you want to spend your free time helping others, that's awesome. If you want to make a career of helping others so that you can spend even more time doing it, hey, that's awesome, too. And, the world's distributions of wealth, free time and skills being what they are, supplying the money that enables people to go that route can quite easily be the most effective option still other people have for giving back, so that's awesome, too.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  > By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth. Even then the one donated can is becoming two if people just donate the cash equivalent! Even in your example donating cash would be better and the money that doesn't go directly to services but instead to advertising and management expenses will also hopefully bring in more donations. But again even in your example if we ignore 100% of the benefits of advertisement and good management 1 can is /still/ becoming 2 cans!
hinkley 7y ago
In high school I was part of a club that was, in retrospect, very well run. And yet some things were a new adventure every time. For their annual events they would go around trying to get local businesses to donate goods or at least sell us supplies at wholesale prices. In some cases they could write it off. And we'd do the same thing every year, starting with places we had previous success with, but often with different people on both ends of the transaction. It was a crap shoot, and every year the game plan was a little different depending on what we got and how much. Now if I were much bigger, and I needed 100,000 cans of something, and I wanted that to be reliable so people don't starve, I skip the locals and I go to the manufacturer. Now my alternatives are 'free or 75% off' instead of 'free, 10% (employee discount) or 50% off'. I could end up saving $20,000 a year just on peas. You going to begrudge someone drawing a salary looking for deals and relationships like that? Logistics is hard. Everyone discounts just how hard, but Software Developers are exceptionally bad actors about this. Reminds me of a story I read about Microsoft millionaires starting their own companies and totally screwing the pooch on logistics because the MS logistics machine worked so well that it was invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Offices don't magically appear for new employees. Neither do desks or machines or ethernet jacks. All that shit is some support person dotting a lot of i's and crossing an exhaustive (and exhausting) number of t's.

CodiePetersen 7y ago

Yes considering depending on the nonprofit large percents of that one dollar donation go to other things like advertisements posters shirts etc. By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth. So what's more important getting someone off their feet to participate in their community or money.

al2o3cr 7y ago
By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth. Bullshit. In the US, charities are required to file detailed financial statements and tracked by sites like Charity Navigator. One that was spending 50%+ on overhead would be a major outlier. For some real data, I typed in "food bank" on Charity Navigator and picked the first result: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=9682 https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... 97.3% spent on programs and services delivered.
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  Right and their program expense is "Distributing food". What do you think that vague description of a program encompasses. Paying drivers? Paying the manager of the drive by the hour? It tells you very little of what your money is actually going to. Now I don't mean to knock the people of Brazos Valley Food Bank, they might all be volunteers and they might all work out of a volunteers garage, in which case you bet your ass if I knew for a fact I would be donating hard cash and probably even volunteer when and what I could if that was my neighborhood. But I'm not going to donate to some giant entity that can "scale". My entire point of the comment was that the author paints a picture that your food donation hinders operations and youd be better off to donate just one dollar instead of one can. So I pointed out all of the local cases where your donation goes just the right amount and from volunteers and for people who aren't going to complain about what efforts you are going to put in.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    I picked a food bank that I remember volunteering with when I was in high school: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=6419 https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summar... "Food distribution" here is everything that the food bank does to put food in front of people. Storage, logistics, networking. As an example, I worked in a warehouse alongside forklift operators, carrying boxes of food between refrigerators and packing distribution boxes destined for delivery. As another example, this food bank owns and operates community gardens. They also have a dedicated "Meals on Wheels" program for taking prepared meals out to senior citizens and the infirm. The fantasy of working out of a garage is crushed by the basic nutrition needs of human beings. A single working garden is half a garage on its own, and a walk-in fridge is another half a garage. We generally want to imagine a food buffer of two weeks. A single block-sized warehouse can be far more practical for county-sized food banks than a network of restaurants, garages, church basements, or other small repositories. Edit: While I might not have been compensated with cash, the forklift operators were employed. Many volunteers were, like me, in various programs that required that they volunteer with the community. Employment with the food bank generally meant additional responsibilities; they couldn't ask volunteers to do certain kinds of dangerous things.
  - mr_crankypants 7y ago
    I don't really want to knock anyone, either, and volunteering is great, but I find the implication that there's something skeevy about paying a fair wage to the people who supply a charity's backbone labor to be kind of bothersome. Subtextually, there seems to be a peculiar double standard being presented: Paying retail prices for in-kind donations, which implicitly covers the wages of all sorts of retail and distribution workers associated with the grocery store, as well as lining the pockets of the grocer store's owners and, if it's a public company, shareholders, is just fine. But providing cash donations is bad, because then the charity might use some (presumably less) of that money to pay its own employees to do those jobs? And paying them money is bad, because they should be getting all that labor for free? It's hard for me not to see that as a tacit allegation that one's time and labor are inherently less valuable when they're being given to an organization whose mission is to help others instead of one whose mission is to make its owners as rich as possible. Which, personally, I think that my opinion runs close to being the exact opposite of that. If you want to spend your free time helping others, that's awesome. If you want to make a career of helping others so that you can spend even more time doing it, hey, that's awesome, too. And, the world's distributions of wealth, free time and skills being what they are, supplying the money that enables people to go that route can quite easily be the most effective option still other people have for giving back, so that's awesome, too.
rtkwe 7y ago
> By the time you cut that out you are only going to get two cans worth. Even then the one donated can is becoming two if people just donate the cash equivalent! Even in your example donating cash would be better and the money that doesn't go directly to services but instead to advertising and management expenses will also hopefully bring in more donations. But again even in your example if we ignore 100% of the benefits of advertisement and good management 1 can is /still/ becoming 2 cans!

hinkley 7y ago

In high school I was part of a club that was, in retrospect, very well run. And yet some things were a new adventure every time. For their annual events they would go around trying to get local businesses to donate goods or at least sell us supplies at wholesale prices. In some cases they could write it off. And we'd do the same thing every year, starting with places we had previous success with, but often with different people on both ends of the transaction. It was a crap shoot, and every year the game plan was a little different depending on what we got and how much. Now if I were much bigger, and I needed 100,000 cans of something, and I wanted that to be reliable so people don't starve, I skip the locals and I go to the manufacturer. Now my alternatives are 'free or 75% off' instead of 'free, 10% (employee discount) or 50% off'. I could end up saving $20,000 a year just on peas. You going to begrudge someone drawing a salary looking for deals and relationships like that? Logistics is hard. Everyone discounts just how hard, but Software Developers are exceptionally bad actors about this. Reminds me of a story I read about Microsoft millionaires starting their own companies and totally screwing the pooch on logistics because the MS logistics machine worked so well that it was invisible. Out of sight, out of mind. Offices don't magically appear for new employees. Neither do desks or machines or ethernet jacks. All that shit is some support person dotting a lot of i's and crossing an exhaustive (and exhausting) number of t's.