5 ms·

$3T flows through U.S. nonprofits every year

106 points by mtweak 7mo ago

0dayman 7mo ago
these are the lobbies in the middle east, lobbying to topple regimes and co.
ledauphin 7mo ago
yes, what we need is for charities to operate on a quarterly reporting cycle, so that their administrative overhead increase, and (like public companies) they can be myopically focused on short-term performance.
- input_sh 7mo ago
  It's truly ridiculous how detached whoever created this LLM-generated website is from the inner workings on non-profits. It's never the case that someone gives a large sum of money to do whatever the fuck you want to do with that money. They're usually given for a fixed period of time to do something grandiose by the end of it and the NGO has to report how they've spent every cent of it, usually at the end of that grant, but sometimes along the way as well (every X months). Not to the IRS, but to grant-givers.
- groundzeros2015 7mo ago
  I noticed you use the word charity - which invokes an image of giving those in need food, money, or care. The vast majority of non-profits are political and social lobbying efforts. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to fill out a form.
efitz 7mo ago
I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering. I would love to see requirements that 75%+ of all non-profit revenue has to pass through to the community, that non-profits may not transfer funds to other non-profits, and that directors and officers cannot be compensated and have very modest limits on expenses.
- mc32 7mo ago
  This would be great. I would also like to see non profits close shop once their goals are reached or fail rather than transform into a new thing just so the top people who make up the organization can continue to have a paycheck.
  - input_sh 7mo ago
    That's kind of the fault of grant givers. Nobody wants to give you a huge grant to continue doing what you're already doing, you only get grants for doing something completely new and grandiose. If you're lucky, you may get like 20% of the grant to cover your other expenses that don't come with a caveat of having to spend it on something completely new.
- WJW 7mo ago
  It seems to me that there's a strong Pareto law inclination to this. 99% of non-profits are going to the local volley ball club type organizations that indeed don't make any money at all, or maybe a few hundred at most. I am in the board of a local chess club and you should see the amount of discussion that sometimes happens around a budget of no more than the equivalent of several hundred USD. I honestly can't imagine anyone is using us to launder money. (How, even? Yearly contribution is less than 100 EUR and even major sponsors for tournaments etc are easily traceable local companies that contribute <1k EUR each) Then there's a relatively tiny amount of organizations that processes the vast majority of funds. Universities, hospitals, big FOSS organizations, etc. Those are the ones that are actually interesting.
  - efitz 7mo ago
    I don’t agree but I take your point. After seeing the recent scandals regarding US AID etc. I have very low confidence that the majority of nonprofits have altruistic motives. I also don’t buy the “most of our money goes to staff and directors salary and expenses because what we do is organize volunteers”. Why? Why can’t the staff and directors be volunteers too? Why do they need to even have any funding if it’s just volunteer coordination? We do lots of complex things with just volunteers- Linux, for example. And I’m unable to differentiate the behavior of most nonprofit hospitals from for-profit hospitals, with only a few exceptions.
lysace 7mo ago
Aka the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. Here's a surprisingly factual Teen Vogue primer: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-profit-industrial-complex-what-is https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-profit-industrial-comple...
arjie 7mo ago
They're a structure to compensate for the lack of state power created by us burdening our instruments of government with overwhelming requirements as much as I suspect that all we did is move the location where crimes were committed. I doubt the direction to success is through burdening these successor organizations with requirements. I suspect it is through reducing the constraints upon our governments - though how one would go about that in the face of highly-organized directed interests is an unsolved problem. Certainly, no one has yet come up with a scheme where firefighters' unions cannot impose rent-seeking requirements like FARS upon the remainder of society. Perhaps I'll take the chance to make a grand proclamation or 'hot take': "America will succeed or fail in the next century depending entirely on her ability to solve rent-seeking".
topspin 7mo ago
"It’s just that almost nobody looks." Looking will blow up too many cushy deals for too much of the Powers That Be. A great deal of it is non-show "chairmanship" jobs for the family and friends of politicians. Legal bribes. Feeding Our Future was another fine example of the shenanigans that go on in the US. Power Forward Communities was setup with $100 and captured $2 billion in EPA grants; caught while still doing only token work and not yet having been drained into the pockets of the favored. Abundant Blessings in CA was another nest of fraud; in criminal court right now. Seems like you can't go more than a couple days without another non-profit scam mess hitting headlines.
- markus_zhang 7mo ago
  So many people sitting on the wealth created by the hard working people, lol.
- mistrial9 7mo ago
  OK - except I recall a tour of Japanese graduate students at CompuMentor in San Francisco, studying the whole setup.. the reason? there are no "non-profits" in Japan (at that time, still?). CompuMentor was a great example -- both dipping deeply into the tills with special sales and large steady cash flows AND serving a genuinely underserved niche. Throw-down on some EPA effort As If That Is Typical, is intellectually dishonest. Mitigation and remediation are expensive and take time. And also there is substantial abuse and greenwashing. So you throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. "Its all a scam" says the barstool attorney, doing nothing.
- dashundchen 7mo ago
  Can you explain what you're referring to about Power Forward Communities? As far as I can tell it's a network of established non profits like Habitat for Humanity and Rewiring America, it seems they did more than token work in things like electrification before their grant was rescinded. The actual org itself acts as an umbrella to coordinate work among the participating non-profits.
Animats 7mo ago
Strangely, what they're selling is some kind of automated surveillance camera system.[1] "Whatever you funded, we can monitor it." [1] https://charitysense.com/#how-it-works https://charitysense.com/#how-it-works
- dklax77 7mo ago
  Reminds me of this recent DefCon talk about sketchy IoT surveillance devices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnojaEpF2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnojaEpF2I
- macintux 7mo ago
  I think every organization (hi, Flock) selling something like this should be required to install it on their own premises first.
  - mtweak 7mo ago
    Agree.
dklax77 7mo ago
For anyone even more skeptical of where your money goes when you donate to a nonprofit, there are plenty of resources out there for researching this. CharityNavigator is a popular one, but I donate primarily to GiveWell: https://www.givewell.org https://www.givewell.org
- morkalork 7mo ago
  But which is more trustworthy? We need a charity watcher-watcher to tell us.
  - bilbo0s 7mo ago
    This is getting downvoted, but it's a salient point nowadays. Who watches the watchers? Because if it's no one, then all we're doing is vouching for what could easily be scams set up by who knows who to steer our money to dubious organizations for who knows what purpose. We shouldn't trust the watchers any more than we should trust, say, Feed the Children. Or Medecins Sans Frontiers. All these organizations should be watched in a comprehensive fashion.
  - Recursing 7mo ago
    The organization I work for does something similar and positively evaluated GiveWell in November 2025 (see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U9H34ui_hvnPOwvsvcZF3VCC2ZDVrFiwgtptp4quXI8/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U9H34ui_hvnPOwvsvcZF3VCC... ) Personally, the more I look into GiveWell the more I think it's an amazing way to donate
    - morkalork 7mo ago
      >Recursing apt username
  - mtweak 7mo ago
    Not wrong
  - myroon5 7mo ago
    https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/2025-evaluator-research https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/2025-evaluator-research
SkipperCat 7mo ago
It looks like a lot of the monies in that chart are for wages and admin. That's not the worst thing. Many charities spend their money on doing things for the betterment of society and those people need to be paid a salary for their work. If there's a charity that cleans up parks, I would assume their wage expenses would be high to pay for the people doing the cleanup work. Not saying that there's not grift in the nonprofit world, but my experience with a lot of people who work in this space is that they're good stewards of the funds and very dedicated to trying to help the world be a better place.
- lysace 7mo ago
  Would be interesting to see some kind of grift estimate as a heat map where the X axis = revenue and the Y axis = age.
- renewiltord 7mo ago
  Indeed, what higher purpose is there except to pay oneself. At sufficiently low levels of productivity, one can consume arbitrary amounts of charitable donations. In fact, the ideal charity is a large vote bloc that is paid to clean parks. A tough job, a hard job, and one that requires back breaking labor of 4 sq. ft. a day.
Aurornis 7mo ago
> Much of it is operational necessity. But from a donor’s perspective, only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants. The rest is invisible One of my groups of friend groups has a lot of people who work at non-profits that are really dedicated to good causes. They are people who care and wanted to find jobs with purpose. The companies they work for aren’t, as far as I can tell, trying to grift or swindle. Yet their overall efficiency looks a lot like this chart: Very little money makes it out of the program because it’s so expensive to pay for all of their staff, office space, and meta-activities like doing more fundraising. From the outside looking in, there is a lot of malaise and inefficiency that just gets accepted at this level. They know they’re taking a pay cut relative to private industry so they, in turn, put in less effort. Many of them invite us to meet up in the afternoons because they’re “working from home” or just leaving the office early. Every time they encounter hard work the solution is to hire more people. Some of them switch to for-profit companies for a while before coming back to non-profits for the laid back working environment. It’s just accepted, to them, that non-profit means it doesn’t have to be efficient or a lot of work. Maybe my second hand experience is unique to this little bubble I’m in, but whenever I see statistics like this I think it’s more normal than not.
- post-it 7mo ago
  Perfectly understandable, I think. Gotta look out for number one, no sense burning out if you're not being paid enough to cover recovery.
  - Aurornis 7mo ago
    > no sense burning out Maybe I wasn’t clear, but even if they did put in 8 hour days they wouldn’t be close to the level of stress that we associate with burnout. This isn’t a self-protection measure so much as a lifestyle choice.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  There's also the assumption that "direct aid and grants" is somehow good - but that can also be exactly where the fraud is.
infinitewars 7mo ago
Very misleading analysis, the 8% direct grant comes from adding universities, hospitals and non-charities that make up 85% of the denominator. If you account for this using their own numbers, you get about 50% overhead, not 92%
- bilbo0s 7mo ago
  Well, ok. But this just goes to show that we need watching and monitoring infrastructure even for the organizations who claim to be watching and monitoring on our behalf. We have to know who's full of it, and who is acting in a more trustworthy fashion. What you point out is a huge miss. There is little chance that it wasn't intentional. There should, at minimum, be an explanation presented as to why they did that?
pan69 7mo ago
Isn't charity just a business model these days? The first time I came across was about 10 or so years ago where, I think it was a 60 minutes did a report on Movember, how they have some scheme/scam where the guys who started/own the "charity" also have another company that owns the Movember brand and the charity then has to licence the brand from that company. Meaning that for every dollar donated a good portion (can't remember the exact figure) then goes straight into their pockets as license fees.
- renewiltord 7mo ago
  This was the trick with the Aboriginal Flag in Australia but that guy beat the odds by getting it into government. I have some suspicion that the various derivative rainbow flags are a similar structure.
yuliyp 7mo ago
"only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants" That's an extremely misleading statement. For instance, a food bank giving away food to a pantry does not count as "direct aid and grants" (at least, if they're defining that as "Grants and other assistance to domestic individuals." from the I-990" ). The salary for the warehouse worker operating the food bank is also not counted in that 92%. Other cherry-picked statements like "32% of donors trust charities less today than they did five years ago" (not giving the percentage that trust charities more, or any other way to contextualize) make it clear that this is just a hit piece.
- Retric 7mo ago
  The problem is there is no guarantee the warehouse worker at a food bank is doing anything of value. So we can’t assume such things are productive without direct evidence.
  - bilbo0s 7mo ago
    I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us. At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're presenting. Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? When you remove them, the numbers and percentages radically change. Not only that, it doesn't feel like the average person sees a food bank and a university, or a hospital, (and certainly not a university hospital), as the same sort of "charity". When you start digging deeper into the numbers, it just looks like they were lumped in to make the less resourced charities like food banks look bad. Maybe there was some other reason they had for using this amalgamation? But they should be forthcoming with what that reason was.
    - Retric 7mo ago
      > Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? Ask the IRS / congress, this isn’t some arbitrary grouping it’s what charity means in the US. I do think it’s worth asking that question, but ask it of the people who can do something about it.
ahaucnx 7mo ago
Is it only me or are you guys also being disappointed when a very interesting article is heavily AI written? I feel like not wanting to read it in depth, even though the topic is unique and something I like to learn more. It’s a shame because there was probably quite some work that went into it: coming up with the topic, doing the research, polish it up etc. I have also been using AI a lot for article writing but the last two posts I wrote I went back into handwriting. They are much less “perfect”, but they are me and 100% what I want to say and convey. Even the imperfections matter. Maybe like a piece of handmade furniture vs something from IKEA.
shrubble 7mo ago
I’ve given to non profits where I know the people personally and how they operate; and to FreeBSD and NetBSD, which deliver pretty great results on a relative shoestring budget.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
robotnikman 7mo ago
One of the reasons why I donate to smaller local charities, like the Husky Rescue near me. Or charities that accept physical goods like Toys for Tots and food banks.
redwood 7mo ago
I wonder how much of this is religions
adamdavies95 7mo ago
ai;dr
bane 7mo ago
There's a mistake I see in the comments here that "non-profit" = "charity". There are a large collection of non/not for-profits that are not even remotely in the charity business. Some of these companies have long legacies that stretch back to academic labs spun out of major U.S. educational institutions. I've worked for two such companies in my career (and partnered with a few others) and both of them were really just normal businesses that used their non-profit status as part of their business model. They used that status to position themselves as an objective second party to various governments and businesses and signal trust. They also internally represent themselves as something different from commercial businesses, just with a weird way of mopping up profit at the end of the fiscal year. At one I was a researcher and the other a low-level executive. At the working level, both paid slightly under comparable jobs in the private sector, were often very top heavy, and spent lavishly on facilities and had large internal R&D programs that often went nowhere but acted like overamped hands-on training programs that expressed themselves in additional expertise they could offer their clients without having to turnover staff. I often had multiple personal offices, subsidized mid-level restaurant quality lunches, laboratories, assistants, and research budgets stretching into the low millions of dollars. This was in addition to the regular work we were contracted out to do, which was often either direct work on fairly cutting-edge S&T like programs or providing special advisory and expertise services to those same customers. All of the companies I know in this space are also fairly top-heavy with, executive and administrative pay helps sop up any profit. The law requires these companies to report quite a bit of information about their financials into the public space every year [1]. Some of the executives make quite extraordinary pay. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Here's a list of the various types: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organization-types https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizatio... (which can include golf courses, heh)
dr_dshiv 7mo ago
AI;DR
xphos 7mo ago
I think charity is good, I donate to charity. At the same time I once watched a podcast that basically said when you donate to charity the mindset and often the outcome of charity is that its money you throwing away and did not invest in making longer term differences. Its an utterly rude statement but I still feel a fundmental tension in that premise that an organization that could seek profit but whose fiduciary responsiblity was to the community it was serving rather some stock owner would have incentives to establish better long term charity. That well example is supportitive of that thought. But I think the the argument is certainly not good at other times because not everyone has the ability to invest and make a difference donations lower the requirements and the barriers to both. Also whose to say even a throw away Well doesn't make the world of difference to people who really needed even if it was temporary. I just a struggling thought I have sometimes...
jongjong 7mo ago
Wow. This is a massive figure. The US GDP is $30 trillion but most of that is spoken for; it's wages, costs, reinvestment — money that's already doing a defined job. But this $3 trillion is different; it's flowing through entities that are completely exempt from normal market pressures and competition. What's insane to think about is the composition of it; this isn't charity money, it's Medicare reimbursements, government contracts, university tuition, hospital fees. Which means the most important sectors of the economy — healthcare, education, research — are basically being run by nonprofits. Enormous institutional players with massive lobbying power, operating in markets with no real competition. It's less that profits are being funneled into nonprofits and more that entire industries have reorganized themselves around the nonprofit structure to avoid the accountability that competition normally creates. Which explains a lot about why the economy feels so captured and doesn't make sense anymore.
diyseguy 7mo ago
I recently had to get surgery at a local hospital with a cross on top and named after a saint. As I waited for my appointment, I noticed the walls were covered with quotes from donors. The lady who was working the desk was an unpaid volunteer from a local church. Out of curiosity, I looked up the financials for the hospital and saw that the board of directors and various executives (around 12 people) were pulling in multi-million dollar salaries. Of the $3B they had raked in from donations that year, they allocated around $300M to a program to help the local people in some ambiguous way. No mention of what happened to the remaining donations. The bill for my treatment was $60K, thankfully insurance covered most of it. Rather seems like charity washing an otherwise ordinary corporation including exploiting gullible people for free labor...
- chneu 7mo ago
  If there is a devil, it runs organized religion.
- mcfedr 7mo ago
  wait, are you saying a hospital that charges 60K for surgery is a charity? because it cheaper than other options or what?
  - rasz 7mo ago
    IKEA is a charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - diyseguy 7mo ago
    No, it's not cheaper than other options. Pretty much market rate healthcare highway robbery. Afaict, they call themselves a charity because of the cross on top of the building. That's it. Their website mumbled something about helping the community with some sort of program with vague handwaving. Maybe an investigative journalist could figure out what they do that's actually charitable, but based on publicly available information, I could not find much. My sense is people just assume they have good intentions because they named themselves after some saint. Just charity vibes.
globemaster99 7mo ago
Money laundering country for the criminals of the whole world.
Simulacra 7mo ago
For five years, I ran a healthcare nonprofit, and the problem is much worse than you think. For C3 nonprofits, for which donations are tax deductible, you have a lot of rich people who just flush cash through them to take is a tax deduction. Then they dictate to the nonprofit what political issues they want pursued. Executives are paid exorbitant salaries, and very little actually goes to what it is intended. Many of the nonprofits that I worked with claim each other's work, when there's a victory, they claim it as their own, and they relentlessly fundraisers so they can pay themselves more. The c3 system is desperately in need of an overhaul.

106 points by mtweak 7mo ago

these are the lobbies in the middle east, lobbying to topple regimes and co.

yes, what we need is for charities to operate on a quarterly reporting cycle, so that their administrative overhead increase, and (like public companies) they can be myopically focused on short-term performance.

input_sh 7mo ago
It's truly ridiculous how detached whoever created this LLM-generated website is from the inner workings on non-profits. It's never the case that someone gives a large sum of money to do whatever the fuck you want to do with that money. They're usually given for a fixed period of time to do something grandiose by the end of it and the NGO has to report how they've spent every cent of it, usually at the end of that grant, but sometimes along the way as well (every X months). Not to the IRS, but to grant-givers.
groundzeros2015 7mo ago
I noticed you use the word charity - which invokes an image of giving those in need food, money, or care. The vast majority of non-profits are political and social lobbying efforts. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask them to fill out a form.

efitz 7mo ago

I believe that many (most?) non-profits are a combination of grift and money laundering. I would love to see requirements that 75%+ of all non-profit revenue has to pass through to the community, that non-profits may not transfer funds to other non-profits, and that directors and officers cannot be compensated and have very modest limits on expenses.

mc32 7mo ago
This would be great. I would also like to see non profits close shop once their goals are reached or fail rather than transform into a new thing just so the top people who make up the organization can continue to have a paycheck.
- input_sh 7mo ago
  That's kind of the fault of grant givers. Nobody wants to give you a huge grant to continue doing what you're already doing, you only get grants for doing something completely new and grandiose. If you're lucky, you may get like 20% of the grant to cover your other expenses that don't come with a caveat of having to spend it on something completely new.
WJW 7mo ago
It seems to me that there's a strong Pareto law inclination to this. 99% of non-profits are going to the local volley ball club type organizations that indeed don't make any money at all, or maybe a few hundred at most. I am in the board of a local chess club and you should see the amount of discussion that sometimes happens around a budget of no more than the equivalent of several hundred USD. I honestly can't imagine anyone is using us to launder money. (How, even? Yearly contribution is less than 100 EUR and even major sponsors for tournaments etc are easily traceable local companies that contribute <1k EUR each) Then there's a relatively tiny amount of organizations that processes the vast majority of funds. Universities, hospitals, big FOSS organizations, etc. Those are the ones that are actually interesting.
- efitz 7mo ago
  I don’t agree but I take your point. After seeing the recent scandals regarding US AID etc. I have very low confidence that the majority of nonprofits have altruistic motives. I also don’t buy the “most of our money goes to staff and directors salary and expenses because what we do is organize volunteers”. Why? Why can’t the staff and directors be volunteers too? Why do they need to even have any funding if it’s just volunteer coordination? We do lots of complex things with just volunteers- Linux, for example. And I’m unable to differentiate the behavior of most nonprofit hospitals from for-profit hospitals, with only a few exceptions.

lysace 7mo ago

Aka the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. Here's a surprisingly factual Teen Vogue primer: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-profit-industrial-complex-what-is https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-profit-industrial-comple...

arjie 7mo ago

They're a structure to compensate for the lack of state power created by us burdening our instruments of government with overwhelming requirements as much as I suspect that all we did is move the location where crimes were committed. I doubt the direction to success is through burdening these successor organizations with requirements. I suspect it is through reducing the constraints upon our governments - though how one would go about that in the face of highly-organized directed interests is an unsolved problem. Certainly, no one has yet come up with a scheme where firefighters' unions cannot impose rent-seeking requirements like FARS upon the remainder of society. Perhaps I'll take the chance to make a grand proclamation or 'hot take': "America will succeed or fail in the next century depending entirely on her ability to solve rent-seeking".

topspin 7mo ago

"It’s just that almost nobody looks." Looking will blow up too many cushy deals for too much of the Powers That Be. A great deal of it is non-show "chairmanship" jobs for the family and friends of politicians. Legal bribes. Feeding Our Future was another fine example of the shenanigans that go on in the US. Power Forward Communities was setup with $100 and captured $2 billion in EPA grants; caught while still doing only token work and not yet having been drained into the pockets of the favored. Abundant Blessings in CA was another nest of fraud; in criminal court right now. Seems like you can't go more than a couple days without another non-profit scam mess hitting headlines.

markus_zhang 7mo ago
So many people sitting on the wealth created by the hard working people, lol.
mistrial9 7mo ago
OK - except I recall a tour of Japanese graduate students at CompuMentor in San Francisco, studying the whole setup.. the reason? there are no "non-profits" in Japan (at that time, still?). CompuMentor was a great example -- both dipping deeply into the tills with special sales and large steady cash flows AND serving a genuinely underserved niche. Throw-down on some EPA effort As If That Is Typical, is intellectually dishonest. Mitigation and remediation are expensive and take time. And also there is substantial abuse and greenwashing. So you throw out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak. "Its all a scam" says the barstool attorney, doing nothing.
dashundchen 7mo ago
Can you explain what you're referring to about Power Forward Communities? As far as I can tell it's a network of established non profits like Habitat for Humanity and Rewiring America, it seems they did more than token work in things like electrification before their grant was rescinded. The actual org itself acts as an umbrella to coordinate work among the participating non-profits.

Animats 7mo ago

Strangely, what they're selling is some kind of automated surveillance camera system.[1] "Whatever you funded, we can monitor it." [1] https://charitysense.com/#how-it-works https://charitysense.com/#how-it-works

dklax77 7mo ago
Reminds me of this recent DefCon talk about sketchy IoT surveillance devices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnojaEpF2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCnojaEpF2I
macintux 7mo ago
I think every organization (hi, Flock) selling something like this should be required to install it on their own premises first.
- mtweak 7mo ago
  Agree.

dklax77 7mo ago

For anyone even more skeptical of where your money goes when you donate to a nonprofit, there are plenty of resources out there for researching this. CharityNavigator is a popular one, but I donate primarily to GiveWell: https://www.givewell.org https://www.givewell.org

morkalork 7mo ago
But which is more trustworthy? We need a charity watcher-watcher to tell us.
- bilbo0s 7mo ago
  This is getting downvoted, but it's a salient point nowadays. Who watches the watchers? Because if it's no one, then all we're doing is vouching for what could easily be scams set up by who knows who to steer our money to dubious organizations for who knows what purpose. We shouldn't trust the watchers any more than we should trust, say, Feed the Children. Or Medecins Sans Frontiers. All these organizations should be watched in a comprehensive fashion.
- Recursing 7mo ago
  The organization I work for does something similar and positively evaluated GiveWell in November 2025 (see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U9H34ui_hvnPOwvsvcZF3VCC2ZDVrFiwgtptp4quXI8/edit?usp=drivesdk https://docs.google.com/document/d/1U9H34ui_hvnPOwvsvcZF3VCC... ) Personally, the more I look into GiveWell the more I think it's an amazing way to donate
  - morkalork 7mo ago
    >Recursing apt username
- mtweak 7mo ago
  Not wrong
- myroon5 7mo ago
  https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/2025-evaluator-research https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/2025-evaluator-research

SkipperCat 7mo ago

It looks like a lot of the monies in that chart are for wages and admin. That's not the worst thing. Many charities spend their money on doing things for the betterment of society and those people need to be paid a salary for their work. If there's a charity that cleans up parks, I would assume their wage expenses would be high to pay for the people doing the cleanup work. Not saying that there's not grift in the nonprofit world, but my experience with a lot of people who work in this space is that they're good stewards of the funds and very dedicated to trying to help the world be a better place.

lysace 7mo ago
Would be interesting to see some kind of grift estimate as a heat map where the X axis = revenue and the Y axis = age.
renewiltord 7mo ago
Indeed, what higher purpose is there except to pay oneself. At sufficiently low levels of productivity, one can consume arbitrary amounts of charitable donations. In fact, the ideal charity is a large vote bloc that is paid to clean parks. A tough job, a hard job, and one that requires back breaking labor of 4 sq. ft. a day.

Aurornis 7mo ago

> Much of it is operational necessity. But from a donor’s perspective, only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants. The rest is invisible One of my groups of friend groups has a lot of people who work at non-profits that are really dedicated to good causes. They are people who care and wanted to find jobs with purpose. The companies they work for aren’t, as far as I can tell, trying to grift or swindle. Yet their overall efficiency looks a lot like this chart: Very little money makes it out of the program because it’s so expensive to pay for all of their staff, office space, and meta-activities like doing more fundraising. From the outside looking in, there is a lot of malaise and inefficiency that just gets accepted at this level. They know they’re taking a pay cut relative to private industry so they, in turn, put in less effort. Many of them invite us to meet up in the afternoons because they’re “working from home” or just leaving the office early. Every time they encounter hard work the solution is to hire more people. Some of them switch to for-profit companies for a while before coming back to non-profits for the laid back working environment. It’s just accepted, to them, that non-profit means it doesn’t have to be efficient or a lot of work. Maybe my second hand experience is unique to this little bubble I’m in, but whenever I see statistics like this I think it’s more normal than not.

post-it 7mo ago
Perfectly understandable, I think. Gotta look out for number one, no sense burning out if you're not being paid enough to cover recovery.
- Aurornis 7mo ago
  > no sense burning out Maybe I wasn’t clear, but even if they did put in 8 hour days they wouldn’t be close to the level of stress that we associate with burnout. This isn’t a self-protection measure so much as a lifestyle choice.
bombcar 7mo ago
There's also the assumption that "direct aid and grants" is somehow good - but that can also be exactly where the fraud is.

infinitewars 7mo ago

Very misleading analysis, the 8% direct grant comes from adding universities, hospitals and non-charities that make up 85% of the denominator. If you account for this using their own numbers, you get about 50% overhead, not 92%

bilbo0s 7mo ago
Well, ok. But this just goes to show that we need watching and monitoring infrastructure even for the organizations who claim to be watching and monitoring on our behalf. We have to know who's full of it, and who is acting in a more trustworthy fashion. What you point out is a huge miss. There is little chance that it wasn't intentional. There should, at minimum, be an explanation presented as to why they did that?

pan69 7mo ago

Isn't charity just a business model these days? The first time I came across was about 10 or so years ago where, I think it was a 60 minutes did a report on Movember, how they have some scheme/scam where the guys who started/own the "charity" also have another company that owns the Movember brand and the charity then has to licence the brand from that company. Meaning that for every dollar donated a good portion (can't remember the exact figure) then goes straight into their pockets as license fees.

renewiltord 7mo ago
This was the trick with the Aboriginal Flag in Australia but that guy beat the odds by getting it into government. I have some suspicion that the various derivative rainbow flags are a similar structure.

yuliyp 7mo ago

"only 8 cents of every dollar shows up as direct aid and grants" That's an extremely misleading statement. For instance, a food bank giving away food to a pantry does not count as "direct aid and grants" (at least, if they're defining that as "Grants and other assistance to domestic individuals." from the I-990" ). The salary for the warehouse worker operating the food bank is also not counted in that 92%. Other cherry-picked statements like "32% of donors trust charities less today than they did five years ago" (not giving the percentage that trust charities more, or any other way to contextualize) make it clear that this is just a hit piece.

Retric 7mo ago
The problem is there is no guarantee the warehouse worker at a food bank is doing anything of value. So we can’t assume such things are productive without direct evidence.
- bilbo0s 7mo ago
  I think the material point of HN User Yuliyp's comment is that the organization claiming to be providing us with "Charity Sense", for some reason is not providing us all of the data we need to make sense of charities. Even worse, it seems to be deliberately disingenuous in presenting the data it does give us. At least provide explanations of why certain things are included or excluded from the numbers they're presenting. Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? When you remove them, the numbers and percentages radically change. Not only that, it doesn't feel like the average person sees a food bank and a university, or a hospital, (and certainly not a university hospital), as the same sort of "charity". When you start digging deeper into the numbers, it just looks like they were lumped in to make the less resourced charities like food banks look bad. Maybe there was some other reason they had for using this amalgamation? But they should be forthcoming with what that reason was.
  - Retric 7mo ago
    > Why are hospitals and universities lumped in with the food bank in the first place for instance? Ask the IRS / congress, this isn’t some arbitrary grouping it’s what charity means in the US. I do think it’s worth asking that question, but ask it of the people who can do something about it.

ahaucnx 7mo ago

Is it only me or are you guys also being disappointed when a very interesting article is heavily AI written? I feel like not wanting to read it in depth, even though the topic is unique and something I like to learn more. It’s a shame because there was probably quite some work that went into it: coming up with the topic, doing the research, polish it up etc. I have also been using AI a lot for article writing but the last two posts I wrote I went back into handwriting. They are much less “perfect”, but they are me and 100% what I want to say and convey. Even the imperfections matter. Maybe like a piece of handmade furniture vs something from IKEA.

shrubble 7mo ago

I’ve given to non profits where I know the people personally and how they operate; and to FreeBSD and NetBSD, which deliver pretty great results on a relative shoestring budget.

deleted 7mo ago

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robotnikman 7mo ago

One of the reasons why I donate to smaller local charities, like the Husky Rescue near me. Or charities that accept physical goods like Toys for Tots and food banks.

redwood 7mo ago

I wonder how much of this is religions

adamdavies95 7mo ago

ai;dr

bane 7mo ago

There's a mistake I see in the comments here that "non-profit" = "charity". There are a large collection of non/not for-profits that are not even remotely in the charity business. Some of these companies have long legacies that stretch back to academic labs spun out of major U.S. educational institutions. I've worked for two such companies in my career (and partnered with a few others) and both of them were really just normal businesses that used their non-profit status as part of their business model. They used that status to position themselves as an objective second party to various governments and businesses and signal trust. They also internally represent themselves as something different from commercial businesses, just with a weird way of mopping up profit at the end of the fiscal year. At one I was a researcher and the other a low-level executive. At the working level, both paid slightly under comparable jobs in the private sector, were often very top heavy, and spent lavishly on facilities and had large internal R&D programs that often went nowhere but acted like overamped hands-on training programs that expressed themselves in additional expertise they could offer their clients without having to turnover staff. I often had multiple personal offices, subsidized mid-level restaurant quality lunches, laboratories, assistants, and research budgets stretching into the low millions of dollars. This was in addition to the regular work we were contracted out to do, which was often either direct work on fairly cutting-edge S&T like programs or providing special advisory and expertise services to those same customers. All of the companies I know in this space are also fairly top-heavy with, executive and administrative pay helps sop up any profit. The law requires these companies to report quite a bit of information about their financials into the public space every year [1]. Some of the executives make quite extraordinary pay. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/ https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/

bombcar 7mo ago
Here's a list of the various types: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organization-types https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizatio... (which can include golf courses, heh)

dr_dshiv 7mo ago

AI;DR

xphos 7mo ago

I think charity is good, I donate to charity. At the same time I once watched a podcast that basically said when you donate to charity the mindset and often the outcome of charity is that its money you throwing away and did not invest in making longer term differences. Its an utterly rude statement but I still feel a fundmental tension in that premise that an organization that could seek profit but whose fiduciary responsiblity was to the community it was serving rather some stock owner would have incentives to establish better long term charity. That well example is supportitive of that thought. But I think the the argument is certainly not good at other times because not everyone has the ability to invest and make a difference donations lower the requirements and the barriers to both. Also whose to say even a throw away Well doesn't make the world of difference to people who really needed even if it was temporary. I just a struggling thought I have sometimes...

jongjong 7mo ago

Wow. This is a massive figure. The US GDP is $30 trillion but most of that is spoken for; it's wages, costs, reinvestment — money that's already doing a defined job. But this $3 trillion is different; it's flowing through entities that are completely exempt from normal market pressures and competition. What's insane to think about is the composition of it; this isn't charity money, it's Medicare reimbursements, government contracts, university tuition, hospital fees. Which means the most important sectors of the economy — healthcare, education, research — are basically being run by nonprofits. Enormous institutional players with massive lobbying power, operating in markets with no real competition. It's less that profits are being funneled into nonprofits and more that entire industries have reorganized themselves around the nonprofit structure to avoid the accountability that competition normally creates. Which explains a lot about why the economy feels so captured and doesn't make sense anymore.

diyseguy 7mo ago

I recently had to get surgery at a local hospital with a cross on top and named after a saint. As I waited for my appointment, I noticed the walls were covered with quotes from donors. The lady who was working the desk was an unpaid volunteer from a local church. Out of curiosity, I looked up the financials for the hospital and saw that the board of directors and various executives (around 12 people) were pulling in multi-million dollar salaries. Of the $3B they had raked in from donations that year, they allocated around $300M to a program to help the local people in some ambiguous way. No mention of what happened to the remaining donations. The bill for my treatment was $60K, thankfully insurance covered most of it. Rather seems like charity washing an otherwise ordinary corporation including exploiting gullible people for free labor...

chneu 7mo ago
If there is a devil, it runs organized religion.
mcfedr 7mo ago
wait, are you saying a hospital that charges 60K for surgery is a charity? because it cheaper than other options or what?
- rasz 7mo ago
  IKEA is a charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- diyseguy 7mo ago
  No, it's not cheaper than other options. Pretty much market rate healthcare highway robbery. Afaict, they call themselves a charity because of the cross on top of the building. That's it. Their website mumbled something about helping the community with some sort of program with vague handwaving. Maybe an investigative journalist could figure out what they do that's actually charitable, but based on publicly available information, I could not find much. My sense is people just assume they have good intentions because they named themselves after some saint. Just charity vibes.

globemaster99 7mo ago

Money laundering country for the criminals of the whole world.

Simulacra 7mo ago

For five years, I ran a healthcare nonprofit, and the problem is much worse than you think. For C3 nonprofits, for which donations are tax deductible, you have a lot of rich people who just flush cash through them to take is a tax deduction. Then they dictate to the nonprofit what political issues they want pursued. Executives are paid exorbitant salaries, and very little actually goes to what it is intended. Many of the nonprofits that I worked with claim each other's work, when there's a victory, they claim it as their own, and they relentlessly fundraisers so they can pay themselves more. The c3 system is desperately in need of an overhaul.