Only one dollar a day will feed a boy or girl...

Invictus ChiKen · Post by **Invictus ChiKen** » 2006-01-01 10:27pm

You know the comercials, mostly put out by Christian Childrens fund.

My question is how effective are they? How much good do they REALLY do?

The Aliens · Post by **The Aliens** » 2006-01-01 10:32pm

For the really Christian ones, you're paying to preach at third world children. For example, Operation Christmas Child was a program supported by our local public school board, which gave packages to children in Africa at Christmas, but it was discovered that they were putting religious materials (bibles, crucifxes) into the assembled hampers for dissemination, so they were dropped, causing a massive furor in my predominently Catholic city. Moral of the story? Some of tehse charities will use your dollar a day to pay thinly-veiled missionaries, with the aid being secondary.

Stuart Mackey · Post by **Stuart Mackey** » 2006-01-02 02:51am

If one wishes to give to such charities its is important, like most other things, to do your research. Dont just swallow their PR, write to them and ask for information on what they do and how they do it, and get a break down of the nature of aid pakages.

Jew · Post by **Jew** » 2006-01-02 09:10am

I don't know about Operation Christmas Child directly, but it is a project of Samaritan's Purse, which is a well-respected charitable organization. In general you should do a little research about any charity before you give money.

One thing to look for is this: is the charity involved in ongoing community development? Swooping in and giving one-time aid is good, sure, but it's better to work with a community to help people out of extreme poverty. If you don't combat the causes of extreme poverty then the people will forever remain impoverished.

That's why the sponsor-a-child charities are such a good idea. You get to provide the basics of food and shelter, and the charitable organization also works with the community as a whole. But again, do your research: not all community-development charities have the same skills.

Finally: I tend not to look at what percentage of donations go directly to aid vs. what percentage goes to overhead. Frankly, any major organization requires lots of overhead costs, and charities are no exception. Overhead costs are part of doing business, and there is no shame in spending donations on vital infrastructure. Without those overhead costs the organization wouldn't be able to deliver any charity at all.