#GivingTuesday is all over Medium
Stories, strategy, and giving opportunities across the platform
Giving Tuesday is shaping up to be bigger than ever this year, and Medium users are doing their part to spread the word. A bunch of stories are included in this publication, and below are some highlights from elsewhere around the platform.
Looking for somewhere to give? These orgs are writing about their work.
charity: water believes we can end the water crisis in our lifetime, and lays out the reasons we should believe and support their efforts:
We believe in local partners who are absolute experts in water and sanitation. None of our staff are hydrogeologists or drillers. Instead, we partner with local organizations around the world who have years of proven experience in delivering clean water and educating communities about health and sanitation. They know the area, they speak the language, and they work tirelessly to serve their people.
Hannah Brancato at FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture describes the Monument Quilt project:
These messages of solidarity are built upon the work of another example of safe spaces for survivors — the Monument Quilt — an ongoing collection of stories from survivors of sexual and domestic violence, written, painted and stitched onto red quilt squares. Our stories are displayed in city and town centers to create and demand public space to heal, creating a culture of support, not shame for survivors. The quilt resists the popular and narrow narrative of how sexual violence occurs by telling many stories, not one. The quilt has already been displayed in 25 different cities and towns across the Eastern half of the United States. This spring, we will embark on a West Coast tour with the quilt. In 2018, during a final exhibition, the Quilt will blanket the National Mall with the phrase “Not Alone.”
Healing Transitions tells the story of Air Force veteran Darryl West who overcame substance abuse at their facility in North Carolina.
West’s face brightens when he begins to look back on the day he decided to go to The Healing Place. “I’ll never forget that day. It was around 28 degrees outside. I had made the decision that I was going to catch The Healing Place bus at noon but it turned out the bus wouldn’t pick me up until four o’clock. So I waited. I had real thin clothes on and it was freezing but I had made my decision. I knew that if I went back to where I came from I would use again. So when the bus came I got on and my life has moved forward ever since.”
ScholarMatch has compiled words of hope for the first-generation college students — many from communities of color and immigrant families — from teachers and supporters:
Dear students, you are supported and loved and valued! Thank you for being you, for being here, for ALREADY making this country great. I stand in awe of your hard work. There is a web of people who care for you and support you, and I hope you feel uplifted and held by us all right now.” -Miriam S.
Reshma Saujani, Founder and CEO of Girls Who Code tells us why community is more important than ever this year:
In the aftermath of the election, I look at the current political landscape and try to anticipate what lies ahead. For our girls, my greatest hope is their dreams are not deferred as that final glass ceiling still hangs painfully intact above us. Many of you have reached out to us over the past few weeks about ways you can make a greater impact in your community. Whether you’re driven by education reform, economic opportunity, or women’s equality, you’re thinking about how you can make a difference for your families, your schools, and your workplaces. The outpouring of support these past few weeks has given us hope and an even greater belief in the work we do and the urgency with which we do it.
Amy Poehler’s SmartGirls Staff shared this heartwarming story of two sisters trying to make a difference:
Seattle based sisters Margaret and Charlotte Tristan have raised over $14,000 for charity in their short but powerful philanthropic careers. Currently they are raising money for the Worldbuilders’ campaign benefiting Heifer International. Their Crowdspire page details the origin of their “Geeky Concert Fundraiser” concept:
“We were driving in the van one summer morning with Charlotte, age 9 and Margaret, age 5 on our way to a violin lesson when Charlotte started talking about how easy it was to pick out the theme song for Doctor Who, one of our favorite shows, on the violin. She remarked on how many great songs there were from games, movies and tv shows that we love and said wouldn’t it be great if there was a concert full of geeky music that we could go listen to. It was only a few seconds before that thought had morphed into, ‘we have to hold a geeky concert fundraiser for Worldbuilders, Mom!’”
Dan Goldenberg of the Call of Duty Endowment reiterates the importance of combatting unemployment among veterans:
Back in 2009, when the Endowment was founded by Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, unemployment for our youngest veterans was well over 20 percent, which is absolutely unconscionable. Think about it: these individuals have given up so much to serve their country — gaining high demand skills and experience along the way. And, when they leave the military, they’re met with incredible instability because they can’t secure good jobs. Nor do they know — in many cases — how to look for jobs that are outside the military realm. This is in addition to the fact that many companies don’t understand how to translate military experience to a non-military environment.
Some others to check out:
- Nationals Communications Youth Baseball Academy
- Kyndall C.’s list of women of color-led organizations she supports
- Independent Journalism operations like stories behind the fog, BINJ, Femsplain, Electric Literature, Pacific Standard and many others around Medium and beyond are in need of support
- Cricket Media, publisher of BABYBUG, LADYBUG, SPIDER, and CRICKET
- Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, on supporting NaNoWriMo.org
- Save the Children on 4 ways to give back
- The Malala Fund and the Girls Performance and Advocacy (GPA) group
(I’ll be updating this list throughout the day, tips welcome in the responses below!)
Giving Tuesday Strategy & Advice for Donors
Hannah Gay stresses the importance of due diligence when choosing where to donate:
Before donating, look up any nonprofit on charitynavigator.org or guidestar.org, which are basically watchdog sites for the sector. They have comprehensive ratings and reports where you can check the efficacy of these nonprofits themselves; most smaller nonprofits are on there too. And if you want to get really nitty gritty you can download the charity’s 990s, their annual IRS tax filing forms that are public documents and also list executive compensation; while I’m all for equitable pay in the impact space, I don’t see the need for any executive salaries that are closer to $1M than they are to the compensation that most other employees within the organization make. I’m well aware of these watchdogs once-upon-a-time judging nonprofits for spending a lot on overhead. This is no longer a practice on there, and should not be a practice with you. Nonprofits need overhead to operate, and they need salaries to operate.
Similarly, Gleb Tsipursky advises donors to do their research and suggests a few specific charities in his comparisons:
Don’t believe me? Let’s work through a specific example. Say you have two charities whose goal is to save children’s lives. Charity A spends $20 million per year to save 100 children from cancer. It therefore saves 1 life at a cost of $200,000. Let’s take a second charity — Charity B — that saves children from a deadly tropical disease, such as Against Malaria Foundation. Research shows that it takes this charity just under $3,000 to save a life, which means that for $20 million, it can save over 6600 children! By using the metric of cost-effectiveness in saving lives, we can see that Against Malaria Foundation is 66 times as good as Charity A. Cost-effectiveness is the crucial metric to use in evaluating how much good we can do with our money, since that’s how we can measure the amount of good per dollar.
Are you planning to give today? Got a story to share or a great organization to recommend? Drop a response below!
