gregshahade.com Blog

I mentioned kiva.org as a possibility for our first charity a few posts ago. I did some further research and found some people who are upset about some of their practices. I haven’t had time to look into it fully and this kind of thing will probably pop up for the majority of charities, but I figure for completeness sake I should post them here:

http://www.scam.com/showthread.php?t=76720

http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php/topic,918.0.html

Here is the wikipedia page where there’s some discussion on the interest rates which are perceived as high by some people:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_(organization)#Interest_rates

Again, I’m just putting this out there. Have had no time to think about what this information means or whether it should be an issue. I’m sure if we go further with choosing this charity I’ll give them a call and try to get as much information as I can on exactly how it works.

So it’s time to start coming up with candidates. I found one site that I think is really cool, although I haven’t done any major investigating. The name of the site is kiva.org and it’s focus is microlending. Most of you probably know what this is, but it’s basically giving very small interest free loans to extremely poor people who are looking to start a business so they can provide for themselves and their family. Sometimes it takes a very small amount of funding to start the business in question, and the large majority of the time you will get your loan repaid in full.

I urge you to check the site out and give me your thoughts, but let me share some positives real quickly:

1. Supposedly they send you some kind of updates when the business is up and running, which of course helps those who want to feel a personal connection to those they donate to.

2. While in reality it’s a donation, given that you are going to get the money back, you can continuously use it for new prospective entrepenuers. So how it would work is let’s say for example one donated $500. One idea would be to spread $25 to 20 different people, or perhaps $50 to 10 different people. Then you sit back and wait, and once you are paid back, you take the money you are repaid and give it to someone else, and simply repeat this process forever.

So right now I like this idea, but obviously there are so many charities out there and I’d love to hear comments from everyone else. If you leave a comment with a description of a charity, I may make it into a regular post so that it gains more visibility.

Of course given that almost no one knows my new website exists yet, there probably isn’t much comment traffic yet, but hopefully after we do this for 1-2 months, people will get the word out.

If you read my first post, you’d see that I’m going to start giving away a bit of money each month to a charity. Hopefully the following two things happen:

1. I have some help from the community in determining which charity to choose each month

2. I also encourage other readers to give a little bit.

There are a lot of things to discuss in regards to how this will work, but first let me talk about the type of charities I’ll be looking at. I expect that I’ll be pretty open minded about it, and that there will be a good deal of variety from month to month. Let’s give a few examples of some prototypical charities. Please note that I know very little about these charities right now, I’m just giving some quick off the top of my head examples:

1. Relief for Poverty/Hunger/Disease: These charities are generally quite large and usually help people in some of the poorest countries in the world. Some examples might be Oxfam, Red Cross, Nothing But Nets etc

2. Charities focused more on problems within the U.S.A: Some examples of this could be the ACLU, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, veterans associations etc. For the most part the people benefitting from these will have greater living conditions than those from the poorest countries in the world, but again I’m not going to try to be 100% focused on making sure that the money is always given to those who are suffering the absolute most.

3. Very individual focused donations: These could be donations that are given to just one or maybe a few individuals. Perhaps it could be some college scholarship for a kid who had something horrible happen to them. Another idea would be to give some scholarship to a kid who was involved in some heroic act. For instance if a kid risks his life to save someone else, it’d be nice to reward them somehow. Also you could just take a kid with a dream, who is having trouble affording whatever it takes to fulfill their dream, and try to help them. There are lots of possibilities in this realm, and usually it’ll probably be the most feel good story because the association is so direct, so I suspect something like this will be done from time to time.

4. Chess related donations: As most people reading this know, chess has been a large part of my life, and it’s always nice to help the chess community. Of course chess players aren’t starving to death on the streets, but as stated above, I believe in making donations for many reasons, and so I’m sure that occasionally there will be some good cause in the chess world to help with.  Please note that this will never involve any project in which I’m organizing such as the U.S. Chess School or U.S. Chess League.

5. Animal Welfare: I love the animals, what can I say. Unfortunately I eat their dead bodies on a regular basis, but that doesn’t mean I still can’t do something to help.

Anyway the above are just some ideas, I’m sure there are many others that I didn’t cover. I just wanted to give a general idea. Please let me know if you have any ideas! The first donation day will be August 31st/Sept 1st, and we will decide on the charity on August 20th!

Ok so I bought the book “The Life You Can Save“. There are some good things and bad things about this book:

Good Things: It’s cheap, only $15!

Bad Things: It really costs thousands of dollars!!!

I’m not sure that I agree with everything in the book, but it’s also hard to deny that I don’t need some of my money quite as much as other people might need it. Now if I were a perfect person I’d just sit back and quietly give my money away to charity, but that’s no fun really!

Instead we are going to do something fun!!! Every month, with your help, we are going to pick one charity and give a bunch of money to it! I’m going to start by giving somewhere in the neighborhood of $500-$1200 per month to whichever charity is chosen. The exact figure is based on a really anal formula that you’d rather not know the details of. For our first month it’ll probably be $800-900.

I will give more details in the coming posts, but that’s the basic idea! The money will given by me on the last day of the month or the first day of the following month. The charity will probably be chosen 10 days before the month ends, probably on the 20th of each month, so that anyone else who wants to join the fun has time to know what they are giving to.  Stay tuned for the type of charities I’ll be looking for. It’ll be pretty inclusive, which is probably different than “The Life You Can Save” would recommend as it won’t be ultra focused on making sure the donations are “optimal”, but I think it’ll be much more fun that way.