gregshahade.com Blog

So there’s always a big question when it comes to charity, as to whether you should always try to give money to those who are suffering the most, or whether this isn’t necessary, and any positive cause is worthy. I think I definitely stand in the latter category.

Just because people have more than poverty level, and can eat on a regular basis, that doesn’t mean their life isn’t extremely unpleasant. I believe there’s a damaging psychological affect if you see everyone around you having more than you. So even if you are one of the bottom 10% of people in the nation, in regards to wealth, you clearly have much more than someone in the same situation in many African nations. However I don’t think this means that we should just forget about you and send all the money to Africa.

My own personal preference may be to find someone who is extremely passionate about what they do, and they are doing something on a volunteer basis. Maybe it’s not feeding every starving person in the world, but the effect will be more measurable. One example I can think of is one of the charities that was posted in a comment. I’ll just repost it below:

“dear Greg,

David Kane encouraged me to contact you. I recently met an amazing woman who gave up a good career to start giving writing workshops for disadvantaged kids in the poorest, most violent neighborhoods of Washington DC. After a year and a half, she has a team of 11 volunteers running the program in schools, shelters, etc and extraordinary stories of transformation, the kids just love it and open up in beautiful ways. By writing, I don’t mean literacy but learning the power of the word, having kids tell their own stories in poetry, essays, theatre, etc. She now wants these stories to not only empower the kids but contribute to social change by providing them to organizations that lobby on issues such as homelessness, education, domestic violence, etc. I was so inspired by her that I just joined her Board, I have worked in non-profit for 10 years and can give her advice on strategy, fund-raising, etc as well as share my networks. She’s been an angel to so many people, I feel it’s time a few angels take care of her too. She has done all this work as a volunteer, by the way. Anyway, the organization is called http://www.bookfruits.org – part of the support she needs is to allow her to update her rudimentary website to show all the new growth and developments. If you’re interested, I’ll be happy to put you in touch with her and give you more information.
Many blessings to you and your very generous commitment to share your good fortunes,
Carole Frampton”

I’m a little confused about this story because it implies she gave up her job and is now working solely as a volunteer. This doesn’t seem possible unless she’s very rich or plays poker on the Internet. In any case this kind of thing always inspires me because it’s someone who is clearly doing something very selfless, providing a clearly valuable service to children who don’t always have the best opportunities and given that it doesn’t seem to be a huge operation, a relatively small amount of money may actually make some difference? I’m kind of curious how much money they’re able to raise per year and what they do with it. Like the comment says, they certainly need to update the website, and that shouldn’t cost very much at all. Anyway, as always I love your feedback.

- Greg

I will now list some of the charities that have been mentioned so far. I’ll try to include everyone who gave a very specific charity. I might not say too much as that’d take all night and don’t want to make a habit of spending hours at a time writing stuff about prospective charities, but feel free to explore them. In fact in the future I’ll probably list all of the nominations about 5-7 days before I choose the monthly charity. This time since there is so little notice, I’ll update at some point in a week or so as well, if there’s much more traffic.

I suspect that this is how it’ll usually go. I’ll avoid making too many posts that mention just one charity, but more often just put a ton of them in a post and people can comment on which they think would be the best. In the end this isn’t going to be completely democratic, as I will have the final say, but I will certainly take everyone’s opinion into account.

1. Kiva.org: The only one that wasn’t submitted by someone else is kiva.org. Kiva.org is a charity that helps you give micro loans to poor aspiring entrepreneurs all over the world. When you loan one of them money, and they pay you back, you can then loan this money to someone else.

2. ACLU: My beautiful girlfriend Susan suggested the ACLU, which stands for American Civil Liberties Union. I am actually already a member as I tend to give them about $100 per year. They certainly do believe in most everything I believe in, and Susan is actually on the Board of Directors for the Philadelphia ACLU. Let me quote her comment below:

“ACLU!!!! They have projects on drug policy, the school-to-prison-pipeline, women’s rights, gay rights, Guantanamo bay, etc. They represent the girl who was stripped searched by school officials, parents who don’t want their kids to be taught intelligent design in PUBLIC school science classes, organizations that are being criminally prosecuted for trying to register more voters, teenage girls who are being criminally prosecuted for cell phone pictures of themselves, churches who are being shut down by municipal governments for trying to run homeless shelters, doctors who lose their clearance for criticizing the government, immigrants who were being forced out of Hazelton, etc., etc., etc. And most of the issues/suits I’m describing are in Pennsylvania alone. Imagine the work they are doing all over the nation.

These are all things that you believe in. Just because Bush is out of office, doesn’t mean civil liberties are no longer important. This is an organization worthy of your donation! (Of course, there are many other organizations that are also worthy, but I’ll try to sell you on one at a time.)”

3. Computer Labs for Kids: This was submitted recently and seems to involve donating computers and computer labs to poor people/orphans around the world. Here is a quote on their website by their founder Shira Evans:

“I’ve seen firsthand the excitement and love kids have for computers while setting up computer labs in Chicago Public Schools. I’ve worked in IT for over ten years and my resume includes certifications such as MCSE and A+. This non-profit is a way for me to combine two areas that I know and love. You can join us and share the excitement of helping children in poverty become better equipped to meet the challenges of their changing future.”

4. CharityWatch: MacCauley Peterson, whom many of you may know from chess.fm, submitted CharityWatch. It seems to be an organization that investigates charities, and helps you make informed decisions on which charities use their funds most efficiently.

5. BuildOn: Kameron Tolliver quickly suggested building for books, which has seemingly changed their name to BuildOn. I believe their main focus is building schools in impoverished areas around the world. In fact I believe that my half-brother Jean-Francois may have spent some time doing this in Nicaragua.

6. USCF Legal Defense Fund: The USCF is getting sued! They need help! I love the USCF and while I’m generally going to make sure to avoid giving any reasons why I don’t want to donate to a particular cause, I think this wouldn’t be a great way to start it off. While I definitely would like to donate to chess at some point (maybe once every 6 months or so at the most), I don’t want to start the project by getting involved in all the weirdness going on in Crossville.

There were some other comments made with no specific suggestions behind them. I know one poster mentioned Multiple Sclerosis but I don’t believe he gave a specific website or foundation to give to. In any case if there’s one you really want to be selected, but it doesn’t happen this time around, this is going to repeat every month, so sooner or later if you keep pressing for your cause and get support from other posters, good things should eventually come!

Also there is one thing I failed to mention in my original post on what type of charities I’d look for. I forgot to mention that I’ll also occasionally focus on Philadelphia based groups, as this is where I live. I’m sure that people from around the country and world might not be so excited by that, but local charities will certainly be chosen from time to time. Also I’m willing to consider other localized charities in the United States, if they are doing really good work.

I look forward to any comments!

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.