Highlighted Charities
Rainforest Trust
Buys rainforest land for conservation worldwide
Yearly Revenue: $48M / year
If you like objectivity, this foundation lists on its website the price at which it buys various specific patches of rainforest land, often for just a few dollars per acre, protected for conservation. And although this is only half the battle, as land management and protection from poaching and illegal logging is not free, not to mention protection from climate change, it really puts it in perspective how much bang for your buck is possible through charitable giving. Also, Rainforest Trust has a perfect rating on CharityNavigator.
Un Techo Para Chile (TECHO)
Fights systemic poverty in Chile
Yearly Revenue: Unpublished
This one is personal for me because I met my wife volunteering here. TECHO is an organization that works in the slums of Latin America, the most unequal region in the world by Gini coefficient, helping communities organize to get the things they need, often infrastructure like water, electricity, roads and garbage collection. TECHO also builds and repairs houses and community centers, responds to natural disasters, and does a lot to foster interactions between these marginalized groups and the local volunteers who work with them. From personal experience, I know that TECHO is austerely run by extremely passionate people, and that, being a nonprofit not based in the US, their job of fundraising is a bit harder.
Donate (Page is in Spanish, donation amount is in Chilean Pesos)
Health in Harmony
Strengthens rainforest communities In Madagascar, Indonesia and Brazil; empowers them to protect the forest.
Yearly Revenue: $1.6M / year
Almost like a cross between TECHO and Rainforest Trust, Health in Harmony protects people and the environment in biodiverse rainforests in Indonesia, Madagascar, and they are expanding to the Amazon in Brazil. They find people in rainforest communities, listen to their needs and try to satisfy them so that they can continue living sustainably and be the protectors of rainforest in their regions. This blog post explains how they are doing that in Brazil. In contrast to the Rainforest Trust, they try to protect rainforests more indirectly in a way that could lead to longer term change, so that there’s not so much pressure to continue deforestation. These efforts can be harder to sell to donors because the results aren’t quite as objective, but I think they are worth investing in.
Ocean Conservancy
Ocean ecosystem advocacy and lobbying in the US
Yearly Revenue: $37M / year
Populations of ocean species like sharks and tuna and many other species have collapsed, caught as bycatch due to overfishing. 50% of the world’s coral reefs have died in the last 30 years. Only 5% of the ocean is protected, even though the opportunity cost of protection is much lower than on land. Also, the fishing industry depends on the ecology of the ocean in a way that high land use industries (mostly agriculture) do not, so it might actually be easier to make progress on ocean conservation than land conservation. This leads me to believe that maybe there’s a lot more low-hanging fruit in the oceanic conservation space. Despite this, however, there aren’t many high-profile charities that operate at a large scale on ocean ecology. Maybe that’s because it’s harder to raise money or inspire people, because visibility is lower? In any case, it seems to me that we should be funding those efforts.
Gideon’s Promise
Fights mass incarceration; promotes equal justice in the US
Yearly Revenue: $1.4M / year
The US has the most incarcerated people per capita of any nation in the world. About 0.6%of the population is currently incarcerated right now. For more information on this jaw-dropping problem, check out The Sentencing Project (also a non-profit with an operating budget of around $1.5 million dollars, this one might not be a bad candidate for giving either).
80% of people accused of crimes in the US rely on a public defender to protect their constitutional rights. Depending on where you live, different jurisdictions will treat that duty to provide someone with a public defender vastly differently. In some cases, you might not meet your lawyer. There are stories of DAs in some districts bragging that they “process” thousands of cases per year per attorney, and that they don’t need more help because they are “efficient”.
Gideon’s Promise runs a program not unlike Teach For America, but for public defenders. They send starry-eyed recent law school graduates to the types of places where these rights abuses happen and keep them in contact with one another to keep them motivated to make systemic change in what can be a really depressing, difficult environment. I think it’s a fantastic idea. I heard about Gideon’s Promise when the founder gave a talk at Google in 2017.
FairVote
Advocates for democracy reform in the US
Yearly Revenue: $2.6M / year
Many of the charities recommended above exist because our governments are not always great at solving problems of collective action. Some important charities are devoted entirely to lobbying, because it can be so difficult to get governments to take action at all. If you believe that maybe some of the specifics of the way our democratic institutions are run is to blame for this and other bad things in our society, then you might be excited about FairVote. They work on pushing forward a number of democratic reforms, most famously ranked choice voting, but also a bunch of other really compelling ideas like proportional representation (read more here) and seem to have quite a bit to show for their work and the possibility of making real change (one example).
Honorable mentions: Pathfinder International (Family Planning), The Sentencing Project (Mass Incarceration), Rainforest foundation (Protects rainforest), Mote Marine Laboratory (Marine Research), Seamless Bay Area (SF Bay Area Public Transit)
What is this?
This giving guide was inspired by an awesome voter guide written and distributed by a friend that I relied upon heavily in the last election. I believe that guide was impactful because it helped people realize the importance of their votes in a way that they might not have before (particularly in local elections). In the same vain, I hope this giving guide can provide not just a few concrete recommendations, but a reminder that we have an opportunity to take action on important issues by donating money.
Like voting but much more so, the world of charity is not solvable and depends on what’s important to you. I have not extensively researched and distilled all charities that exist, or even all important problems facing the world. I don’t have a good way of deciding whether to give more money to organizations addressing the environment, social justice, governance, human health, information access, research or something else. What I can say is that I have researched each of these charities for at least an hour, I like them, I have personally donated to them, and I will be totally stoked if you donate to them too!
Criteria
I tried to pick smaller charities where possible, because the marginal value of a dollar could be a lot higher and because many of them don’t have fundraising machinery in place that larger organizations do.
Specific missions are more appealing to me than broad ones, because they allow charities to specialize and carve out their own niches that might not otherwise be addressed at all, by anyone.
This list skews environmental; I strongly believe that we are at an inflection point for natural systems, and that many of the opportunities to donate money to make things much better from an environmental perspective will dry up, and that future opportunities for conservation may look about as tractable as creating a large national park in Ohio. For environmental causes especially, prevention is a lot more effective than trying to fix it later, and we are running out of opportunities for prevention.
There are lots of really fantastic charities that are not on this page; I tried to keep the list short to avoid paralysis; but if it gives you ideas, by all means, go exploring on CharityNavigator.org!