My employer matches charitable gifts up to a certain dollar amount. I have a number of charities I give to regularly and now that I'm looking at my usual list I wonder if I shouldn't add something considering the changes we've gone through in the last year. Generally speaking, I'm quite happy to give to GiveWell and then I have a number of places I give smaller donations to for reasons that are personally meaningful.

Are there any charities you've started giving to in the past year due to the strain of covid?

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Local food pantries

I’ve upped my giving to local charities this year rather than national or global outfits. I figure the big charities can weather this storm better than a small outfit on a shoestring budget and the impact is more visible to me locally.

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A couple of years ago we started focusing on the efficiency of nonprofits. The thing we really focus on is how much do the high-level administrators make; I'm not at all interested in providing a lifestyle to heads of non-profits that is vastly higher than our own. Recently we started contributing to Tunnel2Towers. The head, Frank Siller, is the brother of Stephen Siller, a firefighter who died in the 9/11 towers collapse; the family set up the foundation in his honor. Frank Siller doesn't take a salary for running it.

We stopped giving to a charity that we had on auto-donation for a decade because they insisted on sending us solicitations even though they were getting a check every month. I called them and told them that they were just going to receive a check every month automatically from Fidelity and to please stop spending money trying to get more from us. They said the would but didn't stop. I then sent them a letter saying the same thing and got no response. I finally sent them a letter asking to be taken off their solicitation list. When I didn't get any sort of response I just stopped the auto-donation. They continue to send solicitations. But, we're done with them. I understand that it may be more expensive for them to clean up their mailing list than to just pay for printing and non-profit postage, but I'm not going to participate in that.

I always give the most to Doctors Without Borders since the large number of medical volunteers leverages the dollars they get by a huge amount; this year will be no exception. I will be adding some US food pantries due to COVID.

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"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." (1987) -- Carl Sagan

We give big to our university and the rest of our donations are to local animal and arts charities and the local food bank.

Giving locally generally eliminates the HUGE overheads that the big (Inter)National charities have. More bang for the buck.