I like to support the Electronics Frontier Foundation. They're generally pretty great about protecting our freedoms online. They constantly show up as the good guy in my feeds, whether it's explaining how to protest safely, or how to internet without leaving footprints, or just generally how to interact in today's online world. I think the only criticism I've ever heard against them is they don't stand up to Google quite as much as they maybe 'ought' to.
If you care about abortion rights, Planned Parenthood is as good a place to help as any. Although I've never contributed, the current administration seems to really be targeting them. Okay, they're targeting LOTS of minorities really.
https://www.plannedparenthood.org/
Speaking of which, the American Civil Liberties Union is one of the loudest voices trying to protect minorities from being illegally deported and stand up for birthright citizenship. Another good cause to support.
ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Your local food bank. Now more than ever.
I proudly donate to Planned Parenthood, The Satanic Church, and NPR on a monthly basis.
Edit: The Satanic TEMPLE. My mistake. 🙂
I reeally hope you mean The Satanic Temple? Because The Church of Satan is actually religious.
ACLU and NPR are my top 2.
What are you trying to accomplish?
Are you trying to save human lives? Reduce suffering? Reduce some specific harm, such as from pandemics, or from severe weather due to climate change, or from trampling by elephant? Cure the specific disease that killed your great-aunt? Stomp Nazis?
If you say what you think is worth doing, people can point you to specific groups that are doing it.
GiveWell is a charity that seeks to answer this exact question.
Also check out https://www.charitynavigator.org/
Especially now, I think projects like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive are great to donate to because of the high volume of information you can find on them, whether that's links to information about a certain subject or a historic record of how a webpage may have looked years and years ago.
Last I checked, conservatives hate at least one of them ( Wikipedia ) because you don't see them constantly bending the knee at every corner to appease their false history claims and other hateful junk.
Any organization that gives 80% or more of it's donations to the actual cause, it claims it's supporting. Most charities keep most of the donations and give very little to their actual 'intended' cause. Goodwill is a great example, they hardly help anyone.
Susan b comen too, CEO gifts themselves half of the donations. Some people donate to pet shelters in desperate need of financing to keep the lights on, I think a lot of charities are scams or at least money laundering front
As I watched the pepfar drama, I've become more sympathetic to the overhead fees of a good charity. How the charity works internally isn't that relevant, compared to how much good gets done per dollar donated (eg, if $1 feeds 10 people in an area and no other charity can do better, I'm not all that sad if the ceo got 90 cents; they did good work even if they aren't very charitable as a person).
But yes, there are probably grifts.
All my non profit/charity donations are informed by Effective Altruism. I'm very much against inefficient or highly bureaucratic organizations where 98c of your € goes to maintaining a monolith.
EA's recommendations are based on: Extreme effectiveness, Research based practices, and Third-party evaluation.
Strongly recommend them as a way to make sure your donations impact the most lives.
Housing and food for your communities.
Time for @FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone.
If you're in the U.S., the Institute for Justice does a ton of good work. They're a nonprofit that picks up cases to help out those who can't afford to do so. They've gotten a lot of cases all the way to the supreme court.
They're committed to challenging things like qualified immunity, or civil asset forfeiture. Things that really need to be taken on given what we see happening today.
Edit: Link: https://ij.org/cases/supreme-court-cases/
Immune Deficiency Foundation
https://primaryimmune.org/Agree it's dependent on your personal values and goals. I prefer environmental causes and also try to help smaller local animal rescues because they're often run on shoestring budgets so a little goes a long way, whereas bigger non-profits have access to more resources.
Would recommend researching whatever you end up choosing.Many charities spend a lot of money on executive pay or marketing vs. core programs. I'll usually check annual reports for budgets or see if they're on Charity Navigator.
