In spite of his horrible behavior as a human being, Lance Armstrong did a wonderful job starting the livestrong campaign, raising money for cancer research. Yellow is the color of choice for the effort and harkens back to the yellow jersey that is worn by the overall leader of the Tour de France which Lance won, partially due to the drugs he and everyone else were taking. Yellow was actually originally chosen because that was the color of the cover of the magazine that sponsored the original Tour.
I wanted to talk a bit about charity today and the choices that we make. The ice bucket challenge that recently went viral over the internet resulted in a large amount of money for the ALS society. ALS typically gets a relatively small amount of money in charity each year due to the somewhat obscurity of the disease and raised about $19k in all of 2013. The New York Times reported that the ALS Association had received $41.8 million in donations from July 29 until August 31. That is just one month and they got more than twice their total amount from the previous year.
At some point, you need to decide whether a donation is a good use of your funds or not. When it comes to the ALS Association, the money will certainly be put to good use but at some point, they will have more money than they know what to do with and the use of the money will be low. A similar thing happened when the Red Cross received money for the September 11th attacks. They received more money than could be used and planned on saving some money for future incidents so they could react more effectively. This plan was quickly fought by many who donated since they wanted their money to go to September 11th victims.
October is breast cancer awareness month and it raises a great deal of money for breast cancer research. If the desire is to reduce the number of women who die, it would be a far better thing to donate to heart disease research as all cancer in women is second to heart disease when it comes to cause of death. Breast cancer gets quite a bit of attention for many reasons including the stigma that was historically associated with breast cancer and the disfiguration many women suffer in their treatment.
Where have I gotten financial support from some of your donations? If you have given to the american cancer society (60% of money donated goes to services provided), I then have benefited from your generosity through repeated stays at the hope lodge in New Orleans. This service has made our long stays (two weeks or more in the case of my surgeries) much more affordable and tolerable. If you have donated money to carcinoid research, it is fairly likely that little, if any, has benefited me in any way. It is likely that it will help someone in the future who is diagnosed with carcinoid but, due to the long timeline for research, it won't help me.
When you do give money, please look into how that money is handled and how much actually goes to the benefit that you are supporting. Organizations vary greatly in the percentage of money that goes to overhead and the amount that benefits the cause. Numbers can range anywhere from nearly 0% to nearly 100%. The Red Cross, for example, is able to use about 91% of the money that they raise to help people. Feeding America uses 98% of the money they raise to feed people. Children's Charity Fund Inc. gives about 6.1% of their dollars to services it delivers. Naturally, the last one is not high on my list of organizations you should fund. Before you give, take a look at Charity Navigator to find out if your donations will be used wisely.
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