Donations to Resistance Groups

Have you heard of The Resistance? Not the Resistance that arose during WWII, the one that came into existence after the election of Donald Trump. The groups that make it up have all received windfalls since then.  They are groups such as 350.org, a climate change group, Planned Parenthood, Indivisible, the group that first began by issuing a manual for progressives,  and of course the ACLU. The unexpected donations have created a problem. While welcomed, the new generosity has ushered the kind of questions and issues expected when one suddenly finds oneself flush with money and volunteers. What to do with this unexpected money and with all these people? The organizations involved  are required to made big adjustments, some more than others, in order  to perhaps meet the expectations of new donors, to  decide how to spend the funds, when and how to use new volunteers, how to keep people giving or volunteering, how to reorder priorities to accommodate new resources.  National organizations are better equipped than local or state ones, they may have better staffs and organization to handle the influx.

Charity Navigator, a watchdog group, calls this rage giving. But whether or not it was given out of passion for a cause, it nevertheless says something worth noting. People are willing to fight for what they believe is right. We saw it with the Tea Party, with the Occupy Wall Street movement, yet in this case, it seems to go further. It involves backing your beliefs and your values with time and money.  It’s the kind of giving, stance and action which create social change and which says something about human nature. There are many who of course see this in political terms, but the real value of this phenomenon goes beyond politics.

Donor Advised Funds

I had not heard of donor-advised funds until I read about them quite recently. They are funds similar to private foundations, where the donor can advise where his or her money is to go. Say you have a few millions, instead of donating them straight to a charity, you can give them to a DAF and instruct them where to disburse the money. Perhaps a family member has had cancer raising your interest in the disease and you would then specify the money is to go to a cancer charity, or as I understand it, a specific organization. These funds have recently come to attention because of an article written in the New York Review of Books stating that they interfere with Continue reading “Donor Advised Funds”