Can you substantiate any of that?
I read
the financial report on their site. It's all of eight lines with no breakdown. I tried hard to find something more detailed, nothing to be seen. Even by the standards of the non-profit world, that's extremely sketchy. They have a huge staff. From LinkedIn I see many of them work exclusively for the organization. What is their means of support? What about Misha and the rest of the higher ups, what is their means of support, exactly how much do they get paid?
Quote:
What makes Haitians less deserving of aid than any other needy groups?
It's not a question of "less deserving". I simply see Haiti as a very PR-able choice. In any event, these people are not our own. We have no business presuming to try to fix other culture's problems until we work our own out.
Quote:
They provide people funds for random acts of kindness in their community. Care packages for the homeless in LA, bikes to people in a park in Paterson, NJ (where they also ran into a little boy whose father was laid off, and bought them both new shoes), toys for children in Mexico, a new bed for an elderly couple, supplies for seniors' pets who were having trouble making it to the store, etc.
All of those things are very sentimental in nature, which makes me even more suspicious of the whole enterprise.
Why not provide these people the means to become self-sufficient - build homes, water systems, power plants? It seems like they're just doing cheap, trivial and ineffectual things designed to pull heartstrings and generate PR, but provide almost no lasting benefit.
Random acts of kindness do not change the world. They make it worse, because they justify the world we live in rather than seeking to change it. That doesn't mean they need to go start riots or overthrow governments or whatever. I'll give you examples of alternatives they could do, but don't.
For many years, Vietnam and other countries lacked good power systems, so they developed bicycle generators. A bicycle generator is durable, with an operational lifespan in decades and little need for maintenance, and provides a self-sufficient power source for a single home, business, or foxhole.
Fresh water is a harder problem to solve, but there are possible solutions. One, which worked very well in Israel, is to drain swamps and plant forests, and dig artificial lakes then fill them with seawater. Forming the land in this way causes positive changes in rainfall near cities - within a few years, rainfall will increase by a few milimeters, enough to water crops and quench the people's thirst. They could even just clear land for simple agriculture, or plant forests of quick-growing plants like bamboo or olive or guava or manzanita, which would enable these people to have some basic industry.
None of those solutions require advanced technology or a lot of capital - just some cheap Chinese bikes and a dynamo/battery/transformer kit that costs like $40. Digging holes, planting forests and such would require only the cost of MREs, bottled water and some tents.
Toys for children in Mexico. Why not give them a simple elementary school? A hut with some used books and maybe three staff members could make all the difference. Care packages for the homeless. Why not set up a shelter, with maybe ten or so staff members picking up day-old bread and leftover pizza and such and redistributing it? There is more food that firms WANT to donate than can be consumed by the appetites of the homeless - not only for the writeoff, but also because it saves firms the trouble of taking out the trash (something I have seen firsthand).
Most of those things just aren't as sexy, and they take a long-term commitment. Not a financial commitment, mind you, so much as the need for administration and collective willpower. There isn't the "now" and "ooh" factor as handing out toys, it's not as photogenic, not as compelling.
As for you and what you do, that's all well and good; I don't doubt your good faith, and my disagreement with you about this is nothing personal. And I'm not engaging you in the hopes of working you up to crave makeup sex so I can sleep with you at the next FUBU meet.
What I want to know is, exactly how much money is going in and out, who's donating how much and how it's getting spent. I think they do a lot of things that are very sentimental and make no real difference, and my sense is that they do it just to PR for more money for themselves.