Jayci Corwin of Maui Gold Pineapple unloads cases of fruit being donated to west Maui wildfire victims in August.
As we enter the season of giving, many of us will be motivated to donate to a good cause. Nonprofits will take to social media to make the case that they are the organizations that most deserve our financial support, often requesting aid for the victims of the latest natural (or unnatural) disaster.
It makes good marketing sense: Most of us want to help others, especially during the holiday season. When we see images of wildfires, droughts, hurricanes or earthquakes, we feel compelled to help stop the suffering — right now. This is true throughout the year as well. When a major disaster hits, countless opportunities like these pop up. These pleas for aid come from established relief organizations, brand-new charities or crowdfunding campaigns, but they all culminate in the same message: Donate now.
I admit that until recently I was one of the many who occasionally did, giving $50 here or $100 there purportedly to help victims all over the globe. But I don’t anymore. And I don’t think you should, either, because I’ve become convinced that donations to disaster aid — whether in the immediate aftermath or as part of a nonprofit’s annual holiday drive — often provide only limited relief and sometimes none at all. There are a few main reasons why.
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First, the field of pop-up disaster relief is rife with fraud as bad actors prey on the desire of well-intentioned people and bilk donors in the process. As the Los Angeles Times recently reported, many such scammers pose convincingly as employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency or well-known charities, tricking even savvy givers. Donations to crowdfunding calls can be an even riskier venture. Notre Dame law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer suggests that they are “particularly vulnerable to fraud” and urges caution when supporting them. One of the most egregious examples was Katelyn McClure, a New Jersey woman who used GoFundMe in 2017 to wheedle over $400,000 out of givers with a fake story of a homeless man who needed help.
To get around this problem, many people end up giving to campaigns organized by celebrities. For instance, after Hurricane Harvey dropped record-crushing amounts of rain on Houston, NFL star J.J. Watt launched a crowdfunding effort that ended up raising north of $40 million. But Oprah Winfrey’s efforts to do the same after the Lahaina fires in Hawaii this summer revealed the weaknesses of this approach. Winfrey began by donating things like pillows, cots, generators and towels. But experts generally discourage this strategy because victims frequently don’t need what donors want to give, leading to a “second disaster” of piles of unwanted items.
To her credit, Winfrey eventually shifted course, teaming with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to start the People’s Fund of Maui, which will simply disburse cash. But she did so only after her friend Gayle King’s son, Will, showed her a video about a similar effort by Dolly Parton. The fund may yet do real good, but I’d rather give to a charity with a research team that is not Gayle’s son’s YouTube feed. Other celebrity efforts are similarly poorly researched. (And all this is to say nothing of the distressing optics of the uber-rich asking ordinary people to donate while sitting on mountains of their own money.)
At this point, many would advise us to turn to locals. But even such on-the-ground efforts sometimes come up short. Take for example the Maui Community Power Recovery Fund, one of whose founders is former Hawaii House Rep. Kaniela Ing. It turns out that the fund is actually a political action committee, and while its website indicates that gifts will support “relief, recovery and rebuilding,” donors likely don’t know that donations could be used to fund political candidates. Revelations about the fund have spurred Hawaii House Speaker Scott Saiki to call for an emergency proclamation compelling relief organizations to be more transparent.
None of these organizations, however, is as big and popular as the one you likely know best: the American Red Cross. Its pleas for donations after major disasters are nearly ubiquitous. But as ProPublica revealed in a series of headline-grabbing investigations a few years back, the organization has significant problems with transparency, oversight and follow-through. And there are legitimate concerns about the way it tracks and spends the money it collects.
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Nevertheless, however, some of us may still want to prioritize disaster relief as we think about our charitable giving. How best then should we proceed? First and foremost, be proactive rather than reactive in giving. Rather than clicking on the next donate link on your social media feed, consider becoming a monthly donor to an established international relief agency with a commitment to transparency and a record of results in the field. Doctors Without Borders comes to mind, but there are others.
As we open our hearts and wallets at the start of the holiday season, we should continue thinking through how to help victims as disasters grow in number and strength. But perhaps we should be more thoughtful about how we help and stop “donating now.”
Joshua Pederson is an associate professor of humanities at Boston University.
When it comes to disaster relief, ‘donate now’ is a bad idea
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18.12.2023
Jayci Corwin of Maui Gold Pineapple unloads cases of fruit being donated to west Maui wildfire victims in August.
As we enter the season of giving, many of us will be motivated to donate to a good cause. Nonprofits will take to social media to make the case that they are the organizations that most deserve our financial support, often requesting aid for the victims of the latest natural (or unnatural) disaster.
It makes good marketing sense: Most of us want to help others, especially during the holiday season. When we see images of wildfires, droughts, hurricanes or earthquakes, we feel compelled to help stop the suffering — right now. This is true throughout the year as well. When a major disaster hits, countless opportunities like these pop up. These pleas for aid come from established relief organizations, brand-new charities or crowdfunding campaigns, but they all culminate in the same message: Donate now.
I admit that until recently I was one of the many who occasionally did, giving $50 here or $100 there purportedly to help victims all over the globe. But I don’t anymore. And I don’t think you should, either, because I’ve become convinced that donations to disaster aid — whether in the immediate aftermath or as part of a nonprofit’s annual holiday drive — often provide only limited relief and sometimes none at all. There are a few main reasons why.
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