Discussion: How Do You Know a Good Charity When You See It?

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1 Search Search for: Go Search About Stations The Team Donate Home Archives Podcasts Geo Quiz Global Hit Photos and Videos Discussions Music Heard on Air Blogs Books Cartoons Economy Environment Global Nation Health History Language Religion Science School Year Technology Discussion: How Do You Know a Good Charity When You See It? August 7, 2013 Post a comment Recommend 110 Tweet 114 The World How Do You Know a Good Charity When You See It? Like Share Download 1,578 1 Reporter Amy Costello is leading an online discussion about evaluating charities with Iqbal Dhaliwal (MIT s Poverty Action Lab), Dayna Brown (CDA Collaborative Learning Projects) and Holden Karnofsky (GiveWell). When people find out that I reported from Africa for many years and am now producing a series called Tracking Charity, they frequently ask me this: Which charities do you think are doing really good work on the ground overseas? Honestly, I have trouble answering. Certainly, many charities are doing good work, but even after all my years covering conflict, food crises, HIV/AIDS, and refugees, I still find it difficult to define effective aid. How should one measure success? Should all charities keep overhead low, or can high expenses be justified if they allow a charity to hire the best people? Even if an aid program improves lives in the short term, might it create a culture of dependency in the long run? Thursday, August 8, we re giving you the chance to discuss these and related questions with people who have devoted their careers to 1 of 5 9/11/13 3:25 PM

answering them. I ll be moderating the conversation and will be joined by: Iqbal Dhaliwal, an economist who grew up in Delhi, is director of policy at MIT s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

2 answering them. I ll be moderating the conversation and will be joined by: Iqbal Dhaliwal, an economist who grew up in Delhi, is director of policy at MIT s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. When people ask him where to donate money, he advises, Don t just think process, but think of the final impact that you are interested in. Dayna Brown is director of the Listening Program at CDA Collaborative Learning Projects, a nonprofit in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is co-author of Time To Listen: Hearing People on the Receiving End of International Aid. Holden Karnofsky is co-founder of GiveWell, a nonprofit that conducts cost-benefit analyses of charities to help donors decide where to give. A graduate of Harvard University, he previously worked in the hedge fund industry. Our discussion will take place in the section below where you can leave your questions and comments. You can follow the discussion as it evolves by subscribing to the comment thread by RSS, or by clicking Subscribe via at the bottom of the discussion box. Amy Costello Amy Costello hosts Tiny Spark, a podcast that investigates the business of doing good. She is a former Africa correspondent for The World and has reported for PBS FRONTLINE/World. She is currently producing Tracking Charity, an investigative series for The World. Follow Discussion 75 comments ALL POSTS for Discussion: How Do You Know a Good Charity When You See It? 2 of 5 9/11/13 3:25 PM

3 76 comments 0 Leave a message... Best Community Share amy_costello a month ago Good morning to our panelists, Iqbal, Dayna and Holden! Thank you for joining today's discussion. Panelists, please introduce yourselves and answer this question by hitting "": What's the biggest misunderstanding out there about what makes aid effective? 5 Iqbal Dhaliwal > amy_costello a month ago Thanks Amy and PRI for hosting this discussion on a very important topic. The Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) started as a center at MIT s economics department with a mission to promote evidence informed development policy. Our network of 87 professors from 42 universities have ongoing or completed evaluations of over 400 programs in about 40 countries. I lead the policy group at J-PAL that tries to make the research results more accessible to implementers, policymakers, donors, and the civil-society, and works with them to scale-up programs and policies that are found to be effective. These underlying programs are designed and implemented by NGOs, foundations, governments and the private sector with varying degrees of inputs from policymakers, researchers, local communities, donors, and other stakeholders. Using rigorous impact evaluations, our researchers working in the field, try to understand what policies and programs work or not, and why, thus generating original evidence that can be used by implementing organizations and donors to make decisions based on hard evidence and not just rely on instincts or ideology, or selective anecdotes from the community. To answer your question about common misunderstanding about see more 1 Holden Karnofsky > amy_costello a month ago Thanks Amy! I am the co-founder of GiveWell, which aims to find outstanding giving opportunities and publish the full details of our analysis to help donors decide where to give. We've spent years looking for charities that donors can give to and be confident of their impact, and we've found it to be a huge struggle. I think the biggest misunderstanding out there is simply overestimating how much is known about effective aid. Many people imagine that as long as the charity they're supporting is well-intentioned, honest, isn't spending too much on overhead & fundraising, etc., that their money is well spent and accomplishing good. In reality, we know very little about how most aid programs affect the people they're trying to help. It's hard to collect good data, it's hard to generalize from data, and it's hard even for someone in the field to really connect with and understand people with radically different cultures and living conditions. We've tried to find the "easiest" bets for donors - cases in which we can answer nearly every question might ask - and even for these (our top charities), there are huge numbers of unanswered questions. That isn't to say the challenge isn't worthwhile. I believe that aid does a great deal of good in aggregate, and the track record of health interventions in particular is strong. But assessing the isolated impact of a particular organization is very difficult, and there aren't established reliable methods for doing so. amy_costello > Holden Karnofsky a month ago So fascinating, Holden. I, too, have struggled to find reliable data on many well-intentioned initiatives. And it's especially hard to evaluate the impact 3 of 5 9/11/13 3:25 PM

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Leveraging Nonprofits as Endowment Builders. Engaging nonprofits for donor connectivity and growing their own endowments

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