Is AUTHOR wrong in the post ? POST : So when I was a youngster I did an internship in a charity. During that time I learned several things about the charity business in general. Nothing secret, things that many people already know, but they were things that made me uncomfortable nonetheless and so I decided that day that I would never give money to charities ever. For reference the things that many of you already know or can guess are that:

- Only a small portion of what you give is actually used to help people.

- A big portion of what you use is used to advertise for the charity instead of directly helping people

- The advertisement is showing you more misery and poverty than the situation warrant to guilt you into giving more money. For instance I was in a charity that was helping orphans. They were pictured in the ads with dirty clothes in shabby rooms but in fact they were well taken care of with good clothes, good food, spacious individual rooms and entertainment.

- The advertisement is sometime kinda racist. For instance a charity helping children in poor neighborhood will picture cute little helpless white kids instead of kids of colors despite the fact that they represent the majority of children in this situation.

- The CEO and top managers of the most famous charities are rich AF with their huge salary paid with the donation of poor people (most people who give are poor).

- Most people working in charities see it just as another business and our donation is used as a resource to extract the most efficient way possible.

- Many of those charities have hidden political or ideological agendas I disagree with (some are against LGBT, some will help only a portion of the population by targeting an ethnicity, some will have unsavory links with a shady government, etc).

- If I give money to one of them, I wonder if my money would not be more helpful another way. What’s more important, feeding poor people or cure cancer?

- Sometime it feels like whatever the amount of money you give, it doesn’t have any impact. The world is still a shitty place and it doesn’t seems to change

- When you give money, you enter a database and you can expect to receive mails designed to guilt you for the rest of your life.


I know all about the rational and perfectly sensible answers for each of those point. Yes, charities are helpful and people should give to them. I’m not trying to convince anyone and I think that people who give are praiseworthy. But I just don’t want to be a part of it.

I have given some of my time to another charity later in my life and I’m not against giving money directly to homeless people (not everyone I cross on my road or else I would join them).

Except that I discovered that most people I know have one or two charities they give to and budget for it. When I told them I didn’t want to give money to charities they acted shocked, start arguing with me and made me feel like an asshole.

So am I?
