I’ve been flooding our readers lately, so today I just want to brag a little bit about an aspect of our application process.

We provide a public online discussion forum as one way for our applicants to ask questions and give feedback. One of the advantages of that it lets our applicants criticize us anonymously - and unlike with a survey, that criticism doesn’t have to be after-the-fact and one-way, but can be a conversation while still retaining the anonymity.

Yesterday and today, we got our first concrete benefit from this particular policy. As you may have figured out, I am a pretty blunt person and can sometimes come across as nasty, sarcastic, flippant, etc. without meaning to. I got criticized for this by an applicant who, completely understandably, didn’t want to disclose their identity. My first reaction to the criticism was dismissive: I didn’t believe I’d actually said anything mean, just terse, and I was ready to write off the complaint as hypersensitivity (and I would have, if we’d collected the complaint through a traditional survey). But when I asked for examples, the anonymous party responded with good ones, and I realized s/he was right and I was wrong. I’m too used to my old workplace environment, where everyone I write to has met me, and won’t misinterpret what I say.

I can easily fix this, I just needed it pointed out. The result will be more appropriate communications with applicants, and that matters. And if not for the anonymous discussion, I’d just keep making the same mistake. Think about that. To others working in grantmaking (where those you work with often hesitate to be critical): you may be better with tone than I am, but what you-specific mistakes might you be making, and what are you doing to catch them?

This is a response to the Giving Carnival topic I posted a couple days ago.

I’m passionate about all of the 2007 Clear Fund causes, and about many others as well, but the one that revs me up the most is inner-city education in wealthy societies. The reasons for this are complicated and tough to unravel, but here goes. This cause appeals to my:

• Universal-humanitarian values. Although the Clear Fund is focusing for now on NYC, I have never felt anything more for the people who share my geography or religion or ethnicity than for the people who don’t. (And if someone I care about suffers from a particular disease, it makes me want to fight suffering, not fight the disease.)
• View of the good life. Gotta be brief about this one. I don’t value happiness, or even the absence of pain, as much as most people do. What I really value is giving someone the opportunity to reach their full potential as a world-shaper, not just -citizen; I want people to experience, learn from, compete with, or even be the best in the world at what they care most about. I see value in things like hospice care and the Make-a-Wish foundation, but they excite me way less than enabling a life with no ceiling. And even though you can save an African life for much less than a U.S. one, I think a true shot at all the opportunities the world has to offer is easier and even cheaper to provide in the U.S.
• Desire to make a real, short-term, definite difference. I’d love to help invent a great cure or technology, or a new version of capitalism where everything is perfect. But no matter what the “expected value,” I can’t stomach the idea of pouring everything I have into one giant losing bet, and failing to impact a single person’s life for the better. We might not have the formula for helping kids succeed, but at a minimum, giving them more supportive adults to interact with is going to make a difference in someone’s life, statistically significant or not.
• Desire to work on a large-scale problem. Despite the smack I’ve talked about “root causes,” I also can’t be 100% satisfied just exchanging dollars for lives. I believe that well-spent charity in this area will support organizations that are trying new things and documenting them; we may never get “the answer,” but we’ll be learning from our mistakes and creating more knowledge about programs that can be replicated at other charities and even possibly by the government. To me it’s a great compromise between tackling a grand problem and helping individuals, because unlike a purely political endeavor, you’re building evidence as you go - and the evidence is real people really helped.
• Wish to fight bad guys. Sure, malaria and diarrhea are bad guys, but this cause, for me, has a much more human and tangible (and thus detestable, and thus motivating) bad guy as well. It’s the people who believe that economics is justice, that our current society is perfectly fair, and that - by implication - the hordes of poor/unproductive/criminal people in the inner city must be that way because they were born that way. People who think this aren’t just being hypercapitalist; they’re logically committed to racism too, since the achievement gap persists as a racial phenomenon even when you control for economics.

  My hatred for these people goes back to childhood, when I loved Les Misérables and couldn’t believe that the smug suburban sheep around me thought they actually deserved to be better off than Jean Valjean. I desperately want to see them be wrong, and I don’t need a worldwide revolution for this to come about. Every poor minority student who grows up to be a successful businessman/politician/writer is one more slap in the face of people who think the world as of 2007 is a reflection of justice.

• Beliefs about race issues. Some feel that racism is the true “root cause” of the achievement gap, and that may be true, but I think it also works the other way around. As long as certain communities (particularly black ones) are held back from the start, they’re going to end up less successful and more criminal than the rest of us, and that just encourages the people (the same jerks from above) who look for reasons to write them off as inferior. Again, every person helped is another salvo in this battle.

A lot of the above isn’t in our criteria, because it isn’t strictly in line with our declared values, and it isn’t strictly rational. I shouldn’t care about proving jerks wrong, for example; I should just care about helping people. But I’m human, and what motivates me isn’t quite that simple, and I can be honest about that and still do my job well. I hope others will participate in similar fashion.

This blog is hosting the Giving Carnival this week. The Giving Carnival is a horrible name for the following: the host chooses a topic, anyone who wants to writes/submits a post on that topic, and the host posts links to the ones he wants to (in a space this small, generally everyone) with commentary. It’s like a periodical, but with the advantage that it’s much more of a pain in the neck to read. Get pumped!

This week’s topic is: what charitable cause are you personally most passionate about?

Cancer research? Feeding the homeless? Fighting malaria?

Are you a US kinda person? Or global? Or Topeka, KS?

Please post a comment to this post by midnight of 8/4/07, either linking to your post or containing your response. If you have your own blog, link to your post and include a summary. If you don’t, or want to be anonymous, or just don’t want this on your blog, you can fully participate by comment. I will publish my own roundup the next week, but this way everyone will be able to see the unedited version.

A few requests:

1. Get personal. Whatever “hats” you wear at your organization or as a blogger, take ‘em off, along with your clothes. Tell us what you care about and why.
2. Be specific. I’m sick of debating things in the abstract like “Should nonprofits make every effort to run as efficiently as possible, while also leaving room for their human side?” No. Next time, maybe. This time, I want to learn something about you and your values.
3. Fundraisers: please participate! You chose your organization - and with it, your cause - over every other choice in the world. Why? What drives you? If your answer ends up being a plug for your organization, that’s totally fine. Just be personal about what excites you, not what excites others.
4. No meta-charity or other copouts. Don’t talk about a cause centered on getting others to give more or give better. (I won’t be talking about GiveWell.) I know that technically answers the question, but it won’t be about your values. So if you do work for one of these organizations, write about your favorite sub-cause that your cause helps fund.

Can you tell I’m worried about cop-outs? I think people in this space love to say things that “can’t be argued with,” and they also have a tendency to talk about what we can sell rather than what we should sell. For this carnival/thing, I want you to put your personal values right out there in the open. I want to see passion, values, your bleeding heart laid bare. If there’s some professional reason you can’t do this, just participate anonymously (via comment). (And all non-bloggers are invited to participate via comment as well.)

Read the debate over at Tactical Philanthropy, on the following question: Clarity in charity - good or bad? (My wording.)

It reminds me of when I used to read really old arguments for democracy and free speech (I’m talking about Locke, John Stuart Mill, etc.) and think, “Huh, there were people who disagreed with this stuff?” That’s what the above debate will look like 100 years from now. People will read it and go “Wow, look at those crazy people saying there are ‘pros and cons’ to transparency. Is this real? Did people really think that?”

That last post was a doozy, wasn’t it. Please read it, though, if you get a chance, because this is really important. It’s my first attempt in a while to do what I’ve been saying forever that we can do: put the reasoning behind our decisions in writing, so that you can see the basis for everything we say and everything we decide. I’d really appreciate your thoughts on the following:

• Readability and usability - are you able to use the writeup to understand what I’ve found and what I think?
• Fairness and transparency - is the context, reasoning and evidence for every judgment call I make clear?
• Coverage - I can’t be comprehensive, but am I making intelligent decisions about what lines of research to pursue?
• Quality of analysis - are my conclusions reasonable? Do they make you feel I’ll make good bets on helping people?

It is a very preliminary, rough draft - 2 days from “What’s Head Start?” to “Oog, OK, finished the blog post. My head hurts.” - but the sooner I start getting feedback on these things and improving my approach, the better.

A few other thoughts that have come up in my first stabs at research:

• I’m probably (no promises!) going to be posting more often on the blog, and when Elie joins us full-time on August 3, I’ll be asking him to as well. This time around, knowing I had to write a blog post really focused my thoughts and stopped me from forming impressions that I can’t explain; that’s a good thing, and I want to keep it up. My goal is to create a public document of everything that goes into our decisions - the more often I’m writing down where I stand, the better I’ll force myself to keep track of why I think what I think (and the earlier my progress will be out there to be critiqued).
• If you think it’s best to forget about measurement and spend all our money on “getting things done” … take a nice careful look at that writeup and its sources and please think again. Many of the Head Start studies found strong and immediate positive effects on children’s IQ … effects that were gone two years later. Meanwhile, the St. Pierre study observed positive changes in just about every aspect of its clients’ lives … but putting them alongside against a control group, the researchers realized that everyone’s lives were improving (maybe a strong economy, maybe just the fact that they were hand-picking people at their worst point) … and their program was having no impact at all.

  Next time you hear someone say “The smiles on the children’s faces are the only data I need,” think about this. The fact is, as a local service provider, you simply have no way of getting around problems like what’s above. No amount of direct observation and experience with your clients can tell you if you’re having a real and lasting impact on their lives. A long, tedious, dry study can. It’s annoying but true.

• I believe that there is a monstrous and unfortunate disconnect between charity and academia. Here’s why.
  • Reading academic papers was a whole different universe from reading charities’ self-evaluations (as I did last year). With the latter, I was constantly trying to figure out how the study was run and what kind of problems might be present; the papers themselves seemed entirely unaware of selection bias issues, making conclusions like “Test scores rose over period X, so the program was a success.” The academic papers on Head Start, on the other hand, were crystal clear - much clearer than I ever was in my head - about how each study was designed and what potential problems (or lack thereof, for randomized studies with low attrition) might be involved. Those that didn’t employ randomization apologized up front. It’s like people have been thinking about these issues for years and years, and have formed a whole culture around them … and many nonprofits and their evaluators seem totally oblivious.
  • I can’t get freaking decent library access. This is crazy. Sorry, but the New York Public Library is crap - spotty collections, closed stack, no borrowing research materials. Meanwhile, Columbia won’t let me within 10 feet of them because I’m not in academia. NYU wants $225 to get in the door and another $600 for borrowing privileges, which we might do, but still … in the world of research libraries, my nonprofit affiliation is worth about as much as my talent for whistling. Why hasn’t this come up a million times, for every foundation trying to research their issues? I gotta say it - probably because they’re not doing that.
  • It’s just unbelievable how excited academics seem to get about anything that has public policy implications. Witness the enormous amount of research related to Head Start. And it’s no surprise - every academic paper begins by explaining why it’s important, and for many papers this is the weakest section. The Head Start-related papers are nothing less than gleeful in proclaiming their relevance to the debate, and thus to actual current events. Well, that’s great - but what about the question of, you know, what we should do with our own money? I haven’t seen a single paper justify its existence by saying it’s relevant to the question of where foundations, or individuals, should give charitably. Why not???

Look. Academia and nonprofits are a match made in heaven. Nonprofits are always complaining that they have no capacity for evaluation; academics complain that no one cares about their work. Academics have the resources, knowledge, and patience to do ridiculously long and diligent studies; nonprofits, at least potentially, have the real-world significance to make it matter. Guys, I can’t watch you ignore each other like this.

Here’s what I’ve learned in two days of reading up on early child care (Cause 3). This is as rough as a draft gets, but I’m still going to provide references, a summary, and a roadmap, because those things are all so useful.

In a nutshell: it’s at least possible to make an amazingly big and long-lasting difference for disadvantaged children, through preschool programs with an emphasis on learning. (Several reasonably executed studies return to beneficiaries over ten years later and still find effects; one does so at age 21!) Not all of these programs work, and there’s no clear “magic formula,” but what I’ve seen makes me expect reasonably big things from programs that are (a) time-intensive; (b) focused on education; (c) targeting at-risk and disadvantaged children. Parent outreach programs, and programs that focus exclusively on the earliest years (0-3), are less well documented, probably because they aren’t at the center of the massive policy debate over Head Start.

Roadmap

• Head Start-style programs describes programs that generally emphasize learning and focus on the years immediately before kindergarten.
  • The stakes explains why there has been so much debate and study of these programs, and thus why I spent so much more time on them.
  • Types of programs distinguishes between Head Start, Early Head Start, Universal Pre-K, and other.
  • Evidence of effectiveness: “model programs” describes some of the findings of individual, intensive preschool programs. The systematic studies that have been done give a surprising and impressive picture: by and large, it appears as though these programs have been associated with real impact on children’s lives, long after the programs end.
  • Evidence of effectiveness: Head Start describes the evidence for a larger, more broadly defined set of programs. It’s much more muddled, although to me it still looks like these less intensive, less well-funded programs are still doing more good than harm (and more good than random).
  • What works? takes, basically, a couple wild guesses at what the difference is, observing that the most impressive results seem to come from programs that (a) are more intensive (b) focus on disadvantaged and at-risk children.
• Early childcare programs briefly discusses the debate around programs that focus on the years of 0-3. There is some evidence that these programs can make a modest difference, and it’s even possible that they have more potential than Head Start programs, but as far as I can tell there isn’t a lot of compelling evidence.
• Parent outreach programs briefly discusses the not-very-strong case for programs that center on educating parents, rather than children.
• References: if you’re still awake at the end of this writeup, and want to read more … you should really consider volunteering for us.

Buckle your seatbelts, and get ready to get real mad about anything bad that happened to you when you were 4.

Head Start-style programs

The stakes

Preschool programs have been subjected to dozens of systematic studies, several of which are carried out with a level of scientific precision that frankly, with the 50 warnings I get per day about the expense and difficulty of measurement, knocked me off my chair. These studies randomize the participants, to ensure that nothing but the preschool program could possibly explain any differences, and then follow up with them regularly for 10-15 years after they complete the program. (Details below.)

The studies aren’t perfect, and the one thing all the authors seem to agree on is that we need more research (makes sense; they’re researchers). But the diligence and volume here is beyond what I’ve seen for other social benefit programs (including within this cause). And I believe the reason is the massive debate over Head Start, a federal program that gives grants for preschool education. Head Start is a large use of federal funds, but its coverage is not universal; some want to see it cut, and others want to see it extended to every child in the U.S.

This is important for a couple reasons. First off, research has really honed in on “whether it works,” rather than “when it works.” Concluding anything about best practices within a preschool program takes a lot of triangulating across studies, and I’m hesitant to do it (although a couple things to jump out, as I’ll discuss). Secondly, on the question of how to donate, there is a huge side benefit (or cost, to some) to this area: funding programs that measure themselves well can help build (or erode) the case for expanding Head Start, as well as the case for changing the way it’s carried out. If you’re strongly ideologically opposed to being a part of this, you may want to steer clear. To me, it’s a plus, although not one that we’re going to consider in grant allocations (since we’re explicitly focused on helping people directly).

Types of programs

• Head Start (official program page here) is a federal program that gives grants for preschool care. I’ve had a heck of a time pinning it down to official, explicit criteria (unlike Universal Pre-K, below); the closest thing I see to a definition, from Section 641D of the Head Start Act, is “comprehensive health, nutritional, educational, social, and other services needed to aid participating children in attaining their full potential.” In practice, most of the studies on it (see Barnett, pp. 232-236) have looked at programs that treat students at the ages of 4-5, and Barnett gives a more concrete description of what the program usually amounts to: “Head Start for many years has provided children with education services (typically a half-day program during the school year), health services (including medical, dental, hearing, and vision examinations and treatment), nutritional services (meals, snacks, nutrition education), and social services to children and their families through direct services or referrals” (222).
• Early Head Start is the leg of Head Start focused on earlier childhood, described in Section 645A of the Head Start Act. I haven’t seen nearly as many studies of this program, and its focus on earlier childhood makes it more similar to the “early childhood care” programs described below.
• Universal Pre-K is a general term for similar grantmaking programs run by individual states. Because our focus is NYC, I looked only at the New York incarnation, which is far more specific in its criteria than the federal program is. Its guidelines are available here; they are extremely comprehensive, and demand programs that address children’s emotional, social, educational, and physical (food, health) needs. Advocacy group PreKnow states that the state intended this program to be truly universal in its coverage, but has followed through with the funding.
• Model programs is a term used by many researchers (and now by me) to refer to specific preschool programs that go above and beyond the Head Start guidelines and requirements. It’s not totally clear to me what the technical line is between model and non-model, but Barnett implies that model programs tend to have been developed by researchers (225) with an explicit intent to measure whether impact is possible in the best of circumstances.

Evidence of effectiveness: model programs

Scanning all the most rigorous and thorough evaluations of model programs, there are a couple that had flat-out stunning evidence of effectiveness many years after program participation, a few with strong evidence, and a few that demonstrated nothing statistically significant. All in all, a pretty compelling picture.

The one that really knocked me off my chair was the set of several studies of the Carolina Abecedarian Project, most of which I was able to check out directly (not just via literature review). See Campbell &c 1994, 1995, 2002. This project sought out at-risk children (”based on maternal and paternal educational levels, family income, absence of the father from the home, poor social or family support for the mother, indications that older siblings had academic problems, the use of welfare, parents working at unskilled jobs, indications of low parental IQ, family members seeking counseling, and other evidence of a need for support from community agencies” – from the 1995 study); randomly separated them into groups; gave year-round, full-day preschool care to one group and not to the other (and also did a later split to test in-school care, but I won’t be discussing that), and followed up again and again. The kids who had been put in their program had higher IQ’s at ages 12 and 21; better test scores at 15 and 21; more enrollment in higher education at 21; less enrollment in special ed, and less getting stuck in their grade, at 15. Holy cow.

This isn’t just cherry-picking. A couple different lit reviews (Barnett, Currie) compiled large lists of studies and examined all the ones that are most methodologically sound, and while the other programs they looked at weren’t as overwhelming as this one, they showed statistically significant impacts on similar measures, long after preschool (sometimes to grade 5, sometimes post high school). See Barnett, 226-229, for a grid that summarizes it all (Currie’s grid, on page 6, is similar though smaller). I come away thinking that early child care can matter.

It looks to me like the programs that were year-round and full-day, as well as focusing on the many years before school (not just 4-year-olds) generally had much stronger results (see the grid). The High/Scope Perry Preschool Project (Schweinhart &c 1993) did manage to get better high school graduation rates for a single year of part-day preschool, which to me borders on implausible, but it’s one of the methodologically strongest studies. Most of the other studies of part-time one-year programs found nothing statistically significant, although some of the results still show pretty big positive impacts for the programs (for example, noticeably smaller proportions of beneficiaries in special ed) that just have too little sample size to make much of.

Evidence of effectiveness: Head Start

Two widely cited studies (Administrative History; McKey et al. 1985) apparently claim that when you look at Head Start programs in general, you see immediate impacts on children’s IQ, but that these impacts “fade out” within a few years. I haven’t been able to get my hands on either of these originals, but Barnett characterizes McKey that way and Wikipedia characterizes Administrative History that way. And the tone of pro-Head Start papers and advocates is often on the defensive against this idea, so somehow it seems to have gained at least popular traction.

Barnett’s literature review has a section on studies of larger Head Start programs (see pages 232-236 for another awesome grid), and it’s certainly less impressive than the model programs. Any statistically significant difference in test scores fades by around 3rd grade, in 12 of the 16 studies (2 of these 12 have it fading only for certain ethnicities). On the other hand, when you look at measures of performance rather than intelligence – particularly focusing on issues most relevant to struggling children, such as grade retention (i.e., getting held back) and special education, you see pretty strong and pretty persistent positive effects of these programs.

Almost all of these programs have significant methodological problems. None of them are randomized, and to me that’s a real issue with Head Start, an optional program. I find it very counterintuitive that one year, no matter when, could make all that much difference, and it’s more plausible to imagine that parents who enroll their kids in Head Start are the same parents who are likely to push harder for them to stay out of special ed and move to the next grade. Then again, in light of the similar (though stronger) results for model programs, as well as a couple of the patterns I describe below, there is some reason to take the findings at face value.

Barnett comes out of this grid feeling pretty sold on Head Start. I come out of it feeling much more mixed. With low confidence, I think there’s a chance that these programs are highly beneficial for the kids who need the most help, as I’ll explain in the next section.

What works?

Unlike with early childcare programs (below), I wasn’t able to find much on the definition of what constitutes “quality” in preschool. What follows are my own observations from Currie’s & Barnett’s grids (you can check them yourself and see if you agree):

• Results are more impressive for programs that went beyond a year, and went beyond part-day (both of which Head Start is generally restricted to). This makes sense to me. I can believe that an intensive program that takes care of a kid for his/her entire early development can affect the development of the brain and basic attitudes; I have more trouble with the idea of one year (age 4) in isolation making that much of a difference, although I suppose it could be that crucial of a year in development.
• All of these programs seemed to do a better job with things like keeping kids from requiring special education, or getting held back, than with IQ and test scores. That makes sense to me too. I’d guess that good child care has more to do with keeping kids out of bad situations than with turning them into geniuses – I think (without any evidence) that it’s easier to screw someone up than to make them go above and beyond their natural abilities.
• In light of that, it’s also striking to me that the strongest results (from the Abecedarian program) come from a program that specifically sought out “at-risk” children, rather than simply low-income children. Also, looking at the Barnett grid, it seems that the methodologically strongest studies showed the strongest effects – the opposite of how it usually is (as selection bias usually exaggerates results). Why would this be? One possible answer, to me, is that the methodologically strongest studies were the ones that used randomization rather than after-the-fact comparisons, and that means they were the most careful in picking out people to study. I didn’t get to look at the Perry preschool study, but it may have done the same sort of selection - specifically targeting at-risk children - as the Abecedarian study, whereas the weaker studies would have no good way of doing this since they didn’t pre-pick their populations.
• So, I don’t know everything or even much, but my money’s on intensive programs targeting highly disadvantaged and at-risk children. And in the end, I don’t think child care is rocket science – if I see a program that’s doing the same basic activities as the Abecedarian project, and its personnel are qualified and (from a site visit) seem to like children, I’m going to think it’s relatively reasonable to expect similar results, i.e., a real effect on children’s development.

Early childcare programs

As this article details, there has been a good amount of media coverage of the idea that the ages of 0-3 is really where it’s at, because that’s when the brain is really developing. As the article also explains, the actual science is much more mixed. I don’t have much literacy or opinion of the actual neuroscience, except I know that it would have to be pretty slam-dunk cause-and-effect reasoning to sell me without accompanying evidence of actual results, and it doesn’t appear to be slam-dunk (based on the review in the article at the beginning of this paragraph). So I look for studies of whether differences in early childhood care have actually been shown to lead to better later outcomes.

Studies on this are pretty scarce, probably because there’s no policy debate attached. The main source I can find is the NICHD, whose huge study on of early child care and youth development is available here. I haven’t read the study carefully, but I’ve scanned it and have a couple observations:

• It doesn’t look at later-in-life outcomes the way the Head Start studies do (it goes up to age 4.5), and given the “fade out” often observed by the latter, I’m hesitant to get too excited about its relatively modest demonstrations of effects.
• It also doesn’t have a randomized design. It’s a survey: they look at the connection between quality of child care and child performance along various metrics, meaning they could easily just be showing that families that care more about getting good child care are also doing other things to help their children (or just care more about them!)
• One appealing thing about the NICHD study is that it’s very specific about what constitutes “quality” child care. Unlike the Head Start studies, which are all about debating “whether it works,” the NICHD gives a nice worksheet that I’ve printed out for us, listing the qualities of good child care that it has linked to better performance, some easily quantifiable and some not.

It makes just as much logical sense to me that 0-3 child care matters as that 3-5 education-focused care matters. Just as much, no more, no less. The evidence for the latter is much stronger. So that’s where I stand for now. A particular charity with a particular approach, and good measurement, could easily change my mind.

Parent outreach programs

Teaching parents to take care of their kids seems great in theory, but the question is, are you really changing parents’ behavior or just giving them a bunch of advice they’re not taking? I’m open to seeing a parent outreach program that really has a way of changing parents’ behavior, but preliminarily, I’m more excited about the more child-focused programs.

The Gomby study is pointed to by many papers (including Schaefer, see page 6) as establishing that there isn’t much to these sorts of programs. I haven’t had a chance to look carefully at Gomby itself, and I should. Early on, it states, “In most of the studies … programs struggled to enroll, engage, and retain families. When program benefits were demonstrated, they usually accrued only to a subset of the families originally enrolled in the programs, they rarely occurred for all of a program’s goals, and the benefits were often quite modest in magnitude” (Gomby, 6). That quote in itself isn’t all that sobering to me - I’d expect any program that only addresses one factor to show only modest effects.

Much more sobering is one of the studies it references, the St. Pierre et al. study, which took an extremely thorough, completely randomized look at a large federal “experiment”, the Comprehensive Child Development Program, which centered around advising families rather than providing particular services. There is a huge amount of data here, and the program seems to have been reasonably well carried out, and the randomized design found nothing. Pending what I find in the Gomby paper, I feel like it’s reasonable to conclude that (consistent with logic) engaging parents is tricky, and it’s going to take ingenuity, not just execution of a basic plan (while I feel that Head Start-type programs can work with the latter). Again, I’m totally open to a particular charity’s showing me that it’s cracked this nut and can prove it.

References

These are just the papers that either are not available online or that I refer to repeatedly. When I just talk about a paper once and it’s available online, I just link to it (above).

• Administrative History of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Vol. I, p.252, Box 1, LBJ Library.
• Barnett, W.S. (2004). Does Head Start have lasting cognitive effects? The myth of fade-out. In E. Zigler & S. Styfco (Eds.) The Head Start Debates. Baltimore, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
• Campbell, F.A., and Ramey, C.T. (1994). Effects of early intervention on intellectual and acaademic achivement: A follow-up study of children from low-income families. Child Development, 65, 684-698.
• Campbell, F.A. and Ramey, C.T. (1995). Cognitive and shcool outocmes for high-risk African-American students at middle adolescence: Positive effectds of early intervention. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 743-772.
• Campbell, F.A., Ramey, C.T., Pungello, E.P., Sparling, J., & Miller-Johnson, S. (2002). Early Childhood Education: Young Adult Outcomes from the Abecedarian Project. Applied Developmental Science, 6, 42-57.
• Currie, J. (2001). Early Childhood Education Programs. Journal of Economic Perspectives V. 15 #2, pp. 213-218.
• Gomby et al., 1999. Home Visiting: Recent Program Evaluations: Analysis and Recommendations. The Future of Children, Vol. 9, No. 1.
• McKey, R.H., Condelli, L, Ganson, H., Barrett, B.J., McConkey, C., & Plantz, M.C. (1985). The impact of Head Start on children, families, and communities. (DHHS Pulication No. (OHDS) 90-31193). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
• Schaefer, S. and Cohen, J. Making Investments in Young Children: What the Research on Early Care and Education Tells Us. National Association of Child Advocates, Washington, D.C.
• Schweinhart, L.J., Barnes, H.V., Weikart, D.P., Barnett, W.S., and Epstein, A.S. (1993). Significant benefits: The High/Scope Perry Preschool study through age 27. Monographs of the High/Scope Educational REsearch Foundation. No. 10. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press.
• St. Pierre et al.. 1997. National Impact Evaluation of the Comprehensive Child Development Program. U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services.

Still reading?

You get 5 points.

The Clear Fund has no secrets. If I’m ever being a jerk about disclosing information, you can quote me on that.

I’ve just added a Board records section to the Clear Fund website. It includes a link to the full minutes and audio recording for our last Board meeting, along with all the written materials we used in the meeting. I was late to the meeting and out of breath, and I say many stupid things in the meeting, and those materials were for our use rather than public disclosure, but we’re publishing it all anyway. We’ll see what horrible things come of showing such weakness. I’m willing to take the risk; I figure that we’re taxpayer-subsidized to operate in the public interest, so everything we do should be public. Foundations, I am looking suggestively at you and coughing and clearing my throat violently right now.

So that stuff is sort of in lieu of a long blog post for tonight. I predict a doozy on Tuesday: I’ve spent a day combing through academic research relating to Cause 3, and after another day or two, I’m going to share my first impressions and opinions of what we should be looking for within this cause.

As quickly and efficiently as I possibly can, I’m now trying to read up on our five causes, and ask the question: “What is the evidence - independent of particular nonprofits - for and against different methods of helping people?” Given the enormity of the topics and how little time I have, this is difficult, to say the least. That’s why I’d like to keep you posted and get thoughts from anyone who’s interested.

Here’s what I’m thinking right now:

1. I’ve been surprised by how foreign the question above seems to foundations and grantmakers. I’ve had long conversations with several major foundations known for “results-oriented” grantmaking, where I’ve asked this question, and have gotten referred either nowhere or to very general sites where I can start digging in. I’ve gotten practically no concrete statements along the lines of “We believe Method X is more promising than Method Y” (I got exactly one, and it was couched in about 200 caveats about how it’s just a generalization, and I’m not allowed to disclose to anyone what the generalization was or who said it). I would expect a foundation that makes grants in education to have written up its own opinions on what works (preschool? Tutoring? Longer hours? Teacher training? Etc.), with footnotes to the research that makes it believe this. We certainly will.

2. But, there’s certainly plenty of research out there to create this kind of writeup. More than I can realistically cover thoroughly in 2007. I’m doing the best I can to focus on very current research, and methods that are common among charities.

3. Causes 2, 3, and 4 are all very amenable to this sort of research, because “How do we fight poverty in the developing world?” and “How do we improve education?” are both discrete, established topics that academics like to fight over. Cause 1 and 5 is much harder: people tend to ask not “How can we save lives in Africa?” but “How can we fight malaria?” or “How can we fight AIDS?” If I went through all of these papers, I could eventually build up a picture, but I don’t believe I can find literature reviews that directly compare all the different ways of saving lives (for the record, the way I would do this would be to rely heavily on the triage approach). Let me know if I’m wrong. Cause 5 is a very similar situation: people argue about how to help ex-convicts and how to help substance abusers, but directly comparing the two (again, I would do this using the triage approach) seems pretty rare.

So, I’m going to focus my research for now on Causes 2-4; I’ll attack Causes 1 and 5 later, when we know who our strongest applicants are (in terms of their ability to report and evaluate what they do, our main criteria for Round One), and focus on comparing the specific strategies that our strongest applicants engage in.

This blog has become part of a blogging “community.” We read each other, we refer to each other, we comment on each others’ posts, and we probably think of each other as the “other charity bloggers.” I’m talking mostly about:

• Tactical Philanthropy
• Philanthropy 2173
• White Courtesy Telephone
• GiftHub (and its weird sister, Wealth Bondage)
• The Nonprofiteer

I think all of the blogs above are intelligent, sometimes entertaining, and generally worth reading for a charity nerd such as myself. I like having people to respond to and people responding to me; being part of this community is been a reliable way to get dialogue, as well as pick up readers. That’s cool. But I have two major problems with this set of people.

1. It’s just too small, and I think the people are too similar to each other. That’s been driven home to me by Sean’s recent interview with William Schambra. Read it, if someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to. In brief, the participants are acting like the fact that this guy affiliates with “conservatives” rather than “liberals” means that this affiliation is the only thing worth discussing about or around him, that every word he says must be nothing more than snake oil designed to protect conservative interests. They’ve used their stereotypes to come up with ludicrous, implausible interpretations of his motives, rather than challenging what he says to get at whatever biases he does have. There’s no recognition that conservatives sometimes think about things other than cutting taxes and oppressing minorities (and that some conservatives support neither of these things). To me, that’s a sign of insulation from other points of view.

(Can you tell I’m annoyed? Guys, if you’re reading this, I’ll get over it. Here’s an e-hug: (). But I do think you’re insulated.)

2. More importantly, none of these blogs ever talk about how to help people, which is an odd quality for a group of “philanthropy blogs.” My original vision for this blog was as a place to discuss tutoring vs. charter schools, bednets vs. water pipes. It hasn’t happened so far, mostly because we had to halt our research on these issues in order to focus on the business side of The Clear Fund. It still may not happen for a little while, because I’m just starting to learn about these issues myself, and at this point anything I wrote about them would largely be in a vacuum. But as we shift our focus to research, I expect this to change.

So, I don’t want to ditch the friends I have, but I want some new ones too. I do read a ton of other blogs, but the only ones I know of that discuss how to help people are Beyond Philanthropy and the Google.org blog (which is showing early signs of flakiness). Any suggestions?

One of the things we need to do, as a transparent grantmaker, is to take the intuitions and biases that make us prefer one charity over another and make them explicit, so that everyone is aware (as much as possible) of the principles that drive us. I’m going to be doing this “out loud” on our blog; please bear in mind that what I write here is unfiltered and personal (i.e., I am expressing my own views, not those of The Clear Fund, whose short-term decisions involve Elie and whose ultimate decisions involve the entire Board).

As I explore different approaches to our five causes, I’m realizing that many of the most difficult calls to make are between organizations that serve fundamentally different populations with different needs - for example, how do you choose between an organization that provides job training for people right on the brink of employability and one that provides a comprehensive set of services for people with more complex issues (including substance abuse, mental health issues, etc.)? When I run up against these questions, the approach that keeps popping into my head is that of a wartime triage.

We’re all familiar with the idea of helping those who need it most, but when resources are scarce (as in wartime, and charity), that’s not all there is to it. As Wikipedia so helpfully explains, there are times when the protocol is instead to help people who have better odds of survival (i.e., people who need less help) - because more lives can be saved that way. That means diverting resources from most wounded to those whose injuries are more treatable. The question becomes not just “What will happen to you if I don’t help?”, but also “What will happen to you if I do?”

You might think a charity that seeks out people who need just a little help is “cherry-picking.” But to me, this seems like a great approach. If we have one set of people stuck in poverty for a simple, stupid, easily fixed reason and another stuck in poverty for a whole complex of reasons - it makes sense to focus on the first group first.

This is cold, of course, and it’s unnerving to think of things that way. That’s why you rarely hear the idea of “helping those who can benefit more easily” - it’s a concept reserved for the direst of conditions, when there’s really no other choice. But to me, the state of the world is exactly that. There are more people in need than we can help. We need to think of charity not as a service to ease our guilt or give us warm feelings, but as a war on suffering. That means making tough choices, and this general approach - help the people who can benefit the most from the least - seems like a good way of making them. Thoughts?

Please don’t tell me you’re going to run one of these “three posts on the first day, then total flaking out” blogs.

If you’re here to read the latest update on the GiveWell project, see this post.

There are a lot of possible objections to my last post; to voice them, I’m bringing back our old friend, the Straw Man, for an exclusive interview.

Straw Man: When you say you prefer charity (helping individuals) to philanthropy (addressing root causes), do you mean you ALWAYS prefer short-term to long-term solutions, and that all research/advocacy/outreach programs should be illegal?

Holden: No. But I think there’s value in making charity the default mode, asking for a higher burden of proof before switching to more difficult and ambitious methods. I think most foundations go in the opposite order, jumping straight to “How can we wipe out this problem?” The two examples I gave in my last post seem like really good ones.

Straw Man: But don’t you think that by helping individuals, you’ll be perpetuating the very problems you seek to address??

Holden: How so?

Straw Man: Hang on, I’m still recovering from how cool I sounded just now. OK. There are a couple different arguments that charity perpetuates the very problems it seeks to address. First, the lefty one: by helping people, you’ll give the government an excuse to ignore them.

Holden: Are there any instances in recorded history where a popular social program lost support because of the argument that charity takes care of it? I doubt it, and here’s why. A charity isn’t a reasonable candidate to replace the government until it’s covering all affected parties (which generally is not a possibility, even in the long term) - and until that point, the charity’s successes are just evidence that more of its activities are needed. If a charity addresses 1%-95% of the needy population, and it’s clear that what it’s doing is working and that that 1%-95% is far better off for it, that seems to me like it helps rather than hurts the case for universalizing the program. Anecdotally, I’ve already seen this with NYC education - the state is willing to partner in “experimental” initiatives (small schools, for example) that already have some track record thanks to the voluntary sector.

“This is a great program, it clearly works, it’s clearly good for our society, but we shouldn’t allocate government funding to it because 501(c)(3)’s already have it covered” doesn’t sound like an argument that would fly in an actual political contest (let me know if there are any examples of this happening). It sounds like the kind of argument that people are afraid “other people” will be snookered by.

Straw Man: OK, now the righty argument that charity perpetuates the very problems it seeks to address. By providing people with free health care, education, etc., you remove the incentive for them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Holden: I don’t think I’ll ever understand where people get the idea that depriving someone of basic needs is a necessary, or appropriate, way to motivate them to work. All of the most driven, entrepreneurial, hard-working people I know have never had to worry about having food, shelter, health care, or education. In fact, most of them have never had to worry about anything much. People want more than they have, period (whether we’re talking about money, meaning, or anything else you get from hard work). So what if food surpluses mean farmers don’t have to grow food anymore? They’ll do something else useful - just like the rest of us who’ve never had to grow food.

Straw Man: But what about sustainability? By providing free medicine, we could be stopping programs that seek to provide cheap medicine. That’s not just a waste of money - it could be stopping people from providing services in much more sustainable, expandable ways.

Holden: This is a real concern. It’s one of many reasons that charity has to be researched carefully and monitored constantly. In fact, I think one of the questions any charity has to ask itself is, “How much can our clients pay for our services?” They should charge as much as possible, until the point where they’d be pricing out people who need help. And they should always be revisiting this question.

That said, leaving people to rot until/unless “the market” solves their problems is irresponsible. There’s no question that there are people out there who need help they can’t afford to pay for, and this fact isn’t going away anytime soon (especially if nobody’s providing them with the things every human needs to become self-supporting). Serving people who need help, while constantly reassessing how much they need it, seems like the only appropriate road to take.

Straw Man: So to sum up: you just like Band-Aids, and you don’t want to see real change in the world.

Holden: First off, every person helped is real change; secondly, I do want to see large-scale change, but I’d rather learn as we go than spend 20 years trying to implement an untried master plan. What I really want to see is a kind of “research” grounded in reality: donors simultaneously helping people and learning how best to help people, by documenting and discussing what they’ve done. This approach - transparent, heavily evaluated, results-oriented charity - can’t solve all our problems or fully replace direct assaults on “root causes,” but it has the potential to build the evidence and knowledge we need for enormous changes, as well as making sure that we’re doing some actual good along the way.

It’s slowly dawned on me that I almost never see the word “charity” on the other blogs in this space, and I rarely see it in foundation literature either. Meanwhile, you’ll almost never see the word “philanthropy” on this blog. For a while, the reason for this was simply that I think “philanthropy” is one of the ugliest words that it’s possible to construct. But I’ve picked up another reason to prefer “charity,” as I’ve discovered why others avoid it. In Sean’s words, “philanthropy [is] the practice of dealing with root causes rather than the derisively referred to ‘charity’ which is ‘just about managing symptoms.’” Put me down for managing symptoms, thanks.

Severe diarrhea kills millions of children a year. When are we going to find a cure?? Um, actually, we have one - in fact, we have several reliable, simple, cheap methods of both treating it (with a packet of nutrients that costs pennies) and preventing it (with water purification tablets, among other things). So may I ask why the Gates Foundation is determined to attack this problem by developing and researching new drugs and treatments?

The Google.org blog reports that polio is nearly eradicated, with under 2000 reported cases. I don’t know anything about polio, but I have to wonder why Google feels that its funds are best spent making a movie to raise awareness about this issue rather than just attacking it head-on. Making a movie isn’t cheap, and competing with Knocked Up for attention isn’t easy; using treatments and methods that have already worked thousands of times is both.

It’s hard for me to say much about what foundations do, what they’re thinking, and whether they’re reasonable, for the usual reason: it’s incredibly hard to get information from them on why they make the choices they make. But my general impression is that they place too much emphasis on “eliminating problems,” rather than on improving human beings’ lives.

When you’re trying to accomplish as much good as possible with your dollar, as in everything else, you have to factor in certainty (the same reason that people buy stocks and CDs instead of just lottery tickets). Of course I’d love to cure cancer or save Darfur, and I’d rather eliminate a disease than save 100 people from it. But as a strategy gets longer-term and gets more moving parts, my confidence in it falls exponentially. And my confidence falls even faster when all I know about a strategy is that it involves “research” (competing with thousands of other causes for the best scientists), “advocacy” (competing for political airtime), or “raising awareness” (good luck if you don’t have Al Gore or Michael Moore in your corner). The burden of proof should be high for a direct-service charity, but it should be 1000x higher for strategies along these lines - no matter how wonderful the goal.

That - not any philosophical opposition to government intervention or anything else - is why I generally prefer my donations to work one person at a time. (That distinguishes me from this fellow, whose argument against “root causes” appears to actually be an argument against large-scale charity.) The chance to truly change the world is, of course, incredibly tempting, and there are times when it’s the right thing to aim for. But it’s also important to remember that the dichotomy between “getting results” and “treating symptoms” is a false one, if improving humans’ lives - not promoting abstractions - is your ultimate goal. Saving a person from starvation - even if makes no dent in the causes of world hunger - is itself a result, and wonderful one.

A lot has changed since the release of our business plan. Back then, the Clear Fund was an idea; we had a broad sketch of what we expected to do and what we expected it to cost, and we didn’t yet have funding. Now, the Clear Fund is a project with an approved budget and a concrete plan, and we just sent out grant applications. Seems like a good time for an update. Here’s what’s changed:

Our Board of Directors

The Board of Directors had its first full-attendance meeting on June 22. The current Directors are:

Bob Elliott – charter member of GiveWell; third-most devoted charter member behind me and Elie; co-founder of the national nonprofit Global Justice (not eligible for a Clear Fund grant); author of more than one post on this blog.

Virginia Zink – major Clear Fund donor; extremely passionate about our project; background in sales and marketing (desperately needed, as you can tell from the way I write).

Greg Jensen – major Clear Fund donor; co-CIO of the hedge fund where I used to work; my former boss.

Tim Ogden – Chief Knowledge Officer of Geneva Global; blogs Beyond Philanthropy, the only blog I know of exploring how to help people (although the new Google Blog is also promising); may become a competitor in the future (I certainly hope so), so is recused from certain discussions and votes.

Lucy Bernholz – author of Creating Philanthropic Capital Markets; founder of Blueprint Research & Design; you probably know her from Philanthropy 2173.

Holden Karnofsky – former Chicago Bears defensive end; holds NFL single-season sack record.

As a quick aside, we don’t want more than one compensated employee serving on the Board, and I got the nod over Elie. Elie is still slated to work for the Clear Fund full-time starting August 1.

In our meeting, we approved the official set of causes we’re exploring in 2007, and the timeline and budget for our project (see below). I’m currently waiting for some computer-related nonsense, but will soon post the audio recording of our meeting along with all the written materials that accompanied it.

Our causes

After collecting and discussing a breakdown of how many potential applicants do different sorts of activities, we have decided to do fewer - and broader - causes than our original business plan indicates. We have also clarified our descriptions of them to make it as clear as possible what sorts of organizations do and do not qualify. This page now gives the full lowdown on who is eligible; briefly, our five causes are

1. Help people in Africa avoid death and extreme debilitation.
2. Help people in Africa become economically self-supporting.
3. Improve early childhood development for economically disadvantaged, but not special-needs, children in New York City.
4. Improve academic opportunities for economically disadvantaged, but not special-needs, K-12 children in New York City.
5. Help disadvantaged adults in New York City become economically self-supporting. “Adults” in this case does not include the elderly, and organizations in this cause must include (though not necessarily focus exclusively on) direct help with finding permanent employment.

Our process and timeline

There are 25-100 eligible (large, relevant, interested) organizations within each cause, and we can’t practically do thorough due diligence on all of them. So we’re conducting our grant application process in two rounds; in round one, we’re asking charities to pick one program that is already well documented and evaluated and send us what they have on it - that’s a time-saving way of seeing which charities are going to be able to demonstrate their effectiveness, without worrying yet about which ones are the most effective. (And based on our experiences last year, we expect that just this criterion - asking that they be able to demonstrate effectiveness - will easily narrow the field.) We’ll use this first-round application to pick about ten charities within each cause; we’ll investigate those more thoroughly, and write up full reviews on about five per cause, giving out one $25,000 grant per cause.

We are aiming to declare the grant winners and have all our reviews up on our website by Thanksgiving - when the media’s thoughts, I predict, will turn to giving.

You can see more on our process and timeline here, and you can see all of the materials that were sent to applicants, including all five first-round applications and a complete run-down of our process, here. It’s a bit dry if you’re not an applicant, but the reason this is such good news is that we now know how many applicants we’re looking at, how many causes we’re doing, and about how much work it’s going to take, and we’re on schedule. Getting to that point took a lot of work, but it’s a much better place to be than where we were in March, with nothing but speculation about how many applicants we’d get and whether Elie and I could handle the load.

Our budget and fundraising

When I post the materials from our Board meeting, they will include the full approved budget. In the meantime, the key points are that (a) based on survey responses, we think that $25,000 per cause will get us a lot of applicants and get us the information we need; (b) once you add in salaries, website costs, and other stuff, we’re looking at a budget in the $240,000 range for 2007; (c) our commitments to donate total $253,000 at this point. That’s obviously fantastic news; it means that to the extent we are fundraising, we can focus on building a donor network for 2008, but more importantly, it means we don’t have to spend all our time fundraising. At this point we can treat our time as being more valuable than money, which is key because we need all the time we have.

So, bear hugs for all the people who stepped up and committed to support us. Building a useful donor resource by December 2007 is absolutely crucial to our chances of getting attention, getting off the ground, and starting to change the way people across the world think about giving. It’s because of your responsiveness and generosity that this is now a feasible goal.

In sum

The parts of our plan that have always seemed most uncertain and out of our control to me (fundraising, setting our scope) are largely behind us, and we’re still on schedule and within our budget. Now it’s a matter of whether Elie and I can communicate well with applicants, make good assessments, write good reviews, and, of course, work our tails off. If we can do that, we can create something that’s never existed before - a website where donors can see (and discuss) every aspect of one of the most difficult and important decisions a privileged person makes: where to give. That, to me, is where the road to solving our biggest problems in a truly collaborative, intelligent way begins.

What’s next

As we wait for grant applications, we’ll be working on:

• Research. The goal is to learn as much as I possibly can about our five causes, to gain better context for evaluating the apps when they come in. So far, I’ve been shocked at how hard it is to find discussions of things like what the most effective way to fight malaria is, or what is known (even guessed) about improving academic opportunity. If I want to learn about early Irish historical tales, or every answer ever to “Is the mind separate from the body?”, there are people I can talk to, anthologies I can read, courses I can take, whole fields to explore. Figuring how to help the people who need the most help has a literature that (as far as I can tell) is relatively small and scattered all over the place. It’s odd. But rest assured, I’ll share what I find; please share what you have.
• Recruiting. If you are interested in a demanding, even punishing volunteer assignment that won’t even get you the chance to see cute children, shoot me an email. In August or September, as Round Two of our application process begins, we will start giving out volunteer assignments. We don’t have the whole process outlined yet, but my rough picture is that a volunteer will be sent a charity’s application materials and be charged with writing an intelligent, understandable review that hits the highlights while linking to every detail. Volunteers who do this poorly or simply don’t spend enough time on it will quickly stop volunteering. Volunteers who turn out to be passionate about this work (and good at it) will save us a ton of time and will take on expanding roles.

  Unlike some nonprofits, we don’t offer useless volunteer jobs as a way of getting people to feel good and like us; we are looking for people who can become important to the project. This is ultimately how we’re going to build our staff, both part- and full-time, if the project expands (because people, like time and goodness, can’t simply be bought). If you don’t have the time or the passion and you’d rather just donate a ton of money to us, I understand.

• Publicity. This is a bit down the line, but we want to make some serious noise come December, so let me know if you have any ideas. Got a friend who works for the Times, or even Deadspin? I’d love to have a talk with them.
• Website construction. The sketch I have in my head involves fusing Drupal and vBulletin to create a site where every single page has its own full-featured discussion board attached. I’d love to speak to people who know those two apps inside and out, so let me know if you know any.
• Building the world’s soon-to-be greatest donor network of all time. We’re working on finding people who are both capable of and excited about paying to make the world a better place. Or people who know those people. When we have an awesome proof of concept in December, we need to make sure we have someone to show it to. (If you want to help with this, let me know because there is almost definitely something you can do.)

Whew!

That’s the story. We’ve already publicly posted our application materials, full process description, and eligibility criteria, as well as created a public forum where you’ll hopefully be able to see what our applicants are saying to (and about) us. Still to come (hopefully within the week) are all the materials from our Board meeting, including the minutes and the audio recording as well as our projected budget. We want you to be able to see into any corner of what we’re doing that you care to explore. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions - don’t hold back.

I’ve had to be judicious with my online time, but there’s a real post coming later today. Meanwhile, I just have to point out this ludicrous example of the “We can never ever take even the tiniest risk of keeping a penny away from a charity, no matter what they’re doing with it” mentality. UK site Intelligent Giving, a third-party evaluator that I generally think is fantastic (I wish we had something like it here in the U.S.), found out that the Wallace & Gromit’s Children Foundation did not give away a penny of its funding last year - but sat on the story so as not to discourage people from giving to it.

Read the post and try to figure out their reasoning. They want charities to be accountable, but they never want to risk hurting a charity’s fundraising appeal. Well, those two are incompatible. Period. You have to choose. Part of putting pressure on charities to do a good job is withholding money when they don’t.

And it’s worth it. In all other spheres, we can recognize that cutting your budget in half while making it better spent can result in a better job done. In the nonprofit sector, a third-party evaluator is afraid to disclose that a charity is doing nothing with its funds, because it might result in less funds. Talk about overvaluing money.