A few thoughts on year-end giving
I’m guessing that you, like me, are inundated with year-end fundraising appeals right now. I always find it amusing when nonprofit executives earning multiple times my salary ask for my money. Maybe I should be asking them for donations!
How do I know how much these executives earn? Most nonprofits in the U.S. are required to publicly file a 990 form that lists, among other things, salaries of top-earning employees and board members. Finding these forms is easy: Just type an organization’s name and “990” into a search engine.
Based on the latest publicly available 990s, here are the top salaries paid by a few of the organizations that have lately solicited me for donations:
National Geographic Society: $1,351,593
Salk Institute: $884,422
Nature Conservancy: $855,346
Planned Parenthood: $583,798
World Resources Institute: $571,922
Wikimedia Foundation: $512,179
Project Drawdown: $423,932
GiveDirectly: $363,872
No doubt, most — perhaps all — of these organizations do good, important work. And these are far from the highest salaries in the nonprofit/charity world. Charity Watch has a list of nonprofit compensation packages of $1 million or more. My personal award for shameless solicitation goes to St. Jude. While regular people like you and me are forced to spend our time swatting away their heart-wrenching appeals at the gas station and grocery store, their latest 990 lists 11 employees earning more than $800,000, including $2,176,046 for their EVP/Scientific Director. I struggle to understand how anyone could in good conscience pocket that sum while working for a charitable organization that raises money by manipulating the emotions of the public. But I digress.
Executives and other leaders do take on more responsibility and headaches than the average employee, and I’m not against them being compensated accordingly. And of course, for-profit company executives can earn far more than any nonprofit leader. But to my mind, there is something uniquely morally problematic about working for a tax-exempt organization that funds itself with appeals to our compassion and morality while accepting a salary that far exceeds what anyone needs to live comfortably and securely — a salary that, frankly, puts someone into the economic elite. If nonprofit leaders truly believed their own fundraising appeals, why wouldn’t they start by reducing their own pay to an amount that’s enough to live comfortably if not luxuriously anywhere in America (let’s say $300,000 for argument’s sake) and giving the difference back to their organization?1
These questions have been on my mind for a while, and I may write more about this at some point. But given that this is the last day to make donations in the 2024 tax year, and some may be looking for good places to donate, I want to instead highlight a few smaller organizations doing important, on-the-ground work. As far as my own giving is concerned, I’ve concluded that it makes sense to donate to organizations that pay salaries in the same range as my own and where I feel like my modest donations might make a concrete difference. (I also try to avoid conflicts of interest by not donating to organizations I might cover at some point, which are mainly large national / international organizations.)
Here are a few groups I’ve given to either this year or in past years:
A small but mighty organization focused on drawing attention to and caring for urban forests in the poorest parts of DC (and recently also Prince George’s County, Maryland, where I live). I wrote about them in 2020.
A long-standing nonprofit dedicated to the Anacostia River, often described as DC’s “forgotten river,” which flows near my house. I am especially impressed with AWS’s efforts to restore mussels and wild rice — two ecologically important species2 that don’t always get a lot of love.
Potomac Appalachian Trail Club
PATC volunteers maintain a section of the Appalachian Trail as well as many other trails in the Mid-Atlantic. I have met PATC volunteers while staying in their cabins, and they are the true salt of the earth. Some have selflessly cared for the same trail or cabin for decades!
A small, beautiful private nature preserve on the edge of Fayette County, Kentucky, where I grew up. My mom has supported and been involved with Floracliff for many years.
A wonderful arts and cultural organization and community hub in Mount Rainier, Maryland, where I live. Among others things, Joe’s supported my work with the Ash Forest Project.
Even though my work is mainly in the science / environment / nature space, I believe that the assault on abortion and reproductive rights is the worst injustice we face in America right now. For the past few years I’ve given to the Kentucky Health Justice Network (even though I live in Maryland, which strongly supports abortion rights, I’m originally from Kentucky, one of many states that force women to travel out of state for abortion care), and this year I also gave to the DC Abortion Fund. Not related to abortion rights specifically, I have also donated to local faith-based organizations Interfaith Action for Human Rights and Anne’s Place.
I admit I am less familiar with the day-to-day work of these organizations than with the environmental groups listed above, and I’m interested to learn about other organizations doing good, on-the-ground work in these spaces.
Naturally, I’m also a big believer in supporting media organizations, which are hardly thriving or overpaying their staff these days. Besides longstanding subscriptions to the New Yorker, New York Times and Washington Post (which I, unlike many, did not unsubscribe from when they decided not to endorse a presidential candidate), I gave to The 51st, a DC-focused startup launched by ex-WAMU reporters and editors, the Bay Journal, which does fantastic coverage of the environment of the Chesapeake Bay region, and Heated, a one-woman climate reporting powerhouse. In the past I’ve also given to WAMU (my local NPR affiliate) and likely will do so again, because we do need to support public radio, but at the moment I’m still mad at them for laying off great reporters such as Jacob Fenston.
Needless to say, this is a highly non-exhaustive list, and one that probably betrays a personal preference for supporting on-the-ground work over political advocacy. If you know of organizations you would add to it, please feel free to share in the comments.
I will close by adding that money is not the only (or even the most important) way to give, and perhaps the ease of clicking a few buttons and entering a credit card number has pulled us away from doing the harder work of showing up in person and putting our hands to work building a better world. Fortunately or not, the state of today’s world affords us infinite opportunity to do that hands-on work. Lately I have found it most meaningful to work at the community level, leading a wintertime effort to prune our street trees, picking up litter and organizing efforts to beautify our public spaces. In 2025 I hope to devote more time to these efforts and others.
Among my other resolutions for 2025: Write more here. (I have a sinking feeling I made the same resolution last year. But hope springs eternal!)
Happy New Year and see you again soon.
This is not a rhetorical question — I really am curious. If you have a good-faith answer, please post it in the comments!
Yes, I know mussels comprise numerous species — apparently at least eight live in the Anacostia.
Three thoughts:
1) Especially for those of us in the watershed of the U.S.'s largest estuary, I would add the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (https://www.cbf.org). They do a wide range of fantastic work to improve the entire bay ecosystem: planting lots of oysters, planting lots of trees, helping farmers keep cattle and animal processing waste out of streams, bringing lawsuits against polluters, lobbying to protect streams and marine life, running a small farm that models bay-friendly organic practices (and that donates much of its produce to local food banks), and educating lots of youth about the importance of improving and protecting the Bay. Not only are they highly effective, their work affects a large region of the U.S. and has benefits for generations into the future--as well as for us watershed denizens in the here and now. According to their 990 data on ProPublica, their top executives are paid around $300k, which is on par with the top executives at federal agencies and hence strikes me as reasonable.
2) As someone who has spent a lifetime living on and profiting from land ultimately stolen or cheated from Indigenous peoples, I'm very moved by Indigenous activists' calls to give back land and/or recognize their right to sovereignty over it (https://landback.org/manifesto). While I'm not prepared, at this point in my life, to uproot my family and cede my land back, I can at least heed some activists' call to pay a "land tax" to the groups on whose land I'm living. (More info here: https://nativegov.org/news/voluntary-land-taxes.) In essence, it recognizes that, if they had truly retained their sovereignty, theirs would be the government to which I would be contributing to social support services. It also helps redistribute some of the wealth generated from my enjoyment of this land to help them afford health care, community services, cultural activities, and--maybe most importantly--buying back their land. In my (and your) case, these people are the Piscataway Conoy Tribe, and I support them via Through Piscataway Eyes (http://www.throughpiscatawayeyes.org/#/) and Native American Lifelines (https://nativeamericanlifelines.org). Readers who don't live on Piscataway Conoy land can start researching the Indigenous groups on whose land they're living at https://native-land.ca, although I would encourage them to treat that as a starting point for further research about the history and current status of those peoples and their institutions.
3) On screening nonprofits, I'd caution your readers against looking only or primarily at executive compensation. (I think you have that nuance, but I want to amplify it.) A more significant metric on which I've heard donors focus is overhead ratio, but even that can be misleading and counterproductive. A high overhead ratio may be unavoidable for certain nonprofits' labor-intensive missions, and a low overhead ratio often means low pay for the workers who do socially valuable work. Not only is that completely backwards in terms of social priorities--shouldn't society value the labor of someone fighting for human rights more highly than that of a corporate lawyer working to suppress those rights?--it also discourages many good folks with families, student loans, high health costs, etc. from getting involved in or staying in nonprofit work. While nonprofits certainly shouldn't be slush funds for self-enrichment and should devote a lot of their assets toward their mission, let's not begrudge places that might have legitimate overhead needs and/or that don't stint their workers to appease funders. Let's not inflict on our favorite nonprofits the same punitive austerity-for-its-own-sake philosophy that hedge funds have used to impoverish our utilities and international lenders our governments!
Thank you Gabe for your local actions! Practicing responsible stewardship in your watershed builds community. People working together to address a problem has immediate social and environmental benefits. This reduces the anxieties imposed by large scale reports by the big greens who have high priced lawyers to pay. Despite huge accomplishments of reaching consensus across nearly 200 nations, they always report the COP meetings have failed and with calamity imminent, their need for more of our money is greater than ever before.
I live in Somerville MA. At 19,000 residents per square mile, we are the most densely inhabited municipality. Cambridge MA is second with 16,000.
We are organizing and planting pollinator corridors across the city on public and participating private properties. Wildlife thrives here because we do not use chemicals or quick-release fertilizers on lawns (kills soil microbes and beneficial nematodes). Lots of turkeys, rabbits and birds forage the ground.