I have loathed the expression "ethnic cleansing" ever since it was introduced; it seemed to me to be a phrase intended to mislead about what is actually happening. It could mean escorting the "wrong" people across the border.
"Cleansing" sounds so much less harsh than "genocide," doesn't it?
Thus I was taken by surprise when I stumbled over it in your piece today -- you who mince no words -- and then saw that you had also used "genocide" twice. Do you draw any distinction between the two, or do you mean the same by each?
I sometimes think writers use both interchangeably for variety. But "ethnic cleansing" conveys very little of the horror. I learned about the Holocaust at about the age of 11, coming upon "The Life Picture History of World War II" in a rectory in Wisconsin in the early '60s. The photographs were merciless -- stacks of naked bodies, rows of the starving. Fifty years later, the generations coming up behind us have very little knowledge of the death camps, which is not their fault. Referring to the more recent murders of hundreds of thousands as "cleansing" does not help. We must each face the existence of evil in order to be vigilant against it.
But of course, you know that.
My daughter is the head of a USAID funded contract team in Haiti that focuses on monitoring and evaluation. She has been there for almost 2 years and previously was in Haiti for 2 year after the earthquake. She highly recommends the Center for Art in Haiti. (https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/center-for-the-arts-port-au-prince), an NGO seeking to empower young women.
I also suggest you fund activities which are testing out and scaling up the idea of cash grants. Recent tests of this idea are very promising.
LOVE the attention you bring to issues affecting the most vulnerable. THANK YOU!!!! Please take a peek at www.OneVillagePartners.org
Love that you have an opportunity to support great causes in such a significant way! Why not help kids everywhere? Once a kid gets a smart phone (at an average age of 10), he or she has 24/7 access to free hypersexualized media and porn. In the absence of comprehensive sex ed, kids take their cues from porn. Check out Culture Reframed, a nonprofit that offers a free program to parents and educators everywhere that teaches us how to raise porn-resilient kids! https://www.culturereframed.org/
Charities are a fantastic way to help the macro picture and promote social welfare. But on the macro $100,000 won’t do much. How about helping a handful of deserving families who are struggling dearly . immigrants on the Mexican border who die not have the basics $100,000 is a lot of Mexican pesos and would go a long way to help those people waiting for their case to be heard or maybe give it to the pro bono lawyer or shelters to help the immigrant community
Hi Nicholas! If you're interested in funding any global education efforts, I'd highly recommend checking out Betterworlded.org ( Better World Education ). They're a fantastic initiative that helps teachers weave together academic topics and global challenges through engaging videos and written content. Imagine 4th grade fractions in the context of food waste... 6th grade division homework in the context of water scarcity...
Fun fact: you wrote an article in 2008 entitled "Odd Couple of the Jungle" about Douglas McMeekin, a failed businessman in Kentucky, and Juan Kunchikuy, a hunter from the Amazin rainforest, and their partnership to create "Yachana", an eco-lodge and school in Ecuador's rainforest.
Well, there's an "Empathy Challenge" story in Better World Ed's toolkit about a student from Yachana! Teachers play a 2-3 minute video of his life in the Amazon and then use his story as a framework to help students understand their math concepts in real life.
$100,000 ( or any amount ) could go to the creation of hundreds of more stories + enabling this beautiful org to continue their important work.
Keep up your incredible work! ( and kudos to the reader who gave you this wonderful "problem" to find an answer to )
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Donate to an organization that plants trees. Trees will outlive us puny, selfish humans, and clean the air and cool the atmosphere while they’re doing it. Hold the water in the soil and the soil to the land. Provide homes and food for whatever wildlife we don’t manage to kill off. It is the longest lasting, unequivocal good most of us will ever do with our very own hands.
Two years ago my grandmother suddenly passed away because of bone cancer, she had been suffered for many years and it was always one of my biggest regrets that I should have paid more attention when she told us that she's in pain when walking.
Few months later I read your article about a better idea for Christmas gift, me and my family decided to donate for "Miracle Feet" which was mentioned. We did again this year and will do again next year for sure. It's so far the most meaningful thing I did for my grandmother. Thank you Mr. Kristof!:)
While this is a somewhat ambiguous suggestion, I would recommend that your choice be guided by critical priority: What people, or which organization might not be around next year without the help?
In my experience genuine prioritization is sorely lacking in what we do. Often the causes which receive the most attention are those which have the best resources, or talent with which to garner the most attention.
Whether it is digging a well, planting a field, treating a plague or helping people organize to escape ethnic cleansing or human trafficing, let your choice be guided by who might not be around to ask for help next year if you do not intervene now.
Nicholas, I decided on my 59th birthday this year to celebrate my 60th year of living by giving $60 every week for 60 weeks to 60 different organizations. I call it my 60 by 60 vision: a year of gratitude. Your columns and book writings have been part of the motivation and have helped me recognize how much I have compared to so many. My list has included charities such as Hurricane Dorian Relief, National Park Foundation, World Singing Day, a local dog shelter and others. I look forward to your column and list and hope you continue to report on the needs of others. I'm sure you'll do great things with the $100,000.
Agree with "Realist" that the most accurate predictor of social and personal success in our society is academic performance.
Sometimes kids can't perform because there is abuse in the home due to poverty, mental illness, substance abuse---any organization that helps prevent it would be critically important.
Read up on Montessori Schools. There are many Montessori schools in the low-income places of the world. These schools actually make a difference in the lives of people just by educating the youngest children in the best way possible.
Please plant trees, grasses, and flowers for wildlife and pollinators to save our wonderful Planet Earth.
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An organization I have given to and fully support is http://www.mooncatcher.org/. I know the founder and she works tirelessly to keep girls in school in Africa, India and other places by making reusable menstrual hygiene products. Too often young girls are shamed or shunned during their monthly cycle and stay home from school, eventually dropping out. This leads to early marriage and pregnancy. As education is the key to empowerment these girls need to stay in school.
Thank you for all you do.
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The most accurate predictor of social and personal success in our society is academic performance. The most accurate predictor of academic success is ZIP code. The most effective interventions for enhancing academic performance among children in poverty occur in early childhood. Use your funds to promote early childhood intervention.
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@Realist Thanks for your comment. As you know, I'm a long-time champion of early childhood interventions in the first 1,000 days after conception. That's also a theme of our forthcoming booki, "Tightrope," as it was of our last one.
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I can’t think of a better person to handle this gift and responsibility. You’ll do GREAT.
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I urge you to do the most good you can, by considering deeply the recommendations of GiveWell https://www.givewell.org/ and The Life You Can Save https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/ — I vehemently believe that will make the difference between only a decent and an incredible use of that money.
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Yes, indeed. I regularly consult Give Well and recommend others do so as well.
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I had to make a decision about a contribution. An obvious choice is a lump sum. A second is a lump sum with payments of smaller amounts from the corpus, as described in the article. This method dictates a finite life.
I chose a different route. A gift was made so that only the earnings, dividends and interest, would be paid out to recipients. The annual distributions are smaller (although not as small as you would imagine with a good investment plan). But more importantly, the distributions are forever. And forever is a long time.
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@Independent Thinking Thanks for your interesting comment. Obviously people should give in any way they want, but I'm actually skeptical of this kind of giving, and also of donor-advised funds. Both strike me as ways that money managers have sold their services to benefit from philanthropy. The argument for giving now is that the needs are probably greater in 2019 than they will be in 2039 (just as they are lower now than in 1999), and interventions are less cost-effective over time. It used to be that $50 could save a life with vaccinations or bed nets; now it's more like $500 or more on average. The number of kids dying before 5 has dropped by half, and so has the number of children out of school. So I generally recommend giving now rather than endowing for perpetuity (assuming that the recipient organization can handle the lump sum wisely).
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Be sure to look under the hood. I got involved with a local charity. I rallied my community, raised a ton of money for them from friends and neighbors whom I lobbied hard and eventually got on the board. After two years, I quit. The charity was so mismanaged and the resistance and ineptitude made it difficult to stay without feeling like an enabler. Nothing fraudulent....just incompetence.
So look under the hood.
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Yes, excellent suggestion. Small charities with charismatic leaders are often exciting and cost-effective, but also more likely to implode
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Not sure how to nominate a charity. I looked for an email? Sew Powerful is a very worthy charity. They work in Zambia in the poorest of the poorest slums, where there are many orphans of the aids epidemic. These children are taken care of by relatives who have very little. The girls don’t go to school if they have their period because of lack of hygiene supplies. So most of them don’t graduate. Girls with no education have many babies. Sew Powerful teaches the women how to sew and provide menstruation pads for the girls. Sewers all over the world make the purses for the pads so the girls can go to school. Sew Powerful also was able to purchase a farm so the kids at Needs Care school can have a lunch. Many go hungry daily. Please consider Sew Powerful dot .org.
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You have a good list, and I like the respect for education that it reflects. With the increasing polarization of wealth, more kids lack access to a better future that was once the promise of America. For many low income and first-generation kids, college is a distant, vague, and unattainable goal. Yet a college degree has a massively transformative impact on their future. I hope you consider organizations like 10,000 Degrees that help low income kids get into, stay, and graduate from college. 10,000 Degrees currently serves 14,000 kids in the Bay Area (100% low income, 89% from communities of color, 85% first generation attending college). They have an 80%+ college graduation rate versus 31% for their national peer group, and they graduate with 85% less debt. It’s a great return on investment for those seeking impact and scale for these kids, their communities, and a more equitable society.
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Well said and agree we need to help level the playing field for others.
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There will always be criticism, but people are free to select organizations of their choosing. You do have a. wider platform, but it constantly changes and I like the idea of smaller amounts instead of looking for $1MM contributions that radically changes an organization (adds administrators). That all being said, we have our own preferences, mine being animal welfare groups which are missing from your choices. They have individuals and groups with heroic missions also,
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"The choice of winner and runners-up is completely up to me"
With all due respect Mr. Kristof, that is a very bad idea.
At the very least I would suggest that you set up some sort of advisory committee or board and that this be a public board. So while I have full faith that you are capable of identifying "fabulous organizations" worthy of the prize, it will look a lot better if all of this is not a one person show (or a two person show, counting the donor).
As the comment before mine - Yiddishmama and her reply continuation, make reference to Jewish tradition, I will add one other perhaps less known Jewish tradition: the rabbis taught that money is collected by two people and handed out by three. Never just one.
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@Joshua Schwartz I always consult a large number of people, but the point is that we did not want to give donors a hand in the choice of winners. By donating money, a person should not gain influence over a NYT column.
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Thank you to the donors, and the author, who set good examples for us all.
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One of Judaism's great rabbis established that the very highest form, morally speaking, of giving charity is to do so anonymously in order to preserve interpersonal relations and the recipient(s) dignity, and to relieve the recipient of a sense of personal obligation to the individual donor (and perhaps to disabuse the giver of a sense of being "owed" since the best kind of giving is that which demands nothing in return).
While I think there may be times when knowing who the donor is/was might help preserve relationships and/or the recipient's dignity, I suspect that the donors, Cohen and Lewises, were aware of Jewish ideals regarding tzedakah (charitable giving) and, so, I appreciate your noting to us readers that they did not seek publicity by, or about, their generously; rather, it is your choice to name them in the cause of transparency -- which, these days or years, has been sorely lacking in certain "donor" circles, as has honorable humility among other, or even some of the same, "charitable" donors.
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