How can crowdsourcing help people in need, or help further a good cause?

Crowdsourcing is a buzzword in industry right now, and large groups of people are earning money online doing everything from verifying business listings to designing logos.  There’s plenty of debate about whether crowdsourcing is fair to workers, and how to make these platforms most effective and fair.  But crowdsourcing be also be used in a number of not-for-profit situations.  The projects below are examples of several innovative ways that people are reaching out to help others via crowdsourcing technologies–and ways that you can, too.

» Continue reading “crowdsourcing for a cause”

Lots of my friends are “locavores” — people who try to buy their food from somewhere nearby, rather than importing it from far away.  One reason they cite is environmental friendliness — transporting food takes energy, which mean releasing greenhouse gasses.  Eating local is one way to reduce your carbon footprint.

A recent analysis, however, summarized by Andrew Winston of the Harvard Business Review, points out that far more energy goes into growing food for the average U.S. household than transporting it:

• 83% of the average U.S. household’s carbon footprint for food comes from growing and producing it. Transportation is only 11%.
• Different foods have vastly different greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity, with meat requiring far more energy to produce, and red meat being particularly egregious, requiring 150% more energy than even chicken.

So the journal article adds this up to an obvious conclusion: if you want to reduce your food’s carbon footprint, eat less meat. In short, “Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.”

Also of note: lamb is far worse for the environment than beef, which is far worse than other common meat products.  The same graph compares the energy used to produce a number of foods.

Of course, there’s no reason not to do both things to help the environment — buy more produce from local sources and eat less meat and dairy.  But if you find yourself weighing the costs and benefits in order to decide when and whether to buy local or eat red meat in a given case, keep in mind the relative contributions to your carbon footprint.

There are many problems with landfills — even the biodegradable trash that ends up there produces a harmful greenhouse gas, methane, as it breaks down.  Fortunately, many cities now have recycling programs and even composting programs to help reduce landfill waste.  But household composting is still far from ubiquitous.  In the absence of having a compost bin, is it better to put food waste down the garbage disposal or in the trash?

Putting food down the garbage disposal keeps it out of the landfill, but putting it into the water treatment system is not necessarily a good thing.  Grease and fats cause lots of problems, including burst pipes and sewage leaks.  Non-greasy food waste particles can also end up in freshwater and harm aquatic life.  Water treatment to remove food waste requires chemicals, and the process releases methane (rather than the CO2 that would be released during composting).  However, some water treatment plants make use of the methane and/or solid waste for green purposes.  So the best answer depends on your local circumstances.  However, there are a few consistent rules to follow:

The research is unambiguous about one point, though: Under normal circumstances, you should always compost if you can. Otherwise, go ahead and use your garbage disposal if the following conditions are met: First, make sure that your community isn’t running low on water. (To check your local status, click here.) Don’t put anything that is greasy or fatty in the disposal. And find out whether your local water-treatment plant captures methane to produce energy. If it doesn’t—and your local landfill does—you may be better off tossing those mashed potatoes in the trash.

If you live in Cambridge, MA, someone has already done your legwork for you, and explains how to do this research in your own region:

The MWRA [Massachusetts Water Resource Authority] focuses on green methods. The methane is used and the solid waste is used. The water is treated, de-chlorinated and diffused into the water system. The only things that go to the landfill are large non-organic items that weren’t supposed to make it into the water system….

Here’s the final count [for Cambridge, MA]:
Best option: Compost
Next best: Sink disposal
Not-so-good: Trash/Landfill

Also, if your city doesn’t offer compost, but does give you yard waste bins, you can give them a call to find out if they’ll accept fruit and vegetable waste as well.

[Note: I started this post a number of months ago; some details might now be out of date.]

In a past post, I discussed sites that evaluate charities based primarily on financial metrics.  Before leaving that topic entirely, I wanted to to also point out that Guidestar has a bunch of information about charities, their structures, and their finances.  You can access the tax records from the past several years for many charities.  They help you verify an organization’s nonprofit status and do other research into organizations.  The site seems to be mostly aimed at people working in the nonprofit sector, large philanthropic organizations, businesses, and academic researchers.  It’s kind of clunky and ugly and harder to use than some tools, sometimes some data is sparse or missing, and they charge money for some services.  But if you want access to a lot more information directly from the company about their structure and finances, I’d check here first.  This may also be useful in using The Charity Rater, described below.

Moving on to other ways to evaluate charities aside from financial metrics, in the rest of this post I will be exploring GiveWell (based on empirical evaluation of results!), GreatNonprofits (kind of like Yelp), Philanthropedia (expert-based),  and The Charity Rater.  If you know of other charity evaluating organizations or metrics that I haven’t discussed in either post, let me know, and I’ll cover it in a follow up.

» Continue reading “evaluating charities, part II”

Giving directly to individuals or to communities removes a lot of bureaucratic overhead.  But sometimes NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have expertise and resources that are necessary — or at least helpful in order to spend money well.  NPR’s Planet Money podcast recently looked at two cases of direct donations in Haiti. In one case direct donations to a community cause (school improvement) ended disastrously, but in another case (donations to a savvy wholesaler who’d been supporting her family for years before the earthquake), it seems as if an organization would have only gotten in the way of a mostly very good thing. In both cases, the results were complex and interesting.

Here’s the most recent report on all these cases: What your $3000 bought in Haiti.  This podcast summarizes and refers back to these earlier ones:

How foreign aid is hurting Haitian farmers: the initial description of the community that needed school improvement, prior to donations

Small business, big debts in Haiti: the initial description of Yvrose Jean Baptiste, wholesaler of chicken necks and other parts

For $3860, a new life: the follow up to the Yvrose story, post-donations

I’ve been wanting to post for a while about the different sites out there that evaluate charities and help donors decide how to best spend their money.  I’ve finally done the research, and I think I’m actually going to split this into at least two posts — possibly a longer series.  In Part I, I’m going to discuss three of the oldest and best known charity evaluators, all of which grade organizations in large part according to financial metrics.  I’m also going to discuss the controversy over using such metrics, and the pros and cons of these sites.  In Part II, I’m going to discuss some newer sites that are finding other ways to evaluate nonprofits.

I’m going to start by talking up front about the controversy involved with using financial metrics, because it’s interesting and it’s a good thing to keep in mind when reading about the sties below.  All of the evaluators I’m about to discuss measure, among other things, the amount of an organization’s income that goes toward administrative overhead.  The idea is that organizations should be efficient, and should be spending their money on the cause rather than large salaries, unnecessarily expensive resources, and general bloat.  While this idea seems reasonable up front, it has a number of critics.

» Continue reading “Evaluating charities, part I”

Randy Paynter, founder of thePetitionSite and Care2, has an interesting blog post about the effectiveness of online petitions.  It’s worth reading before reading my response.  I think a lot of Paynter’s arguments make intuitive sense, and I’d like them to be true.  There’s unfortunately scant evidence to support much of what he says, which is a common problem when trying to understand and quantify causal relationships.

When I posted about the topic previously, I mentioned the Snopes article on online petitions, which claims they are a waste of time.  I also noted that Snopes didn’t cite any evidence.  Paynter strongly disagrees with Snopes’ assessment, and he tries to provide evidence to the contrary.  Paynter says online petitions often do make things happen, and he provides many examples.  However, in almost all cases, he doesn’t provide any evidence that the petition caused the actions/changes described (exception: a military officer got to keep a stray Iraqi dog that she’d adopted, instead of the military destroying it as originally planned.  the petition is cited as a cause).  I think it would be hard in many cases to quantify the effect of a petition, but it would be nice if the articles he linked to actually included some mention of public officials (or other targets of petitions) feeling pressure to act in certain ways because of the petitions.  The one thing he does say along those lines is that North Korea tried to shut down thePetitionSite when a petition hosted on the site asked for the release two U.S. journalists imprisoned in North Korea last year.  That sounds like at least the petition was getting noticed.  But I doubt (though I may be wrong) that the petition was a decisive factor in getting the journalists released.  Still, I am not unwilling to believe that online petitions have made a big difference in a number of issues, by attracting media attention and/or making a segment of public opinion known.  But I’m still hoping to actually see some direct evidence.

Paynter also says that people who sign a petition associated with a non-profit are more likely to later donate money to that non-profit.  He links to a paper that provides evidence supporting this claim as part of research on donations to non-profits (see Table 7). Note that this study groups together people who take any online action — letter writing being the example they give — and does not specifically examine online petitions, but the key difference they’re showing is between people who get involved in any way and those who don’t.  One problem with this statistic is that it assumes a causal link from a correlation — maybe the group of people that is more likely to eventually get around to donating is also more likely to sign a petition — but the petition plays no causal role in the donation.  However, it is at least plausible that people who take a step like signing a petition then feel more engaged and are subsequently — as a result of that feeling — more likely to donate.

Paynter also makes the following statements:

The reason we have such apathy in society today is because most people believe it’s too difficult to have an impact and/or they don’t believe they personally can make a difference. Because online activism makes it easy to get involved, millions more people than ever before are speaking up and taking action. And that’s a good thing. Ask any hardcore activist you know – their first action probably wasn’t storming the White House. Usually, activists start with simple steps, get some positive feedback, and then take it to a higher level. If we want a more engaged democracy we need to make it easy for as many people as possible to feel the joy of those first simple steps. Internet petitions are effectively a “gateway drug” to more civic engagement.

I could easily imagine this being the case.  But are internet petitions more often a gateway drug to further involvement — or do they more often make people feel like they’ve already done something about the issue in question, and thereby stop people from taking other, more effective actions?  I just don’t have the data to tell (and if Paynter does, he didn’t provide it).

I suspect Paynter is right to at least some degree about most of his claims.  I’m sure that, for some people, signing petitions is a first step toward doing more.  I think I ended up on several mailing lists for organizations by initially signing petitions they had organized, and through the subsequent emails, I found other ways to be involved.  I also think that petitions probably can help cause change in certain situations.  And, while I’d love data helping to define and quantify the role of petitions across different kinds of situations, at least we can say that it’s a minimal effort activity that won’t do any harm in and of itself, and may get people thinking about issues and how to help make the changes they want to see.

Yesterday I attended TEDxBerkeley.  You may have seen TED talks online before, taken from the main TED event which used to be hosted in Monterey and is now in Long Beach (if not, I recommend browsing through them — there’s a lot of fascinating stuff there).  In the past couple years, TED, dedicated to “Ideas worth spreading,” has itself been spreading to a bunch of regional events that are locally organized.  The UC Berkeley event was subtitled “Doing the unprecedented,” and vetted its applicants for those interested in changing the world.  I went eager to hear talks on how others were changing the world, and hoping for some tips on how to do so effectively.

There were a number of interesting talks at the event, but a few stood out in particular from an effectivist viewpoint.  People spoke on everything from compassion, making progress toward ending conflicts, changing policy at the city level in order to save large numbers of lives, radically altering how the medical system works from the outside, and — perhaps best of all — effective philanthropy.

» Continue reading “TEDxBerkeley”

[Hooray!  I have a working laptop again, and most of my data from my previous laptop has been restored.  That means that this week I can finally publish a post that I started writing back when effectivism only existed as the idea of a blog. :) ]

I try not to waste too much water.  In the past two living arrangements I had, my roommates and I didn’t flush the toilet after we peed, so as to save water.  I also turn off the water while brushing my teeth and as much as possible when washing dishes by hand.  At the same time, I love to take longer showers than I need, and I can’t bring myself to turn off the water while soaping — the “sailor shower” that some of my friends advocate.  At some point, I started wondering how all this balances out.  How much water does it save to flush the toilet relatively infrequently?  Just how guilty should I be feeling about standing under the shower a minute or two longer than I really need?  Are there other relatively easy ways to save water that I’m not thinking of?  I decided to do some poking around.

» Continue reading “residential water use and water footprints”

[Note: this post has a lower ratio of fact to “I think”/”someone on the internet thinks” than I would like.  Even more than usual, I’d love to know about more facts/research on this topic, if you can point me at any.]

I recently started working part time at UC Berkeley, where I often walk through Sproul Plaza.  Everyone at UC Berkeley talks about the protest culture of the school, and the protesters and protest organizers frequently gather in Sproul.  The other day, I got into a conversation there with an undergrad manning a table that said something like, “You’re radical and I like you!”

Me: What are you promoting?

Him: on March 4th we’re taking part in a march to protest the state of education in California.  We’re trying to get everyone to participate — get everyone at Berkeley to march off campus and into the downtown, but also everyone from the surrounding K-12 schools.

Me: What are you hoping to achieve with this protest march?

Him: Well, we have a lot of complaints… [he elaborates and hands me a pamphlet]

Me: Okay, but how do you hope the march will help address these issues?

Him: Well, there will be a lot of organizations involved.  People will get to see that they’re not alone in caring about this. It’s good to not be alone.

Me: So the march is an end in and of itself — a place to vent frustrations?

Him: Well, no.  We hope to change things.

Me: How?

This went on for a while before I took pity on him and left him alone.  I don’t think he was unusual in not knowing why exactly he was marching — but it got at an issue that I’ve been wondering about for a while, and have only been thinking about more now that I’m in Berkeley.  When and how do protest marches actually work?  It’s clear that they sometimes do have a large impact on society — Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington, the anti-Vietnam war protests, Gandhi’s march to the sea, and recent effective protests in places like Pakistan, Thailand, and arguably Iran (where the Green movement seems to be bringing about potential long-term social changes, even if the protested election results still stand) provide examples of how protest marches can aid social change.  Why haven’t we seen marches with comparable success in the U.S. recently?

» Continue reading “why are U.S. protest marches less effective than they used to be?”