Last-minute giving that really counts

  • Nasty weather we’re hav­ing — again. That’s okay. The fore­casts tell us this dump of sleety snow is just a pass­ing fancy. Enough to keep us house-bound for the day, but then thank good­ness, I had wound up all the gift-giving errands that would’ve taken me out of the house. The last out-going pack­ages are gone, and the last incom­ing pack­ages have come.

    Which is always a relief, since there’s always that dan­ger that some­one that you decided to skip this year would send you some­thing that arrived Decem­ber 22 — too late for you to even wrap up an old wed­ding present you never opened and send it, let alone actu­ally go out to a store and get some­thing. It’s the big game of Christ­mas tag. The best you can do is resolve next year to buy them some­thing sen­sa­tional and time it to arrive one hour before the stores close.

    But then, just in case there is any­one out there in this fix, there is an alter­na­tive, and it’s actu­ally a (capital-g) Good thing to do. You still have time to get a gift cer­tifi­cate from Kiva, and if you did, you could e-mail the gift cer­tifi­cate or print it off, fold it and put it in an enve­lope under the tree, so you’d be set. And you’d also know that your last-minute gift-giving could actu­ally change someone’s life some­where in the world.

    Back here, I wrote a lit­tle about Kiva and said I’d look into it and report back. For those who don’t feel like click­ing on links, I’ll just remind you that Kiva is a non-profit that takes your dona­tion of $25 and allows you to put it towards micro-finance any­where in the world. Your $25 (or your friend’s or relative’s, if you give it as a gift) might go towards a total loan of $900 or $1200 that allows a man in Pak­istan to buy a dairy or lets a woman in Mozam­bique start up a flower shop. The lendees have up to a year to pay back the loan, and 95% of them do. When they do, you can re-invest the money, or cash out.

    So I’ve been try­ing it out for a cou­ple months, just to see how it would go. The bot­tom line is that it works, and that’s enough for me to pass it on as a Dec. 22 tip.

    Here’s more info for those who are interested:

    .
    Good things:

    • Warm glow — Of course the biggest plus is that it’s just a nice thing to do with $25. There isn’t any­thing I can think of that makes such a big impact with the kind of expense that all of us can spare.
    • No skim­ming — Most char­i­ties take some off the top for admin­is­tra­tive costs. The only way Kiva gets any money is if you decide to give them a per­cent­age when you invest, or if you donate to them sep­a­rately. Kiva is still a fairly new and fairly small oper­a­tion, so chances are you won’t be read­ing about any of the kind of scan­dals that have tarred the Red Cross and other big char­ity organizations.
    • Well done! – The Web-site is very well-managed, and the entire process has been com­pletely worked out. The home-page offers a dozen or so loans you can con­tribute to, along with a pic­ture and a short descrip­tion. You can click on a link for more info, or find more loans. If you want to con­tribute, you can pay by credit card or Pay­Pal. Once all the money is gath­ered up, the loan is made, and you’re e-mailed progress about repay­ment. You can also log on any­time to check on things, look up sto­ries or get news.

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    Bad things:

    • Pol­i­tics? – Over­all, I’ve got much more pos­i­tives to give Kiva than neg­a­tives. But I will men­tion that there is some­thing that turns me off a lit­tle bit, and that is that they’ve made a big deal out of hav­ing Bill Clin­ton endorse them. Now, I know I might sound like a jerk for even men­tion­ing that. But the prob­lem isn’t that Clin­ton is such a bul­wark of Left­i­ness, though of course he is. The prob­lem is that by hav­ing a video of him on the home-page, Kiva has politi­cized the giv­ing, which I think they could’ve avoided. I would’ve felt the same if they had a video from Jeb Bush or one of Mitt Romney’s sons on the site. And I would’ve had just as much trou­ble imag­in­ing that the con­nec­tion was acci­den­tal, espe­cially this close to an elec­tion year.
    • Who’s watch­ing? — The other neg­a­tive is inher­ent in any big char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion, and that is the issue of checks, bal­ances and con­trols. As I said, Kiva is new enough and small enough that things aren’t likely to have any embez­zle­ment scan­dals yet. But there’s just some­thing about all the money at stake that tends to mean that things will go awry unless there are peo­ple on the front­lines who answer to a higher power and can com­mu­ni­cate hon­esty and self-restraint in the cul­ture where they serve. A per­son can never know for cer­tain that that’s the case, unless they’ve got agents they’re send­ing out to check on things. But per­son­ally, lack­ing the abil­ity to fund a staff of inves­ti­ga­tors, I have to go with what I trust, which is the Ortho­dox Church.

    So my next lit­tle foray into donat­ing and report­ing back will likely be with Inter­na­tional Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian Char­i­ties (IOCC), which you can find HERE. I won’t stop giv­ing to Kiva, because they seem like they’re doing a lot of good in the world. But I want to sup­ple­ment those dona­tions with some explo­rations into IOCC.

    But that’s a project for 2008. In the mean­time, there’s last-minute Christ­mas giv­ing. And for that, it’s hard to beat some­thing that really will con­tinue to give for months to come. And it gives to both the one who lends and the one who receives. Clever folks, these Kiva dudes and dudettes.


    Related posts:

    1. Doing good worldwide
    2. Not giv­ing the poor our junk
    3. A wor­thy cause
    4. Giv­ing the nanny state a new uniform
    5. Just another failed church

    December 22nd, 2007 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 12.22.2007

    I really like IOCC, I donate to them quite regularly.

    Have a won­der­ful Nativity!

  • Grace

    Thank you. You and your good fam­ily do the same!

  • Word­mama

    What an extremely cool idea — very excit­ing! Who­ever came up with this should rank along­side the inven­tor of the paper clip for sheer sim­plic­ity of form and func­tion. Sure hope it works for them, by which I mean I hope it helps peo­ple with­out get­ting so big and pop­u­lar that it (a) tempts the greedy and (b) blows up in their faces.

    Re: the left­i­ness of it, I noticed some­thing odd: if you watch that Clin­ton clip to the end, it becomes obvi­ous that the inter­view is tak­ing place on a Fox News show of some kind. That makes it look as if they’re mak­ing a def­i­nite state­ment about their non­par­ti­san status.

  • Grace

    Good idea: I agree. It’s such a good idea that I’m amazed no one thought of it before.

    Left/right: I should’ve actu­ally watched the video prob­a­bly. I’ve noticed that in their media endorse­ments they’ve got both sides (i.e. “Daily Kos” and “Wall St. Jour­nal” — and I don’t think there’s another thing on the planet that they’d agree on).

    And really, I start to feel like I’m being touchy to jump to any con­clu­sions. I think that what I’m prob­a­bly feel­ing is the sad aware­ness that with things like this, you want to be care­ful about think­ing that noth­ing can go wrong. Human fal­l­en­ness and all that.

    But as for what way things would go wrong, I prob­a­bly shouldn’t read too much into things, since I don’t really know.

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