I was planning to donate the couple bucks I had left over from the year to the charity called “San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance”, I was doing a background check on CharityNavigator and they gave the charity full ratings so it seemed good.
Then I stumbled upon the salary section. What the fuck? I earn <20k a year and was planning to contribute to someone’s million dollar salary? WHAT.
Is there a site which documents all charities and flags misuse of funds and such?
How do we know donations will go where expected?
Charity navigator is generally a good source.
If they rate highly there I’ll just search up the organization’s controversies and make sure nothing is currently going wrong.
At the end of the day there’s no guarantee regardless so just donate and feel good about it knowing you did your research.
Unpopular opinion: Charities should be morally allowed to compete for top talent on a financial basis.
Realistic opinion: It takes zero “talent” to sit on a board and collect money.
(Ofc this zio wacko supports extreme inequality. Probably thinks poors are all palestinian.)
Unpopular opinion: “top talent” is a meaningless capitalistic word to justify crazy wealth disparities
I say this as someone who went to one of the “highest ranked” unis in the world. Most of all this prestige and “top talent” stuff is bullshit designed to keep the rich rich.
It doesn’t seem like an unpopular opinion at all
Try interacting with offshore contractors who were hired to cut costs.
The board are fiduciaries. They have to do the math to prove hiring a more expensive CEO is ultimately better than not.
So why don’t you go work for a charity for 25k american a year? I’m sure you can do a much better job than overpaid C staff and pass all the rest of the money on to the actual cause, right? After all, you went to one of the best unis in the WHOLE world.
Plenty of non-american charities dont over pay people. You would expect people who work in charity to not be greedy. Greed is when you take more than you should because you think you deserve it.
If an exec can work two places and one pays an exorbitant amount but the other is a good cause, it would be altruistic to go to the good cause. If in the same situation the two places pay the same, I’m not sure it’s greed if you don’t give some back. The problem is that c suite folks in general are chronically overpaid. So the argument is that people who are very competent but don’t care about a cause should… take less money on principle I guess?
I mean sure I agree it seems ridiculous for charities to pay 8 figure salaries, but from a micro economics standpoint it doesn’t really make sense to walk away from an 8 figure salary to work for a charity either. Maybe it makes sense if you are already retired or it is your life passion, but that pool of people may be pretty small and maybe not hugely competitive.
Competent people who don’t care about the cause shouldnt take the job at all. People earning 8 figures shouldnt expect to make the same at a charity. Greed and altruism are values or qualities a person can possess and I dont think they can exist in the same person.
The United Health CEO thought he was altruistic, his family does as well. Its pretty clear the vast majority of people see greed there, not altruism.
Greedy people simply shouldnt be in charge of helping people.
I don’t think anyone is deluded enough to think for-profit insurance does anything altruistic. There is comparison at all between UHC and a charity.
In a purely ideological way I see and understand what you’re saying. In practice what I read from your message is “Charities should pay less and take who they can get”. Maybe there’s a competent altruist, and then maybe charities and nonprofits that don’t get competent staff at a “charity appropriate salary point” can just… dissolve or something? And they should do that whether they have the money to pay more or not, because charities paying more money is just flat distasteful.
Essentially you have it right, although I wouldnt say charities should dissolve as a rule. If there aren’t enough people to do the work with the right goal in mind though I dont think the answer is to pay more and get capitalists in the door.
I have a strong aversion to greed minded people in general though so I’m very biased here.
My wife works for a non-profit where the Executive Director (CEO if you will) cannot make more than 5x what the lowest paid person makes. Wish more non-profits would adopt something similar
Well we don’t know if the lowest paid employee makes $254,927 at this one
That’s the Janitor. He drives Bentleys off the pier into the Pacific Ocean every second saturday.
His name is Keith
I suggest donating to your local wild animal rescue/rehabber. They’re all volunteer based. They receive $0 public money. The public rarely sees the work they do. They’re doing physically and mentally taxing work purely for the love of animals.
They typically all have a donation page, and many have Amazon Wishlists where you can send them cleaning, maintenance, or medical supplies directly if you’re worried about the money going to something you might not intend.
Nothing will go to people. You won’t have to question if you’re really help an animal that may or may not exist in a country you’ll never see. They’re your neighborhood animals.
As the !superbowl@lemmy.world person here, I look specifically for a raptor rehabbers to donate to, and I share links to those rescues worldwide.
I can’t find my link to the world rescue database, but for a US based one, you can look here or just Google up “wild animal rescue near me” and you should get some options.
Wow, no wonder they don’t make a profit 🙃
Okay, so think about it like this:
Suppose your job is making wooden chairs. It’s takes you the exact same skills to make a wooden chair to sell for profit, as it does to make a wooden chair to donate to a chairless children’s charity, right? So why would you spend all your time and skills doing a job that’s eventually going to bankrupt you? While you might do a few chairs because you feel like it’s morally right, the bulk of your work is going to be selling chairs because that’s how you sustain yourself.
CEOs are in the same situation. A 500-person for-profit company takes the exact same skill set to run as a 500-person non-profit. So the reality is that non-profits need to either be competitive in pay with for-profits, or they have to be attractive in ways other than compensation so they can entice CEOs to work for them.
Now, none of that is to say that the scale of CEO compensation is appropriate, because it’s not. But that’s the calculus a non-profit has to make.
While not ideal, I would like to note that the charity has a revenue of 392 M$. Spending 1-2% on salaries of top exec is not that bad if it prevents them from misusing the funds. A lot of the time, the alternative to high salaries for people in power is those people giving in to corruption since the risk/benefit encourages it. Just look at politics for an example.
That being said, wtf is chief philanthropy officer?!
Spending 1-2% on salaries
These greedy cunts are probably 1% of the workforce though. How much is actually spent on salaries?
Stop defending them
Stop defending them
Idk anything about them, so it is not my intention to defend anyone. I am just pointing out that having bad execs (whether incompetent, careless or outright embezzlers) is far worse than paying 1-2%. As far as I know, no one has came up with a better reusable way to get good execs than paying them a lot. I have no idea if these execs in particular are good.
How much would you prefer they made? Do you think the world would be a better place if they shut down their charity businesses?
What you are describing is blackmail.
“Pay us exorbitant salaries or we’ll be forced to embezzle the funds”
I am not an exec, so no it is not. It is just statement of fact.
What is “it” in your comment?
What I am describing is not blackmail. It is the same as saying that leaving unguarded food next to starving people encourages theft of said food. That is not blackmail. I am saying anything beyond that. I am not commenting on morality of the situation or what the right thing to do is. Just pointing out a fact.
It amazes me that somehow all that makes sense in your brain. Interesting.
Sorry, do I need to handhold you through it? Are you unable to figure out what the definition of blackmail is? “If you don’t bring an umbrella, you will get wet since it is supposed to rain.” is not blackmail. Unless you are 10, I am very concerned that you can’t comprehend this.
I am very concerned that you can’t comprehend this.
What’s not comprehensible here is your argument. I’d suggest you consider how you might learn to be a better communicator.
Good bye.
Last time I checked prison was the real alternative.
For the little people.
Would be nice if that worked. If you embezzle the money smartly, e.g. giving lucrative contracts to friends consultancy firm, there is pretty much no way to prove it.
It’s also human nature for the kind of sociopath executive positions attract.
So we should just accept that and pay them off rather than putting in mechanisms to prevent that and hiring people who are motivated by something other than the payout?
It might seem like we have no choice but we do, collectively, hold the power of the purse here. And I think this post is a great example of that.
You are not necessarily paying of the same people. Even most honest/righteous people like to be paid well. So the charity willing to pay them get those and the charities that don’t pay well risk getting the kind of people who don’t mind embezzling.
Chief Philanthropy Officer probably heads their fundraising team. Aka sales
That’s exactly what they do. They also usually act as a liason between their mega donors to ensure the money is spent in the way it’s ear marked for. Mega donors usually donate conditionally, basically a type of private grant.
Thanks for the extra info.
That makes sense, thanks for the info.
Was put to me at a young age that non-profit only means they spend any revenue they get before it gets to the bottom line to show up as a gain or loss. Always good to sort out the shady from the legit.
that’s not just non profits. ever wonder how so many nominally “unprofitable” companies seem to stick around forever?
It’s not exactly the charities fault.
The real issue is that for profit companies can pay their CEOs this much, which means charities have to compete if they want a good CEO too.
In reality we should be cracking down on companies hoarding wealth towards to their CEOs at exorbitant rates, that way charities won’t have to pay a wage like this just to function and even hire a CEO.
They don’t have to do this. They’re choosing to. It’s not like these guys can just walk into the unemployment office and say “I’d like one CEO job please”. There’s more people interested in executive positions than there are positions available. Why is it only acceptable to use that knowledge to negotiate lower wages for lower ranking positions?
Fundamentally good CEOs expect a wage based on the market.
There’s tonnes of high paying positions so, no, non profits truly will struggle to find an actually good CEO if they dont offer a competitive wage.
It’s not their fault, it’s the lack of regulation on all the for-profits and the fact they can funnel so much money up to CEOs unchecked.
If for-profits had regulatory checks that made them do that less, then non-profits wouldn’t have to compete with nearly as insanely high wages.
IE if there was a law that CEOs couldn’t be paid more than 10x their lowest paid worker, this problem would be a lot less insane.
https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/sites/default/files/2024-07/2023-SDZWA-Annual-Report.pdf
Total revenue per year is 420 million.
Concessions and cleaning staff typically make 35k-40k. Zookeepers ~50k.
These 5 employees. Amount to .8% of the yearly operating budget, while the sum of all other employees totals up to 10% of the 400 million dollar operating budget.
I’m not making any judgements, just offering the numbers.
They pay cooks less than $20/hour in a city with an average rent of $3000/month. I’ve got no problem passing judgement.
They pay cooks less than $20/hour
So their cooks get paid less than ‘cooks’ at McDonald’s? Fast food minimum wage is $20/hour throughout California.
Why did you put “cooks” in quotes? Do you think fry cooks aren’t cooks? Churning out food in a hot kitchen is work, regardless of what you think of the end product
While most work is hard, and I dunno how bespoke this gig is, there’s a massive difference between a generic fry “cook” and a restaurant line cook/chef.
Most fry cooks, like a Macdonald’s, are a finely tuned production line where most of the food is pre-prepped and premade (most of the “cooking” is done in a factory). The “cooks” in those roles usually just assemble the pre made components, and in the case of fast food, have finely tunes tools to serve their generic menu.
A restaurant cook/chef requires significantly more attention to detail, skill, flexibility, and knowledge because most of the food is made from scratch, using raw ingredients, which is why there are culinary schools. Real restaurants can’t succeed with a kitchen full of deep fryers and teenagers pushing buttons. Naturally, the expectation is that they should be paid more because it requires more skill, knowledge, effort, and dedication.
Management and marketing bloat is extremely common for nonprofits, unfortunately. Especially large ones.
Ones that don’t do that exist too, but it’s a thing you have to be wary of.
It’s a classic moral hazard of private non-profits. You generate income from press and marketing, so you have an incentive to invest more in those parts of your business. The Zoo Wildlife Alliance doesn’t get any money from the wildlife.
But now you’ve got a marketing team that wants to grow, in order to generate more revenue. So they need more revenue themselves. But it’s “justified” because they can claim credit for every dollar brought in. The bigger the marketing staff gets, the more sway they have within the organization as a whole. So it prioritizes growth for the sake of growth, rather than asking where the money is going.
And all along, the fundraising leadership is justifying higher and higher compensation as a percentage of groups revenue.
Eventually, you’re just a millionaire pan handler, asking money so you can ask for money. That’s a totally organic consequence of unregulated industry.
Yup.
And honestly direct regulation is hard here. Those are the two expenses that grow out of control, because it’s really hard to measure how much marketing or managing you need exactly. No empirical proof of overspending means no legal case against the directors.
Ideally, they’d have to provide something like the MER (management expense ratio) you see on investment funds. Charity kind of is like an investment on the behalf of the greater good, if you think about it.
It would be nice if organisations were run by people who were so dedicated to the job that they’d do it for free or at least on a survival wage, but it is difficult to find someone with both the right qualifications and the willingness to do it cheaply.
The figures aren’t outrageous for those positions and as a non-profit they do have a board who made the decision to pay those amounts.
It’s not like a private company where the owner/CEO can just grab the money. The board members voted to hire someone and offered those amounts.
If you want to change this kind of thing, you need to attend the annual meeting in which the board is elected. I’ve been elected to a few board positions in non-profit organisations and let me tell you: It’s really easy to get on a board. Most places have difficulties filling the positions or you can easily outcompete other candidates simply by wanting to be there. It’s boring as fuck, but important stuff sometimes happens and it’s a good experience to have.
So if you want to actually contribute to that non-profit, you might want to save your few dollars and instead give them some of your time to help them in the right direction. Assuming you’re dedicated to the cause in the first place that is. If you have something to say, you will be heard, because quite frankly, half the board members only come for the free food.
As someone who has worked at a non profit and works at a low profit company now, the idea that because it’s work we’re passionate about that we should do it for pennies is so toxic, and how teachers, nurses, childcare workers, etc are abused by society. We’re actively out here trying to fix the problems caused by capitalism and the top 10% who are fucking over the world, and we deserve to be fairly compensated, not do it for free because we’re so passionate. I’m not saying OP’s example is right either, but charity workers shouldn’t need to rely on charity to survive, or be so wealthy they didn’t need to get paid.
This completely misrepresents the issue. It is not about working for free. A salary of a million bucks is just insane, regardless of context, be it for a non-profit, a private company or a presidential office. There’s no point of donating money to a cause if it only ends up in the pockets of a CEO who already has way too much of it.
The comment I was responding to said it would be nice if the people running the organizations would do it for free or survival wages. I agree the salaries in OP’s example are extreme, but what I see more often in my industry is burnt out people doing work for survival wages because they’re passionate, while everyone else makes a ton of money.
Here’s the thing: I don’t know about this charity in particular. But in general, a big charity is just as complicated a business as a big for profit company.
The task of managing it isn’t any easier. So the people who have experience in managing big businesses can get that kind of money elsewhere, too.
In our system, the charity is pretty much forced to pay competitive CEO salaries if they want experienced people at the helm.
If they paid much less, they wouldn’t get anyone to do the job who’s actually competent.This is a good reminder that you can look up Form 990 for any nonprofit (they are required to submit one), which includes any staff that make over $100k.
Also, it looks like the “salaries” you found are total compensation, which also includes medical and retirement benefits. The CEO’s salary is around $600k, but also got a $300k+ bonus.
for me its more like whats the lowest paid worker. Nowadays you are going to have trouble under six figures in any major city and the ceo is not much over 10x that. Now I doubt the lowest paid worker makes that but it would be great if they did.
