Don't Donate All Your Eggs to One Basket

from Huffington Post:

How Much Is Too Much?

"As of noon on Friday, September 2, The American Red Cross was reporting it had already raised $73 million in private funds for Hurricane Katrina victims. At the same time, the authoritative journal, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, which monitors nonprofit fund raising, stated that $108 million had been raised by all private charities willing to report.

That means about 70% of the public's compassion has flowed to The Red Cross. . . . .

This skewed giving to Red Cross would be fine if the Red Cross were paying for the cost of the 80,000 people they are expertly sheltering in 240 designated shelter sites; but FEMA and the 4 affected state governments (including Texas which will shelter up to 75,000 people) are reimbursing the Red Cross under pre-existing contracts for emergency shelter and other related services."

--Richard Walden

Hundreds of small nonprofits will be doing much of the work of sheltering, feeding, clothing, and providing legal, psychological and job counseling to the evacuees. In the rush to provide aid, donors have ignored the organizations which can least afford to be ignored right now, those that don't have the advertising dollars and the name recognition of the Red Cross. These organizations, including some in Boerne already, are providing aid right now, and they need money right now--and because they'll be providing aid months from now, after the Red Cross' part is over, they'll need a steady stream of money well into next year. Their own coffers, already meagre in the economic depression that hit the nonprofit sector in y2000, will have to be spent on meeting huge, huge needs that they could not have possibly prepared for.

Will donors, having given so much to one big organization, assume they've done enough? Will the Red Cross share any of that $73 million with the hundreds of mom-and-pop nonprofits that are caring for the evacuees? Or will the public, after the last benefit concert has been broadcast, move on to the next runaway bride story?