> The most surprising thing to me was how small a percentage of the budget was under the control of the president of the university; it was only a tiny amount. Virtually all of the money was controlled by the source, not by the administration.
I consider that good news, actually, because it makes restricted donations meaningful.
I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless, because if I donated $x of restricted donations to cause A, the organization would simply take $x of unrestricted donations that it was planning to spend on cause A and instead spend them on other causes. All of my money technically went to cause A, but de facto it didn't.
I still assume that's the case for regular, non-university charities.
If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any.
On the other hand, if you trust that someone wants to do a good thing, they probably have more information about the topic than you do, so you should give them freedom to actually act on that information. Like, maybe you think "X is way more important than Y", but maybe the lack of Y is actually what prevents them from doing X efficiently, so your restriction to only use the money for X is not helpful, even from the X-maximizing perspective.
Like, sometimes your mission is to distribute food to starving kids in Africa, but you can't organize your volunteers until you buy a new computer, because the only one you had just broke. Then someone gives you a paycheck with big letters "only use to buy food, I don't want to see you wasting money on computers". Yeah, thanks a lot, dear condescending saint.
> If you expect that someone just wants to steal your money (and I am not saying such expectation is always wrong), perhaps you just shouldn't give them any.
This is indeed the approach I've been taking with some climate change charities: most of them have an "advocacy" component, and while I'd like to support effective emissions reduction projects, I'm not willing to contribute to the preaching for individual asceticism.
I have no issue giving to "some project + a proportionate share of central/overhead costs".
Unfortunately, it's often extremely hard to find a charity that is tax deductible where you live, part of employer matching programs, effective in running projects you want to support, and not performing activities you specifically don't want to support.
The word itself isn't the problem, and in general I don't have an issue donating to organizations that also tackle the problem on a political level.
With climate change specifically, if I can't reasonably rule out the risk that the org will spend the money to tell me that I can't have an air conditioner, meat, or travel (or worse, lobby my government to ban me from having these things), they're not getting any money.
I'm OK with taking some risk that the org will use money in a way that I consider non-optimal, but I draw the line where I see a risk that the money may be used directly against my own interests. "Don't feed the mouth that bites you", I guess.
Sometimes there is only one charity that covers a certain topic so if they also do other things you don't want to support the only choices are to make a restricted donation or to not donate at all.
I consider that good news, actually, because it makes restricted donations meaningful.
I always assumed that restricted donations were pointless, because if I donated $x of restricted donations to cause A, the organization would simply take $x of unrestricted donations that it was planning to spend on cause A and instead spend them on other causes. All of my money technically went to cause A, but de facto it didn't.
I still assume that's the case for regular, non-university charities.