Help us choose a charity!

December 21, 2009 12:07 PM

Anyone have any information about how good World Education is as a charity? What about Ashoka?

We have gotten a small charity gift card for Xmas. Since we don't have an established charity to give to, this means that, in effect, we have been given a charity-organization research project. Truly the gift that keeps on giving.

We have narrowed our choices down to two: World Education and Ashoka.

Before we choose, does anyone have information about either of these organizations that might influence our decision one way or another? Personal stories are great. Biases and opinions are welcome. We'll even consider hard data, too, if you don't think that will be too much of a bummer.

Thanks for any help you can give us.

posted by springo to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

I had a recurring donation to World Education set up for a while because I saw on a charity rating site that they were reputable and I like the idea of giving to an education-based charity that does not spend much money on advertising, telemarketing or their own CEO. Their newsletters and anecdotes are almost exclusively based around helping girls and women in 3rd world countries, though I don't know if that's in their actual mission statement.

I think the rating site I looked at (a few years ago) was charity navigator or something similar, but from looking now world education only has a two-star rating (http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=4758). I'm curious to hear if anyone has first-hand knowledge too.
posted by Post-it Goat at 12:34 PM on December 21, 2009

Ashoka is a tremendous organization--well worth your donation. We have a close friend that ran their Brazilian favela education initiative throughout the 1990s and who is now a senior staffer with the organization. It's the kind of group that inspires real loyalty, which is a rare thing in development non-profits today.
posted by yellowcandy at 2:42 PM on December 21, 2009

I have no specific knowledge of either, but here are the Charity Navigator pages for World Education and Ashoka.
posted by davcoo at 3:47 PM on December 21, 2009

Charity Navigator assigns its ratings on a mix of the ratio of program expenses to admin expenses and the operating capital of the charity (how many months they can continue to run, if they did not receive any donations). In this economy, most charity ratings are suffering on the latter count. It looks like World Education are good but not great on the first part of the rating (ratio of program expenditure to admin expenditure). They are really suffering on the second (operating capital). But so is my local food bank and I don't stop giving to them just because they are struggling for donations ... Their rating without this factor would be three stars.
Ashoka gets 4 stars from Charity Navigator, so they are doing OK.
posted by Susurration at 3:47 PM on December 21, 2009