Supercharity 
 

People donate their time and money for different reasons, but not all of them are good reasons. Some people give to charity because a friend asks, and they don’t want to look bad. Some people give because the charity offers some benefit in return. Sometime people give out of guilt, to avoid self-reproach. Some people give because a charity has spent money to create a good image through impressive PR—whether or not the charity is effective.

To increase the good that people do through charity, we  created a new term: “supercharity.”  We define your supercharity as the charity or group of charities that best address the problems that you would most not want to personally suffer. For instance, if someone thought that political torture was the worst kind of suffering, then giving to organizations that effectively minimized political torture would be supercharity for them. But if another person thought that sexual molestation was the worst thing that they could imagine, then giving to organizations that minimized that problem would be supercharity for them. Your supercharity (or supercharities) depends on you and your values.

People don’t have to limit their supercharity to one issue or problem. There’s no need to try to figure out what the all-time worst of many awful forms of suffering is. By defining this new term, supercharity, we're encouraging people to donate more money and time to their supercharities, and less to other, less critical charities. When most people do this, you can expect the amount of suffering in the world to decrease.

You can imagine that if many people did this, some charities would shrink and some people at these charities would lose their jobs.  But at the same time, other charities would grow, and employ more people, perhaps some of the same people, but retrained.

Along with donating to your supercharities, you shouldn’t forget to support behind-the-scenes organizations that attack some of the problems behind the problems. For instance, no one dies directly from illiteracy. But certain kinds of educational programs empower people to avoid problems and situations that cause suffering and death. The same is true for certain strategic environmental, political and public health programs.

When picking charities that address the harshest forms of suffering, you must also pick the most efficient and well-run charities. It does no good to pick a charity that claims to address some hideous form of suffering, but wastes much or all of the money donated to it.  We recommend that you do more than study the charities’ financial information.  We think it’s important to talk to people at the charity to determine their attitude and work ethic.  Another good strategy is to ask several people in related charities whose work they respect.  For instance, you might ask medical missionaries from some religious organizations what charities they would recommend besides their own.

Should you make all your donations of time and money to supercharities? If you did, the arts, some community organizations (and probably many of your friendships!) would suffer. It will irritate people when you don’t give as much to their charities, but this can be an opportunity for you to educate them. If necessary, change your giving gradually. It may help you not to give in to pressure, if you realize that maintaining conventional giving patterns keeps the world as it is.—Do you want the world to change or not?

Personally, at least 75% of my giving of time and money is to supercharity and strategic causes like literacy and structural changes in politics. But it’s up to people to make their own decisions.

We created three other tools to help people optimize their giving:


Wise Giving of Time and Money    PDF format
Choices Regarding the Empowerment of Others
The Helping Inventory    PDF

“Act as if your child’s life was on the line, and not someone else’s — your Molly, your Jason, your Kizito, your Prajhi, your Ling. Act as if you can see their faces.” – Tim Cimino