Give a Little & Change the World

When author Wendy Smith looked at the charitable giving statistics related to the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, she was amazed to find that 45 percent of total giving from around the world came from "ordinary American citizens." Their contributions amounted to more than those from famous philanthropic foundations, from corporations, and even from the U.S. government. As someone who had spent more than 20 years in the nonprofit sector, she also realized how far those small donations could go towards supplying the neediest with simple, inexpensive things -- a water filter, a bicycle, a mosquito net -- and how dramatically they could change lives around the world, as well as the donors themselves.

In her book, Give a Little: How Your Small Donations Can Transform Our World (Hyperion), Smith provides more surprising statistics and offers help for those looking to select a worthy cause. She highlights 47 charities that are among the best at utilizing small, individual donations to a make a difference in people's lives in the U.S. and abroad -- organizations like Developments in Literacy, where $1.54 a week can educate a girl in Pakistan for a year, or the Greater Chicago Food Depository, where $50 is used to feed a child 800 meals. Smith not only reports on effective charities, she also provides anecdotes about those whose lives have been changed by these organizations.

BTW recently spoke to Smith about her nonprofit work and how to make the right choices when donating.

BTW: What led you to you to become involved in nonprofit work?

Wendy Smith: I wanted to help children from low-income households improve their prospects in life by their participation in high-quality early learning programs. So I took my first job working in a community-based nonprofit early childhood organization in 1988. There I learned that such work could change a child's life, her family's life, and the wellbeing of an entire community.

BTW: What prompted you to write about the effectiveness of making small donations as opposed to covering one area of need, for example, education or hunger?

W.S.: I became interested in the movement to end worldwide extreme poverty after reading Jeffrey Sachs' The End of Poverty. This coincided with my discovering innovative and effective programs using small donations to help end poverty in the U.S. and in developing countries. I wanted to introduce these often little-known programs to everyday donors. I grouped the programs into four broad areas linked to extreme poverty: hunger, health, education, and access to tools/technology/infrastructure.

BTW: With such an overwhelming amount of global need, and new desperate cases developing all the time, such as the current situation in Haiti, how does someone determine which charities to support?

W.S.: The scope of individual challenges such as the spread of HIV/AIDS is enormous and the number of social challenges is great, so choosing what cause to address, let alone which program working on that cause, can be daunting and even paralyzing to donors. My first suggestion is for every donor to consider what cause inspires him or her. They're all important, and you aren't and can't be responsible for every one, so choose the one that sparks you or touches your life or someone you know.

You cannot make a wrong decision when making a donation to a nonprofit! It is easy to vet many nonprofits for fiscal responsibility by their inclusion in my book or on one of several online watchdogs, including Charity Navigator, Guidestar, and the Better Business Bureau. When there is a sudden urgent need for help, donors should know that whatever additional contribution they can make will make an important difference to those in need.

BTW: In Give a Little, you talk about creating "ripples of positive change." Would you explain to our readers what that means?

W.S.: Affordable donations generate positive change vastly greater than the size of the original gift through the dynamic I call the ripple effect. The easiest way to explain the ripple effect of small donations is through an example:

When you make a contribution to Mobile C.A.R.E. in Chicago, a child from a low-income household receives comprehensive asthma care via an Asthma Van that comes to school once every month. Delivering care at the child's school makes it easy for parents and children to regularly obtain the treatment necessary to effectively manage a child's asthma. When a child's asthma is managed, he or she attends school more regularly and is better able to participate in learning activities, so school achievement improves. When a child is well and able to go to school, his or her parents can go to work. Parents of children with asthma, which is epidemic in many low-income urban areas, often do not get paid leave from work when a child is sick. Healthy children also do not incur medical expenses for trips to the emergency room or prescription medications. Thus, healthy kids mean financially healthier families. Finally, when a child succeeds in school, he or she is much likelier to become a self-sufficient, employed adult member of the community who contributes to resources through income taxes rather than consuming resources through social support programs.

So, by helping a single child, the family and even the greater community benefit. That is the rippling effect of a single affordable donation to an effective nonprofit.

BTW: How did you choose the 47 organizations highlighted in Give a Little?

W.S.: I chose the nonprofits that appear in Give a Little because their work uses small donations to effectively help eliminate extreme poverty. While there are many tools to assess the programs' financial viability and responsibility, I used several criteria that I refer to as the ABCs of effective nonprofits to define the effectiveness of their work in eliminating poverty.

First, nonprofits in Give a Little afford access to tools and services that help the poor overcome obstacles to prosperity and create opportunities for economic security.

Second, they build self-sufficiency by insuring that individuals become self-reliant rather than dependent on the services of nonprofits into perpetuity.

Finally, nonprofits in Give a Little create change that is measurable and meaningful to individuals and that ripples out across families and the community.

BTW: Anything else you'd like to add?

W.S.: Americans are incredibly generous and largely unaware of the magnitude or potential of their charitable giving. Typically, large donations made by wealthy individuals, corporations, or foundations get media attention, leading individuals to believe that their relatively small contributions cannot make a real difference in the pressing social challenges of our time. Everyday donors need to know that their contributions constitute 75 percent of all charitable giving in the U.S. each year. Approximately half of that 75 percent comes from households with incomes less than $100,000. In 2008, giving by individuals amounted to $229 billion. That is larger than the gross domestic products of 75 percent of the nations around the world.

In addition, by making just a few additional affordable donations each year, everyday donors could make a tremendous contribution to the fight to eliminate extreme poverty around the world, the benefits of which would ripple throughout and across developing countries and right into our own backyards in the form of a more stable and peaceful world.