Are There Too Many Tzedaka Organizations?

In a word, yes. It is not the worthiness of all the various organizations that I'm referring to (or at least not yet), but the sheer proliferation of numbers. This time of year my mailbox is stuffed to overflowing, mostly with appeals from charitable organizations. But I've noticed that the mailbox stuffing is no longer limited to before holiday periods; it's happening every week. And it seems as if every week I receive mail from a new organization that has never contacted me before. Rabbis, some of whom I have heard of and some of whom I don't know, send personal appeals on behalf of individuals. Add to the mail received all the phone calls, meshulachim and shul appeals and the whole tzedaka process can seem overwhelming.

There's been some discussion about where donation dollars really go, and I think it's worthwhile to expand that discussion. Let's face it, you can't run a business--and tzedaka organizations are a type of business--without some overhead. Paying rent for an office costs money; supplies cost money; phones cost money; printing and mailing appeals costs money. There are going to be costs involved. But how much should those costs be? What is reasonable to assume as the cost of doing business?

There are sites that can tell you how much of the money a charitable organization uses for overhead and how much is actually given towards the cause the organization espouses. Those figures are real eye openers. Some organizations go as low as 5% as an overhead charge; others go as high as 90% going towards overhead. Whoa! Why such a difference? Can there really be such a huge difference in the running costs of Organization A to Organization B?

I just mentioned that tzedaka organizations are a type of business. Well, far too many of these organizations aren't run in a very business-like fashion. Those running them may have good intentions but haven't the foggiest idea about good business practices and money management. A lack of knowledge leads to much wastefulness. We once sent a check to an organization that was having an emergency campaign for funds to feed the needy--it took them 13 months to get around to depositing the check, which the bank would no longer honor. This organization got hit with a bank charge for the non-negotiable check and contacted us to make good on the original check plus pay the charge it incurred. My husband refused; any organization that can't get an "emergency" check deposited in less than 13 months is not a place that we trust any longer to do what they say they will do. And I had to wonder how this organization, which purportedly deals with large sums of money, didn't know about the time limits on checks. And if they "misplaced" our check, just who is running that show?

Then there is this, which we have seen in more than one organization. Those people who call you on the phone? Many are not volunteers; they are commission agents for the organization. Any donations that they can solicit they get a percentage of, and I'm not talking small percentages. Many meshulachim work in the same way; they take a percentage of what they collect as their "salary." You think you are donating money to a worthy cause? Think again.

One organization couldn't understand why I was a bit upset when I found out that they were paying multiple people salaries for running their offices. They had explained to me that these were poor people who had no other source of income so they were providing jobs for them so they wouldn't need to be a burden on other tzedaka organizations. Here was my problem with this. This organization's overhead was in the 75% range. Yes, it was nice that they were helping out people so they could have a job and not have to be recipients of a tzedaka. But this tzedaka was purportedly collecting money to help ill children. It was our original reason for donating to them to begin with. And yet only 1 out of 4 dollars we sent them was going to their stated purpose.

And then there are the "duplicate" tzedakas; organizations that are collecting funds for a purpose that other organizations are also collecting for. Does New York City, for instance, really require 50+ organizations for Hachnosas Kallah? Would not the purpose, helping poor brides in the NY frum community, be better served by having one umbrella organization for this purpose? By combining resources and thus streamlining overhead costs more money would be going towards the cause being supported. Many of these organizations are named "in memory" of someone who has died. Family and friends want a zikoron for this person. Fine, let there be a "________fund" designation within the umbrella organization.

And then there are "local" organizations, some free-standing and some branches of a larger organization. Hatzoloh is one of these organizations. My community has it's own branch of Hatzoloh. Except for widespread catastrophies, such as 9/11, our Hatzoloh serves only us. Yet, we routinely get appeals from Hatzoloh branches in other places. Why? The same goes for Tomche Shabbos. We have a branch in SI. And again, I routinely get appeals from other Tomche Shabbos groups in other areas. I look at our community, not small but not huge either, and the Brooklyn communities from where these appeals come, most of them huge, and I have to wonder why they are coming to me, particularly since they know that we have our own groups.

Should rabbanim be making widespread public appeals on behalf of an individual, who may or may not be a member of their community, but mostly isn't? I really don't want to get into that here, but I would just ask some of these rabbanim to at least change the words in the letter from appeal to appeal instead of just filling in the "name" blank with a different name. And maybe they should also change the number of children these people have--does every poor Torah scholar who has fallen on hard times, whose wife is ill or who is ill himself, have 13 children, one of whom is getting married but there is no money for the wedding? Apparently so.

There needs to be some real re-organization as regards tzedaka organizations and how they are run. Giving tzedaka is part of who we are as frum Jews, but getting fleeced shouldn't be. Accepting and encouraging poor management needs to go. At this time of year, when we have just given a cheshbon ha'nefesh, perhaps we should be asking just how much good we are really doing with some of our tzedaka giving. What is going to be needed is the cooperation of all the sub-communities within the larger frum community, and therein lies another tale.