Pangu
Registered User
- Jun 20, 2005
- 4,675
- 107
Something may also surprise people is that foundations (such as hospitals) usually have high admin costs to pay for huge fancy marketing campaigns and events. In many cases, only a fraction of that money to foundations goes to the actual cause, because they have looser regulations from CRA. Meanwhile charities like United Way (not a foundation) put a lot of effort into local programs getting 80-85% of your donation. That means the remainder covers admin (salaries, marketing, research, etc.).
Huh? If I am not mistaken, the difference between a foundation and a charity is that a foundation spends its money as grants to other organizations, while a charity actually does work to benefit the community. So United Way's chapters are effectively foundations.
Plenty of foundations do good work and some have basically no advertising costs. In medical research, we mostly get money from foundations. Plenty of wealthy people setup foundations that then give out money using NIH//CIHR-style peer-review grants. Obviously, there isn't any advertising cost there. Also, if you want to support medical research - like cancer research - you can't give to any charities, since there aren't any charity researchers. The gold standard in medical research is peer-reviewed grants. So, I don't think that foundations vs charities is the key here.
I think the big questions are (1) is the charity managed and governed competently and (2) is it focused on doing good. The second question is particularly pertinent to charitable organizations tied to for-profit enterprises.