2020 (age 6)
Last year when L was six and her school was doing a fundraiser for a local charity, I told her Jeff and I would give her $20 to donate as she chose at the end of December. We sat down and she listed her ideas, which were all about helping homeless people. She wasn’t interested in considering other causes, but I do think we had a good conversation about priorities within the area (she decided that medical care and food were most important, followed by housing, followed by phones and computers, followed by “money to buy things they want” as the last priority. Not a fan of unconditional cash transfers apparently.)
In the end she gave $10 to two charities. I steered her to local charities I was familiar with, though in retrospect I wish I had researched ones in a city we don’t live in to make a bit clearer that you don’t have to give locally.
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2021 (age 7 and 5)
I told L we would do it again this year, and that A (age 5) could also donate. A seemed sad and bothered about it and said she didn’t want to because she would spend the money in a store instead. She was convinced she’d done this the previous year, though I don’t know where this idea came from. I told her she’d pick out where to send it, and I would send the money, so she didn’t have to worry about doing the wrong thing with the money.
It turned out she had no idea what donation was. At first she asked if she could “give the money to a store” and elaborated “I’d give them the money, and they’d let me take something from the store” which I explained is buying rather than donating. I explained donating is giving money to somebody else to help with some kind of problem. She said “but there aren’t any problems.” Jeff and I listed things like people who are sick or hurt, people who are poor and don’t have things they need, animals who are treated badly, and pollution. She said she wanted to help animals but wasn’t that interested in which charity — I described three from the shortlist on Animal Charity Evaluators and she picked one helping farm animals. I now think she wasn’t old enough for this, and it would have been better to wait a year.
After hearing the problems we listed to A, L decided not to donate to people because she did that last year. She wanted to help animals too, and when I described different types of animals (pets, farmed animals, wild animals) she went with wild animals “because people are the least likely to see them and tell that they need help.” She also wanted to donate to preventing pandemics “because not having any pandemics is really important to me.” (Hear, hear.)
So A’s donation went to the Humane League, and L’s was split between Wild Animal Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
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I see the point of this exercise as gradually building up layers of knowledge / interest:
- Problems exist in the world, and you can use money to help make them better
- You can pick between different problems / beneficiaries
- When picking, you should think about which problems are most important to work on
- … and neglected and tractable
- There are different ways of working on a problem
- Some of those ways work better than others
- You can use evidence to help you figure out which problems and solutions to pick
A was somewhere around levels 1 and 2 this year. L is around 3 and 4, going for wild animals because they’re more neglected. But she hasn’t started to get curious about what you do to help. I expect she prefers more concrete things, and would probably prefer something like rescuing birds from oil spills rather than research by Wild Animal Initiative. I directed both kids to the short list from Animal Charity Evaluators, and those charities aren’t doing the interventions the kids would probably prefer. But we can talk about that in future years when the kids have a better understanding that charities within the same cause area do different things.