Questionable Charity

A fascinating reevaluation of U.S. literary realism during the Gilded Age.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Communications - Journalism, Journalism Professions, grade: 1st, University of Leeds (Leeds Trinity University), course: Media Research, language: English, abstract: This paper is an evaluation of the techniques that large organisations may use to influence members of the public into donating, exploring how often how often these practices are used and if this format is actually ethical. The purpose is to identify the underlying moralities of charity advertisements in modernity and to ultimately decide whether such mode of practice should be in some way altered or rectified. The methods used to collate empirical audience research are both qualitative and quantitative approaches collated to form part of the main results. It builds on previous work of other academics adding to their research. My main aim is to identify whether positive or negative video advertisements that have more of an effect on the viewer and to classify what type of effect these variable tableaux actually have. Previous research has been undertaken in this way through the form of imagery (Deborah A. Small 2009), as a result this research develops the idea further but through a different medium to fill a gap extant academic knowledge.

Vast and largely unexamined, the world of American charities accounts for fully 10 percent of economic activity in this country, yet operates with little accountability, no real barriers to entry, and a stunning lack of evidence of effectiveness. In With Charity for All, Ken Stern reveals a problem hidden in plain sight and prescribes a whole new way for Americans to make a difference. Each year, two thirds of American households donate to charities, with charitable revenues exceeding one trillion dollars. Yet while the mutual fund industry employs more than 150,000 people to rate and evaluate for-profit companies, nothing remotely comparable exists to monitor the nonprofit world. Instead, each individual is on his or her own, writing checks for a cause and going on faith. Ken Stern, former head of NPR and a long-time nonprofit executive, set out to investigate the vast world of U.S. charities and discovered a sector hobbled by deep structural flaws. Unlike private corporations that respond to market signals and go out of business when they fail, nonprofit organizations have a very low barrier to entry (the IRS approves 99.5 percent of applications) and once established rarely die. From water charities aimed at improving life in Africa to drug education programs run by police officers in thousands of U.S. schools, and including American charitable icons such as the Red Cross, Stern tells devastating stories of organizations that raise and spend millions of dollars without ever cracking the problems they set out to solve. But he also discovered some good news: a growing movement toward accountability and effectiveness in the nonprofit world. With Charity for All is compulsively readable, driven in its early pages by the plight of millions of Americans donating to good causes to no good end, and in its last chapters by an inspiring prescription for individual giving and widespread reform.

Silence: The Impending Threat to the Charitable Sector is a high-stake and explosive investigative work about charity misdeeds. As you read this cover, there is a noteworthy charity fraud being perpetrated. Scandals threaten to destroy the reputation of the charitable sector. These scandals threaten to destroy the reputation of powerful organizations and their leaders. Charity malfeasance is an addiction of epic proportions. Charity leaders and regulators, by their silence and denial, are enablers. Because the misdeeds were kept secret, there was no public outcry. The secrets are now being exposed. The sector needs a new paradigm, and Silence makes numerous suggestions as to how to turn it around. This exposé is based on the largest repository of charity fraud anywhere. Many trusted leaders are exposed including board members, presidents, superintendents, chief executive officers, accountants— and more. They embezzled, forged, extorted, and falsified records; they self-dealt, negligently managed assets, and had multiple conflicts of interest.

A blueprint for a national leadership movement to transform the way the public thinks about giving Virtually everything our society has been taught about charity is backwards. We deny the social sector the ability to grow because of our short-sighted demand that it send every short-term dollar into direct services. Yet if the sector cannot grow, it can never match the scale of our great social problems. In the face of this dilemma, the sector has remained silent, defenseless, and disorganized. In Charity Case, Pallotta proposes a visionary solution: a Charity Defense Council to re-educate the public and give charities the freedom they need to solve our most pressing social issues. Proposes concrete steps for how a national Charity Defense Council will transform the public understanding of the humanitarian sector, including: building an anti-defamation league and legal defense for the sector, creating a massive national ongoing ad campaign to upgrade public literacy about giving, and ultimately enacting a National Civil Rights Act for Charity and Social Enterprise From Dan Pallotta, renowned builder of social movements and inventor of the multi-day charity event industry (including the AIDS Rides and Breast Cancer 3-Days) that has cumulatively raised over $1.1 billion for critical social causes The hotly-anticipated follow-up to Pallotta’s groundbreaking book Uncharitable Grounded in Pallotta’s clear vision and deep social sector experience, Charity Case is a fascinating wake-up call for fixing the culture that thwarts our charities’ ability to change the world.

We all know we should give to charity, but who really does? In his controversial study of America's giving habits, Arthur C. Brooks shatters stereotypes about charity in America-including the myth that the political Left is more compassionate than the Right. Brooks, a preeminent public policy expert, spent years researching giving trends in America, and even he was surprised by what he found. In Who Really Cares, he identifies the forces behind American charity: strong families, church attendance, earning one's own income (as opposed to receiving welfare), and the belief that individuals-not government-offer the best solution to social ills. But beyond just showing us who the givers and non-givers in America really are today, Brooks shows that giving is crucial to our economic prosperity, as well as to our happiness, health, and our ability to govern ourselves as a free people.

There are over 195,289 registered charities in the UK spending about 80 billion of our money a year. Charities claim that almost ninety pence in every pound we give is spent on 'charitable activities'. But with many of our best-known charities, the real figure is less than fifty pence in every pound. But does Britain really need so many charities? And do our charities spend enough of our money on good causes? The Great Charity Scandal exposes the truth about Britain's massive charity industry and recommends how we need to change things so more of our money goes where we expect."

Veteran urban activist Robert Lupton reveals the shockingly toxic effects that modern charity has upon the very people meant to benefit from it. Toxic Charity provides proven new models for charitable groups who want to help—not sabotage—those whom they desire to serve. Lupton, the founder of FCS Urban Ministries (Focused Community Strategies) in Atlanta, the voice of the Urban Perspectives newsletter, and the author of Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life, has been at the forefront of urban ministry activism for forty years. Now, in the vein of Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty, Richard Stearns’s The Hole in Our Gospel, and Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart, his groundbreaking Toxic Charity shows us how to start serving needy and impoverished members of our communities in a way that will lead to lasting, real-world change.