im rating this holistically — a blend of the message and the actualy production of the film itself. TDLR: it succesfully changed my mind about what a good charity looks like, and that “overhead” is a positive thing.
recd by @jdizzrizz
watched with @doublesquare @anala @kurtacash @vic @ut2k
It woke me up to the potential of the non-profit sector, and all the ways its being held back. I didn’t know much about the non profit world and used to believe the more a charity spent on the cause the better — which is a logical thought and what the media feeds us but not true in praticality. Essentially if we let charitys invest their funds into raising more funds, they can grow, and massively scale their actual impact/results. 1$ does not have to equal 1 meal. If “invested” so to speak 1$ could equal 10 meals. Thats really powerful and charities can succesfully do it, but there is pressure for them not to do that in order to minimize their “overhead” percentage.
There are a few things I wish it spoke more too, one being how to actually help someone pick a charity to donate too. The existing model most people have (low overhead %) is wrong, but what should we do instead? Maybe you have a little bit of hard earned money as an average american, maybe your a billionaire and have a lot — either way you want to make sure your money is most effectively spent. If there are thousands of charities for any given cause how are supporters supposed to pick? The movie briefly mentions look for results/impact, but thats hard to measure relatively to size. E.g. how do measure the effectiveness of the way one charity goes about a cause vs. another of they are different sizes? Maybe the anwer is 99% of charities are great and it doesn’t matter which one, but thats probably not helpful when you naturally want to find the “best” one. Maybe the answer is charities that let you donate to multiple or hundreds of charities and they do the research for you.
Anyway lots more to discuss here (e.g. non-profits need to have permission to pay market rates for top talent), but overally succesfully rewired my how I think about this topic.
The production was okay overall, they clearly didn’t spend too much on it — but maybe in the theme of this movie — they should have??? Either way, if you are at all interested in the non-profit space or saving the world I highly reccomend watching it or at least the TED talk from the main charecter bc the movie is an extention of that.
