The Score

"Charity" is derived from the Latin word caritas, which means "charity."  That's it for the fact portion of this post.  The rest is uninformed cynicism.

I'm wary of charities.  I have a feeling that it's a matter of perspective.  Ripping someone off when you're pretending to help orphans seems so much worse than employing any of the various other pretexts for getting at someone's money that it sticks in your mind and serves as a barrier to charitable action.

Still, there's plenty to watch out for when it comes to charities, unless a whole two hours of internet research lied to me just now.  We all know about the Wyclef Jean thing, right?  People send his Haiti-oriented charity millions of dollars, only to find out that it's paying him exorbitant appearance fees and whatnot?  It wasn't an isolated incident. An English breast cancer charity, for example, spent "less than 10p in every pound" (can anyone translate that for me?) on its mission while paying a fundraiser it employed millions of £, which I gather is some kind of fancy cursive-looking money.

I'm not even talking about actual fraud.  That thing where you pay yourself a fat salary and still get to call yourself a charity because of you give five percent of the proceeds to orphans is completely legal (as far as I know) and apparently not unusual.  I'm not saying that all of them do it.  I'm not saying most of them do it.  I'm not even saying any of them do it.  Wait, no - I am saying that last one.

So that's why I'm suspicious.  Kiva (and I hope this part doesn't wind up sounding like a commercial for them) assures us that every dime lent to an entrepreneur goes to that entrepreneur.  They don't use it to cover their costs, and they don't apply it to some other, similar project that they decide needs it more.

Long story short: Hearing stories about crooked charities makes me think Kiva is rad.  The folks at Bancocomunal Nacer can thank Wyclef Jean for my twenty-five bucks.  And for The Score - man, that's a great record.