In my household we were cautious about how we gave, because UNICEF is—of course—loosely tied to those who took food out of Iraqi children's mouths to line their own pockets. And the Red Cross has been actively undermining U.S. policy in any number of ways. Even USAID has an agenda we have deep ambivalence about (they may be "progressive," but they do some fine work in Southeast Asia).

I'm sure any of those agencies would have spent carefully any funds earmarked for Tsunami relief, but we wanted to be absolutely certain that none of our contribution would be diluted by a very large bureaucracy, so we opted to go with Catholic Relief Services, reasoning that any of the church groups would be staffed with a higher number of volunteers (and near-volunteers), and our money would go further.

I'm working on contributing a Blogad to one or more of the groups that are collecting funds, but I'm also going to bend the rules and point out that my Google ads very often link to disaster-relief efforts, so they might also be a good resource (ordinarily, I'm not supposed to call attention to the Google ads, lest I campaign for clicks to 'em). Remember, also, to visit the Command Post Master List of Tsunami charities, which has some breakdowns in terms of countries (for those who want to target their contributions in that way).

Posted by: Attila at 01:46 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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