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What a Form 990 Can and Cannot Tell You
Every American charity files one. Anyone can read it. Five lines answer most of what donors actually want to know.
Read the pieceAid, philanthropy and the organisations that run on your money. Who gives it, who moves it, and what is left by the time it arrives.
The first season is being reported now. Until it lands, I am publishing the research as short written pieces — the explainers I wish I had when I started giving.
One short read every other Thursday while the season is in production. No pitch, no sponsor.
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Giving is one of the few things people do with their money on faith alone. This show follows the money instead: through the appeal, the accounts, the subcontracts, to whatever is left at the other end.
Published filings, annual accounts and contracts, read line by line, then the people involved asked about what the numbers say. Where a figure is our estimate rather than a published one, it says so.
People who give and want to give better. No sector jargon, no assumed background, and no interest in telling you to stop giving.
One fifty-dollar gift, traced through every hand it passes through on the way to a borehole.
How the sector learned to starve itself to look efficient to donors.
Six years after a two-billion-dollar pledge, where the money went and how fast.
Rating sites shape billions in giving. We look at how the grades are made.
Every American charity files one. Anyone can read it. Five lines answer most of what donors actually want to know.
Read the pieceA 1990s rating shortcut taught a generation of donors to judge charities by their least meaningful number.
Most gifts arrive with strings. Here is what those strings do to a year of work.
I gave for a decade without understanding where the money went. This is the reporting I wanted to read.
A reading list, with the two I think are wrong and why they are still worth your time.