What is your charitable giving?

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I wasn’t really sure which forum to post this in. However, managing one’s charitable giving is an aspect of budgeting and finances, which is an aspect of family life… so I decided to post here.

I am curious what Catholic causes/charities you all choose to support financially. Not including your giving to your parish, and support of the annual diocesan appeal, as those are taken for granted. It could be things such as a religious order, an apostolate, media (i.e. EWTN) etc. Please do not include any groups that are involved in political activity in the strict sense, as I don’t want this thread to get into political argumentation.

Thanks!
 
louisak said:
I wasn’t really sure which forum to post this in. However, managing one’s charitable giving is an aspect of budgeting and finances, which is an aspect of family life… so I decided to post here.

I am curious what Catholic causes/charities you all choose to support financially. Not including your giving to your parish, and support of the annual diocesan appeal, as those are taken for granted. It could be things such as a religious order, an apostolate, media (i.e. EWTN) etc. Please do not include any groups that are involved in political activity in the strict sense, as I don’t want this thread to get into political argumentation.

Thanks!
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I make a yearly donation to the Paulist Fathers.
 
Yearly donation to Catholic Charities.

We also donate a lot to our Parish School as well as various charity events sponsored by our Parish.

Our Parish usually sponsors about 20-30 children with school tuition and supplies in Nigeria every year.
 
Our local food banks, St Vincent de Paul, and utility assistance.
 
Most of our giving is done through the parish. But we do use Amazon Smile to benefit our local pregnancy resource center and Catholic charities.
 
I have supported my local EWTN radio affiliate off and on.

I support a number of other causes that aren’t specifically Catholic; maybe in another thread we can talk about that.
 
It has varied substantially over the years. I like to break stewardship into time, talent, and treasure.

Treasure:
about 10-12% of our income goes to our parish including our monthly envelopes, special collections, and contributions we make towards parish bazaar, Lenten rice bowls, things we buy for the parish throughout the year (we donated a chasuble this year), pro life ministry, etc.

about 3% of our income goes to diocesan annual appeal and to support diocesan causes such as an orphanage and a mission in Central America.

about 1% of our income goes to other charities including some local ones we sponsor in our small community

Time/talent:
my DH and I do a LOT at the parish: CRE, CCD and confirmation catechist, bookkeeping, liturgy, flowers, parish council, snow plowing, you name it. So at least 5 hours a week there, sometimes more. I pay my own way to go to diocesan meetings, and often for supplies, so I don’t know how much I spend there.

I am on the board of directors for a non-profit professional association I belong to. I spend 20 hours a month on that.

I make flower arrangements for a local nursing home for residents. Time is about an hour a week. I buy flowers so I probably spend about .5% of income on that over a year. Sometimes I double duty the flowers as altar flowers and then take them to the nursing home.
So, I don’t know, about 17-20% of our income goes to charity in one form or another.

Over the years, the causes I support vary. In the past I’ve donated to support a seminarian, three or four different pro life groups, various local charities, etc.
 
10% of my take home pay goes to Cross Catholic Outreach. I’ll probably start giving at the parish level this year.
 
My husband and I give small amounts to multiple charities. We give to Catholic Answers, St. Joseph’s society for Retired Priests, the “local” Catholic children’s home, our seminarians foundation, Food for the Poor, and St. Vincent de Pauls. We are considering adding a pro-life group this year, if my husband gets a good raise.

I recommend, from the above, making small donations to important causes to your family, instead of picking one big one. Also, if you can, go online and check the ratio of aid to administration. We had a charity that we gave to until we found that 25% of its money went to administration. Food for the Poor, as a counter example, (if I recall correctly) uses 4-6% of its money for administration. So how we do it is, if we would normally give $30 to support a young man becoming a priest because we’ll likely get him as our priest is close to retirement, but we know that our priest can’t live on the diocese provided retirement plan, we feel guilty. Therefore, we help the new priest with $15 and the old priest with $15. (Or break it down to our six charities and the example would be $5 a piece.)

As some budgeting advice, we try to include charities that we most want to support in our monthly budget, taken out of the disposable income fund, just like the utilities, the house payment, the food, and the college/retirement funds. If it is automatically withdrawn from the spreadsheet (and maybe the bank account too) it is easy to remember. Open Office spreadsheets (or Excel if you already have it) have some great tools for this, and are often cheaper than budgeting software.
 
Secant said:
I recommend, from the above, making small donations to important causes to your family, instead of picking one big one. Also, if you can, go online and check the ratio of aid to administration. We had a charity that we gave to until we found that 25% of its money went to administration. Food for the Poor, as a counter example, (if I recall correctly) uses 4-6% of its money for administration.
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While it is certainly important to check out any charities you are not familiar with or that are not parish or diocesan sponsored, I personally do not think the “percent administrative” is a good indicator of a non-profit’s stewardship of dollars nor is it a badge of honor to strangle your non-profit by having low administrative costs. Capacity building, capital spending, and marketing and overhead dollars can increase the size of the pie for a non-profit substantially.

It is backward thinking to think that a non-profit that barely survives by strangling it’s investment in technology, capital improvements, capacity and strategic planning is a “good deal” while one that invests in these items is “not”.
 
For about 7 years we did 10% giving to a variety of different charities, but as my grandparents are far away and are getting frail and very elderly (94 and 90), we have been giving slightly less to ensure that our big kids have real memories of their great-grandparents.

Our current cash giving is primarily split between the following organizations, not all Catholic:

–Caritas
–our local college chaplaincy
–the local parish where the kids do CCD
–the Vladivostok Russia Catholic mission
–our kids’ Protestant private school

We also do gifts to people in our circle who are especially in need. For instance, whenever a graduate student family we know has a baby, we give a check.

We will try to work up to 10% eventually, and my husband would like us to give substantially more. I would eventually like us to additionally fund a scholarship to our children’s school.
 
1ke said:
While it is certainly important to check out any charities you are not familiar with or that are not parish or diocesan sponsored, I personally do not think the “percent administrative” is a good indicator of a non-profit’s stewardship of dollars nor is it a badge of honor to strangle your non-profit by having low administrative costs. Capacity building, capital spending, and marketing and overhead dollars can increase the size of the pie for a non-profit substantially.

It is backward thinking to think that a non-profit that barely survives by strangling it’s investment in technology, capital improvements, capacity and strategic planning is a “good deal” while one that invests in these items is “not”.
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Right.

If the charity spends 90% of it’s income on food and 10% on overhead, but if it spent 20% on overhead it could get twice as much food, is that extra 10% really such a bad bargain?
 
CRS, Catholic Charities, Little Sisters of the Poor, Wounded Warrior Project, Water.org, St Jude’s Children’s Hospital, FOCUS, the parish, the Bishop.
 
I don’t have a lot of spare money right now, so the charitable giving is limited. But a friend of mine works with a charity that assists incarcerated mothers, and I usually send requested christmas presents so they have something to give to their children.
 
Assc. Of the Miraculous Medal,Sacred Heart Missions,Rachael’s Vineyard,Wounded Warrior Project,Catholic Answers,Amer Needs Fatima,Fransician Mission Assc.
 
I sponsor 3 children in developing countries and write to them, too. We have a parish food distribution service which runs 5 days a week and I work there for half a day a week and take food donations.
 
I too do not give to organizations that have a high percentage administrative costs, especially if those costs are used just to move money between charities. The one odd ball charity I give to is the Missionary Society of St. Peter and Paul out of Abuja, Nigeria, though they have a house in Houston.
 
Aside from the parish where we are registered: Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey, the parish serving my alma mater, Save the Storks, and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty (not necessarily Catholic but I feel it’s more important today than ever). Over the years I have given to the Basilian Fathers’ missions and Missionary Oblates but not currently. I had supported CRS and St. Jude years ago but no longer after reading their reviews on the American Life League’s page.
 
We have about reached our limit on charitable giving because we are both on pensions and SS and the cost of medical care has gone up to about 10% plus of our gross income. When we worked, our employers paid part of the insurance costs and we were pretty well covered. However, now my medication is so expensive we will soon be in the Medicare “donut hole”, and we are paying much more out of pocket for Medicare and drugs than we did while we worked.

I feel bad about this, but some things are a fact of life. We give to the weekly offering, the Bishop’s appeal, we pledged toward a parish building fund, Catholic Charities, Mercy Corps, St. Jude’s Children’s hospital, Food for the Poor, the food bank, and an order of Franciscan nuns, and a few occasional things like the Rice Bowl, religious retirement. It sounds like a lot, but we have cut back on the frequency and amount of our giving, other than the parish and the bishop. I am afraid we will have to cut back even further and that makes me sad.

But I think God does not hold this against us.

Anyway, those are my favorite charities.
 
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