Each year around Christmas I make a set of donations to causes and
organisations that I want to support. I do this all at once, because I
find I'm a lot more deliberate about what causes I support and the
amount I want to donate than I am donating on impulse throughout the
year.
I adopted this approach couple of years back after I read a tweet from
Simon Lyall. Following his lead I've
decided to blog my donations this year on the theory that it may
encourage others in a similarly privileged position to do likewise.
I'm always rather uncomfortable discussing financial matters, so I'm
going to avoid dollar amounts and just talk about groups of charities.
Everyone's situation is different anyway so I don't believe dollar
amounts really help the goal anyway.
Category 1: "Humanitarian Causes"
I use humanitarian loosely, my general preference is to support
organisations working locally. I use GiveWell for supporting work
overseas.
I split about 75% of my overall donation equally between these
organisations:
Category 2: "Agenda I want to advance"
Tech has been very good to me, so I like to somehow support making that
an option for more of the next generation, particularly those for whom
it's not an easy / obvious option. Basically this comes down to three
things:
- Ensuring that kids have the basics covered so they can pursue a
passion
- Encouraging a passion for S.T.E.M
- Making sure there's still a tech sector for the next generation
This leads me to split another 20% across the following:
Category 3: "Tech projects I use / want to continue existing"
Finally I spread the last 5% of my donations between some projects that
I use:
- Wikipedia
- Mozilla
- GPG
- Lets Encrypt
- Tor
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