Coming up to Christmas I generally make some small donations. Some of these I ask for as Christmas gifts because I’m old and basically have very basic wants and needs so I’m hard to buy for.
Curious to hear if / what others do.
I’ve expanded my annual list to include:
- Wikipedia
- Lemmy.world (my home instance)
- Mozilla (I’m not happy with how they spend their money necessarily but I’m very thankful to have Firefox)
- Signal messenger
- A few Ukrainian things (u24.gov.ua is the official site if this is your thing but there’s a great lady on Reddit I give to occasionally too)
- The guardian (I read so many articles from there linked on here that I feel like I should and I really appreciate the lack of paywall and easy cookie rejection but never use the site logged in)
Money
- My local NPR station
- InRangeTV
Time
- Wikipedia
I don’t have a lot to give. If I did, I would also include:
- Linux Mint
- GIMP
- Darktable
- Inkscape
- Open Medicine Foundation
- Election Science
- LibreOffice
- zirk.us
- midwest.social
- Strong Towns
I donate to my local food bank. I worked in their hydroponics garden a few years ago and saw how much work goes into providing food for the needy. They need all the help they can get.
I also donate time and energy and a bit of money on a specific horse at the stables I volunteer at. She’s an old mare with an owner who doesn’t give a shit about her. Nobody really does anything with her other than me and another person, and that other person only lets her out to graze. I exercise the horse, groom her, give her lots of attention, and I got her a winter blanket recently.
EFF Wikipedia KDE Asahi Linux Thunderbird Mozilla Archive.org Libreoffice My lemmy host Voyager
These are all one time donations, i tend to donate around 15€ a month in 5€ chunks. Some have repeated donations, other a single one. Started only a few months ago doing this
tor project
I have a monthly recurring donation to the GiveWell Top Charities fund. GiveWell ranks charities by efficiency (i.e. impact per dollar) and distributes the funds donations to the most effective ones. Those include fighting malaria, world hunger, child blindness,…
- Wikimedia Foundation
- Nature Conservancy
- Democracy Now
- Democratic Socialists of America local chapter
I just sat down to do my annual donations, so I’ve got the list ready to go:
- local food bank
- local safe injection site
- Signal
- KDE
- OpenMedia (closest thing to EFF in Canada)
A few places I couldn’t afford to donate to this year, in case anyone needs more ideas:
- archive.org
- EFF
- miscellaneous software projects I’m using (mostly Steam Deck plugins because I’m in that community a lot)
- Gnome
I also give a bit to Tor and The Beaverton monthly.
I donate to my local animal shelter
Maxfun org and one random YouTuber that covers North and South American anthropology.
So every year I go donate Blood, since I’m Bloodtype 0. Aside froom that there are these:
- KDE
- FDroid
- Tutanota (Yes you can donate)
- Yet Zio (yet-calc App)
- My favourite Artist in Music
- A political Party which stands for Privacy
- EFF
- Tor
From what I’ve heard about Wikipedia’s finances they’re set for the foreseeäble and my money would be better used elsewhere.
Here’s why knowing the above i still donate to wikipedia.
Because we don’t want them to be in a position where they take money with strings attached. Imo its good for them to be reminded they serve the public first and foremost.
Yeah, Wikipedia is such a stable and positive force in the internet and directly reaches so many people. It’s easy to take it for granted but the internet would be so much incredibly worse without it.
I happily donate.
I want any organization that has shown that much commitment to making the world better to be well supported.
Here’s their audit report. 59.8% of their expenses are in
executivesalaries, a total of $107,793,960 this year. They list internet hosting as 1.7% of their expenses at $3,116,445.Good find.
That salary number is all ~700 employees, not just “executives”. That averages to about 150k apiece, not unreasonable for what is probably mostly tech workers.
The total for just the executives is $88million. Leaving $19million for the 700 employees, or $27,000 each. You are donating to executives.
Edit: whoops, it’s total salary in 2021, I misread
Good lord these numbers are ludicrous
The actual total in your own link was 5.2 million for executives. The 88 million is, again, the entire salary base just in 2021. Assuming they still had 700 employees (which is a current figure, not 3 years ago) that’s still about 120k apiece for everyone else.
I can’t tell if you’re just being disingenuous or you really can’t read your own sources…
You’re right. It’s not just executives. I believed the criticism was over inflating executive salaries, but it is indeed all salaries. Wikimedia operated with a total salary of $26million in 2014 but now has salaries totalling $107million. Quadrupling their salaries in 10 years with little explanation. You’re assuming it goes to IT infrastructure workers, but they don’t explain where it actually goes.
More of a regular thing for me than annual. It’s primarily Doctors without Borders and some international charities,mainly for the middle east. A while back my wife and I paid for some wells for some villages in Pakistan.
I cannot afford much, but I gladly give monthly to Doctors Without Borders.
Neither are perfect organisations but both are trying to help people in desperate situations.
Archive.org, Wikipedia, Signal, Mozilla (I feel the same as you), and a bunch of patreons for artists.
You might be interested in supporting Nebula, which is sort of like if YouTube was a creator owned coop. Lots of good content on there and I feel good about giving them money to compete with google.
