OUR APPROACH TO DONATIONS
Support Communities. Challenge Injustices.
Project Dialogue donates 100% of profits; our Board Members, Directors, and staff instructors collect no share of profits for their time, effort, and preparation. We operate on minimal costs and free software resources to ensure we can maximize the donations we make, which amounted to $45,000+ in the past two years.
How do you select what charities you donate to?
At Project Dialogue, we look for charities consistent with our values & mission:
We use debate to empower the next generation of BIPOC leaders with the ability to engage diverse perspectives, advocate for change, and confront our world's most intractable problems and injustices. We teach communication, ethical citizenship, and advocacy skills to serve oppressed groups and promote a culture of conversation within our broader communities.
Therefore, we donate 100% of profits to charities, community organizations, and nonprofits on the frontlines of fighting poverty, global inequalities, disease, and other injustices. We look for organizations with similar values and proven impact in targeting global injustices and resolving inequality.
We seek to support nonprofit organizations and charities that share and advance our mission to directly or indirectly mitigate the harms of oppressive systems.
For example, we will give our support to organizations that:
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Provide food, water, and other humanitarian needs, as we recognize poverty is a result of government neglect (and in many cases, government abuse). We believe in organizations that do the essential work of food distribution, humanitarian relief, and poverty alleviation.
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Aid formerly incarcerated individuals, exonerate innocent convicts, and challenge the prison industrial complex. We recognize that the US system of mass incarceration is inseparable from racism.
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Provide community outreach and a safe haven where all other alternatives fail. We will support homeless shelters, Boys and Girls Clubs, LGBTQ shelters, and women’s shelters or other organizations helping survivors of intimate partner violence.
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Mitigate the impacts of climate injustice. We will support organizations providing relief to climate refugees and low-income, urban communities that are disproportionately at risk of adverse climate effects.
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Reduce the burdens of health inequality and disproportionate injustices arising from disease and public health challenges. We recognize the moral obligation in ensuring accessibility to treatments and healthcare for those in need.
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Because we recognize that our donations and work are inherently political, we are willing to support organizations that conduct political advocacy, provided they are able to translate funding to direct and tangible outcomes.
Given the exceptional circumstances of COVID-19, we donated all funds in 2020 to organizations involved in COVID-19 relief, such as food banks, international or humanitarian aid organizations, homeless shelters, PPE & support funds for communities of color.
To determine where our donations will make the most impact, we use several standards modeled off of the Effective Altruism framework. We will prioritize both causes and organizations that are:
Great in scale, meaning the organization has the capacity to affect many lives
Highly neglected, meaning few other people are working on addressing the problem or there are few other funding sources/mechanisms
Highly solvable or tractable, meaning additional resources will do a great deal to address it and each dollar donated can create a tangible outcome; our donations will help do a great deal of good
How do you ensure your donations result in tangible change?
The charities and organizations we donate to must be allocatively efficient and transparent in operation. We will extensively research the spending history of the organizations. We look for measurable and tangible donation returns (X amount of money yields Y result, such as: $1 donated to North Texas Food Bank yields 3 meals).
The goal of project dialogue is to maximize our positive impact on our communities. We will default to charities that have responsible spending histories, lower overhead costs, and higher percentages of their income spent directly for their cause. We will also use tools like charity evaluation websites (ex: Charity Navigator) to accurately assess the impact of donation recipients and inform our selection.