01 · Money moves slowly.
Layers of approval, reconciliation and reporting sit between your gift and the work.
The problem
$617.2 billion.
Given by Americans last year. Up 5%.
3.6% fewer donors.
Fourth year in a row.
More money. Fewer people. That's not a generosity problem. It's a trust problem.
In New York alone!
$85 to raise every $100.
Two cancer charities in New York spent 85% of donations raising more donations.
104 campaigns lost money.
In one year in New York, they cost more to run than they raised. More than $20 million, gone.
$395 million to fundraising companies.
One state. One year. They kept an average of 25 cents of every dollar.
86 cents of every dollar.
One national children's charity paid $109.8 million of the $127.8 million it raised to professional solicitors.
$187 million.
Four cancer charities, sued by the FTC and all fifty states. Donations meant for patients paid for cars, cruises and tuition.
9 cents.
At one charity, that's how much of each dollar of cash spending reached the programs.
The government's own auditors count roughly $3 trillion in improper payments since 2003. Every administration. Both parties. The machinery is the problem, not the people running it.
Nobody here is short of good intent. They're running machinery built before the internet. And the machinery is where the money goes.
Layers of approval, reconciliation and reporting sit between your gift and the work.
Confirming help arrived costs more than the help. So most organizations sample it, or skip it.
Structures built to raise money consume the money they raise.
An annual PDF, written by the people being judged.
Emergency help fixes the moment and leaves the conditions that caused it.
Checking, matching and reporting at almost no cost. The three jobs that made real transparency unaffordable.
Reach that used to cost hundreds of millions is now earned. Proof travels further than ads ever did.
Funds that settle in minutes, with a record of where they went, cheap enough to make a dollar a day work.
Need, delivery and outcome confirmed on a phone. No office. No paper trail.
Millions of people who still want to give, still can, and are looking for somewhere to believe in.
Sources: Giving USA 2026 · Fundraising Effectiveness Project, Q4 2025 · CharityWatch · New York Attorney General, "Pennies for Charity" (2025 report, 588 campaigns) · Tampa Bay Times / CNN / Center for Investigative Reporting (2013) · FTC et al. v. Cancer Fund of America et al. (2015) · CharityWatch 2024 · GAO-26-108694 (April 2026)