The other thread is getting too bogged down with personality conflicts, and I think this information is getting lost.

I keep a lot of these sites bookmarked, and I do research on organizations usually a couple of times a year. So, I hope this helps people help others, by making the most of their donations.

Here is the excellent Reuters AlertNet website, where you can find a ton of information on international relief, from satellite maps of disaster areas, to information on what NGOs are doing what, where, and for whom. At great place to start.

Charity Navigator is the largest US charity watchdog, and has current information on the Asian tsunami relief efforts. This is another place you can go to do your charitable donation homework.

There is also Network for Good, though I have to say, they never impressed me much.

Better for me has been Ministy Watch, to help sort the good, bad, and the ugly of donating to religious organizations. For instance, it is good to know that Catholic Relief Services, a notorious "pro-life" outfit, won't donate to or help clinics where certain reproductive services (abortion usually, though not exclusively) are perfomed. Now, if you are interested in helping women especially in disaster areas, that fact translates to your Catholic Relief Services donation never getting to the best clinics in the area. That is just one example of the values politics gone awry, and underscores the importance of doing your homework about the organizations you donate to.

There is also the Charity Watch page for the American Institute for Philanthropy, which I linked to recently in another thread about the Salvation Army. Another great resource for evaluating charities.

So, decide how you want your donation money to be used first, then go looking for a good match.

Below is some cut and paste info about the realities of relief services from an article written by a relief worker a few years back. I've only given portions of the article here, to help people get an overview of the "on the ground" realities of the relief industry, to help them make informed decisions.

Emergency funds are often given during moments of great human suffering and public sentiment. But ironically despite the initial emotional impulses this aid is rarely given entirely altruistically or without due consideration for economic interests. In today's world, if the countries involved had not been subscribing to the dictums of the donor governments' own economic interests (trade agreements, export driven economies and IMF led economic restructuring programs, war on drugs, etc.) it is not all together obvious that such an outpouring of aid would be forthcoming.

In places where there is no real economic basis for a lot of monetary aid, the donor governments and agencies will occasionally be compelled to respond on the basis of public sentiment fuelled by images coming over CNN or some other news show. This is definitely an accurate assessment of what is happening right now with the Asian tsunami crisis, as we have seen with the paltry amounts of aid money promised by the EU and the US (that 'stingy' story). A typical donor response will be to try to minimize the aid offered by either making preconditions for the aid's receipt or by offering commodities which are in overabundance in the donor's own country (and often heavily subsidized commodities).

This latter phenomenon is referred to as "dumping". Food dumping and drug dumping are the most common forms. Rather than give the starving people of Sudan or Somalia food which they are familiar with, food which could be brought locally/regionally (and, thus spur the regional economy), or food which might be tasty, donor governments instead will ship tons upon tons of western maize, wheat flour, beans, whatever they have on hand (and, thus, depress the regional economy). And commonly, the food is totally inappropriate for the situation. For the donor, however, food dumping offers a rather painless way to be rid of overstock and at the same time proclaim some good deeds.

Drug dumping has become a huge international tragedy on its own right. During the Bosnian conflict there were literally warehouses filled with expired or useless pharmaceuticals. Drug companies have used humanitarian disasters to donate their slow selling products, their damaged batches, their expiring or discontinuing drug lines so that they can claim the tax write off and at the same time show a compassionate face to their customers. The consequence is that sick people end up with useless or toxic medicines. They are often packaged in unfamiliar languages, often in preparations unknown to the local inhabitants, often for ailments which aren't appropriate to the situation.

The donors themselves never actually carry out the work that they pay for with their aid agency funds. This is left to the recipient agencies: the nongovermental organization community. The alphabet soup that the world's international non-governmental organizations (INGO) make up is even more convoluted than that of the donors. MSF, ACF, OXFAM, SCF, CARE, ADRA, CRS, etc. are but a few of the larger ones. Literally thousands of small and medium sized INGO's , local as well as international, receive money from the donor governments.

One way around the inefficiencies and politics of the big international relief INGOs is to give greater support to locally based NGOs that keep donated money and other items closer to the recipient's home community. Even overhead costs of these local NGO's (such as salaries for their staff) translates into local jobs and payments directly into the local economies. These local NGO's can be quite sophisticated even if they are small and under funded. Often, by virtue of their greater abilities to engage the local populations, they can do much much more with far less than better known INGO's.