How to make the biggest difference when giving to charity

Smaller circles, enormous impact
The virtues of helping a person in the Global South jump-start a business are undeniable, but what do we do if we can't afford to make a $200 gift on our own? We can turn our $20 into $200 by coordinating our donations through giving circles.

Giving circles are easy to set up and easy to manage: we donate a small amount of money and ask our friends and coworkers to match our donation. Pooling our resources and directing the combined donation to smaller, more specific causes is much more effective than writing a small cheque to an organization that tackles "the environment" or "human rights abuses."

For example, One By One is building an online network to fight obstetric fistula, an injury to mothers during childbirth cause by long, obstructed labour -- the kind that would be easily remedied in the Global North with a cesarean section. When left untreated, obstetric fistula can be devastating, often debilitating the mother and rendering her incontinent. This condition is relatively inexpensive to cure (it costs about $300), but women in the developing world, particularly in Africa, rarely get the treatment they need.

One By One's network of fistula fighters come together to raise tax-exempt donations through the underfunded United Nations' Campaign to End Fistula. The donation of each giving circle goes directly toward buying one woman the surgery she needs. In other words, when 10 people write cheques for $30, one woman's life is drastically improved.

Effective philanthropy
What can $150,000 buy?

If you're a professional musician, it can buy a music video -- and it's easy to blow much more than that on staff, union workers, caterers, makeup artists, equipment and travel.

But if you live in Afghanistan, it can buy clinics and medicine; in Africa, classrooms and books, shelters for refugee camps, ambulances and irrigation and scholarships.

Musician Sarah McLachlan chose to spend the $150,000 allocated to her "World on Fire" music video on services for the world's needy. Instead of buying one ephemeral piece of advertising, the money paid the total running costs for a year of an orphanage in South Africa and a street children's hospital in India; purchased six months' worth of medicine for 5,000 people in Nairobi, Kenya; provided counselling and schooling for 70 child soldiers; and much, much more.

And then she went ahead and made a video, for $15, that puts faces on the faceless by revealing all that was done with the rest of the money and by making staggering comparisons between what the money could have bought and what it actually did buy. The video reveals, for example, that $5,000 can pay for hair and makeup services on a set or it can fund schooling for 145 Afghani girls.

This was much more than a mindless publicity stunt. McLachlan and her producer, Sophie Muller, decided to make the video this way after being moved to action by a story they'd read on the Engineers Without Borders website. Their hope was that by making the video they would be able to illustrate how easy it is to turn wealth, especially tremendous wealth, into worldchanging actions.

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Excerpted from Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century, edited by Alex Steffen. Copyright 2006 by Worldchanging. Published by Abrams, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Excerpted with permission from Harry N. Abrams. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced except with permission in writing from the publisher.