How do charities help?
United States charities focused on the cause of equality of opportunity aim to improve the lives of individuals born into disadvantaged socio-economic situations. They work on areas including early childhood care, education, extra curricular programs, substance abuse prevention, college access, and job training.
What are the challenges of finding a great charity?
Many programs focused on helping people in the United States have not been evaluated, and when they have been, many have found little or no evidence of a significant impact. Furthermore, often programs have been evaluated for only short-term impacts (e.g., increased earnings over the course of a year following the program), and their long-term impact has not been assessed. The effects of programs whose long-term impact has been assessed often fade out over time.
Where should you give?
Within the U.S., we recommend the
Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP is a charter school network aiming to improve academic achievement for low-income students. KIPP stands out from the rest of the charter school organizations we considered, and we believe it improves educational outcomes for the students it serves.
In the past, we have also recommended
Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP). NFP provides nurse home visitors to young, low-income, first-time mothers. Based on multiple randomized controlled trials with more than 10 years of follow up, we believe that NFP improves the lives of the children and mothers it serves. We believe NFP is outstanding but that it has limited short-term
room for more funding.
For more information on U.S. charities, see
all U.S. charities we've considered.
Research process
We discuss the
process and criteria we used to identify our top U.S. charities, and provide further detail on
common evaluation problems and the
sources of evidence we used.
We also reviewed four promising programs in-depth:
Career Academies,
Incredible Years, the
Nurse-Family Partnership program, and
volunteer tutoring.
