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- [00:00]
Lori Styron
Okay i have to tell you i.
- [00:02]
Isaac Saul
Was just looking on ebay where i.
- [00:03]
Lori Styron
Go for all kinds of things i love and there it was that hologram trading card one of the rarest the last one i needed for my set shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams one of a kind ebay had it and now everyone's asking ooh where'd.
- [00:18]
Ari Weitzman
You get your windshield wipers ebay has all the parts that fit my car.
- [00:22]
Lori Styron
No more annoying just beautiful millions of fines each with a story ebay things people love ai.
- [00:33]
Ari Weitzman
Had the time of.
- [00:35]
Lori Styron
My life a i never felt this.
- [00:39]
Isaac Saul
Way before from building timelines to assigning.
- [00:42]
Lori Styron
The right people and even spotting risks across dozens of projects monday sidekick knows.
- [00:47]
Isaac Saul
Your business thinks ahead and takes action one click on the star and consider.
- [00:51]
Lori Styron
It done and i owe it all.
- [00:53]
Isaac Saul
To you try monday sidekick ai you'll love to use on monday dot com.
- [01:00]
Commercial Announcer
Amazon pharmacy presents painful thoughts twenty more.
- [01:06]
Lori Styron
Minutes to kill in the pharmacy before.
- [01:07]
Ari Weitzman
My prescription is ready maybe i'll grab some deeply discounted out of season halloween candy i never had a chocolate pumpkin with raisins before those were raisins right.
- [01:21]
Lori Styron
Next time use amazon pharmacy we deliver and no those were not raisins amazon.
- [01:27]
Ari Weitzman
Pharmacy healthcare just got less painful.
- [01:36]
Lori Styron
From.
- [01:36]
Isaac Saul
Executive producer isaac saul this is tangle.
- [01:51]
Ari Weitzman
Good morning good afternoon and good evening this is tangle managing editor ari weitzman here with interview for you to listen to over our holiday break as usual we're taking some time off between now and new year's to try to refresh recharge take a break from the news cycle and we're hoping you allow some time for yourself to do the same be with family rest recharge at the same time we know the news doesn't stop so over break we're releasing a series of interviews with guests for podcast listeners only today i'm joined by lori styron the executive director of charity watch which is an organization that reviews and assesses the effectiveness of different nonprofits and charities operating the united states i wanted to talk to lori because after doing my holiday shopping i was really curious about the donations that i was prompted to make at the checkout line often these were for organizations i hadn't heard of before and i was curious when i clicked that button to give dollar one dollar two a checkout how do i know where it's going what do i know about these organizations really am i a bad person if i don't want to say yes at checkout with everybody behind me watching so i wanted to talk to somebody who could help give me those answers lori's been in this business for decades and in our conversation i ask her what are these charities how can i know whether or not they're doing what they're doing what are some of the good ones how can i separate the good from the bad should i be clicking yes at checkout it's a great conversation with a lot of simple and nuanced advice for listeners for the holiday season hope you enjoy it thanks for listening hope you enjoy it it's a good one okay i'm here today with lori styron who is the executive director of the charity watchdog group charity watch and we're going to talk today about charities how we watch them her company's methodology and check out charities specifically so thank you so much for joining us today lauri welcome.
- [03:56]
Lori Styron
To the show well thanks so much for having me this is an important topic especially this time of year because people you know donate a lot for the holidays but also they're trying to get their last minute donations in for tax deduction reasons and so this is the perfect time to be talking about.
- [04:12]
Ari Weitzman
This topic that's my thought too i was recently thinking about this doing my holiday shopping at the checkout for store after store they have their own charities that i don't know anything about and i'm sure a lot of people don't either so it's really useful to have people who are experts in this industry tell us how to separate the good from the bad if there even is such a thing as the bad or the good i don't know so hopefully you can help shed some light on.
- [04:43]
Lori Styron
That for us sure well i've been doing this work for twenty two years now so i have a lot of information to offer but i guess you know my elevator pitch to people is always choose the charity don't let the charity choose you there are about two million nonprofit organizations in the united states and within that you know the five hundred one c three public charities there's hundreds of thousands of those so there's no way that you're going to be able to memorize which charities are good or bad or you know there's no way that you can have a concise list that you can just take with you as you go grocery shopping that you can check to see if a charity is good in the checkout line it's just not practicable to do that and so it's really more important to kind of arm yourself with best practices right as a donor so that you just can resist the pressure to give impulsively in the moment and i want.
- [05:43]
Ari Weitzman
To get into what those best practices are but first i think i want to learn a little bit more about you so you just said you have all of this experience in the nonprofit industry i'm curious how you got started in the nonprofit industry and why you started charity watch what got you in the door in the first place with.
- [06:00]
Lori Styron
This kind of work sure well when i was young i grew up in the country i spent a lot of time by myself so i guess i'm more philosophical kind of a person but i care a lot about other people i care about the state of the world and i also care about justice and you know when you donate there are a lot of bad actors that are trying to separate you from the money you have to enrich themselves right but there's just as many if not more actually there's more really great people in the world who want to take your money and do something good with it and help people and so part of achieving justice in this regard is for me to try to help people understand how do i get my donations directed to those charities that are responsible have good governance and operate financially efficiently so that when i do give up something giving up going out to dinner with my friends this weekend or giving up getting a nicer gift for a relative to give to charity instead how do i make sure that that's actually gonna accomplish something good rather than being diverted to someone who just wants to exploit my generosity so when i was young i started out volunteering with habitat for humanity painting houses and the local church i did a little bit of volunteering there but i've always been someone who's been interested in getting people to do the right thing doing the right thing myself and making the world a better place.
- [07:44]
Ari Weitzman
And that brought you to the nonprofit industry then take me to charity watch let's jump ahead from there to you found charity watch what's the goal what are you trying to do with this organization and how do you do it i think just as importantly because i can find several different charity rating organizations online what separates charity watch or what is your methodology that you use to try to ascertain whether or not a company's fulfilling its goal or nonprofits fulfilling its goal of trying to get your dollar into the hands of the people that they say that they're.
- [08:20]
Lori Styron
Trying to help sure well i actually am not the founder of charity watch i have been working with charity watch for twenty two years yeah but charity watch was founded in nineteen ninety two and this was back when everything was on paper and you had to actually go down to the attorney general's office and pay five cents per page to get audited financial statements and tax filings and the founder daniel boruchoff that's exactly what he did and he was my mentor for many many years before i took over as the leader but setting the history aside i would say that our mission has always been steadfast and hasn't changed much we want to make sure that people actually get the information they need to make informed giving decisions so to get into the methodology of our approach please so i'm an accountant and the founder of charity watch and my mentor for many years was also an accountant so we actually understand the numbers and charity financial reporting is just notoriously inaccurate inconsistent incomplete and incomparable especially when you're just looking at the tax filings so there's a number of online databases that they rate hundreds of thousands of charities and that would work okay if the underlying reporting was reliable but it's not not only is it not reliable because a lot of charities lie in their unaudited tax filings because tax filings are not audited and those automated ratings are based on the tax filings but they're just incomplete due to the complexity of financial reporting so at charity watch we actually have degreed accountants do a very deep analysis of independent audited financial statements all of the tax filings of the legal entities that are included in those statements so we do a really deep dive we make adjustments for again inaccuracies incomplete data data that charities report differently from year to year even though it's the same activity and then incomparable data because there's a lot of different accounting methodologies that charities can use to present their financial reporting and if you just take those numbers at face value without making the information comparable you're not going to be able to come up with ratings that are comparable right that consistently reflect if i donate one hundred dollars to this organization how will it really be used so unfortunately as much as it would be great to be able to run a tax form through a formula and spit out a reliable rating it just isn't possible and that's why we exist as a true watchdog versus just a raiding organization.
- [11:26]
Commercial Announcer
We'Ll.
- [11:27]
Ari Weitzman
Be right back after this quick break parle tu francais hablas espanol par l' italiano if you've used babbel you would babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world with lessons handcrafted by over two hundred language experts and voiced by real native speakers babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket start speaking with babbel today get up to fifty five percent off your babbel subscription right now at babbel dot com acast spelled b a b b e l dot com baby acast rules and restrictions may apply as a.
- [12:12]
Isaac Saul
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- [13:20]
Ari Weitzman
Okay so if i try to put that into a nutshell for myself to understand sounds like what you're saying is you can automate through an automated approach take the tax filings of different nonprofits different charity organizations and try to get some general insight over what they're doing and how they're doing it but those reports aren't directly comparable to each other there's no industry standard that will tell you i'm going to plug this into a spreadsheet and it's going to spit out a number for me and those reports aren't super reliable because they're not audited so it sounds like what you're telling me is the process of reviewing the financials for organizations is a really manual process that's specific to each organization and it takes a lot of work to go dig into those numbers and come up with a.
- [14:08]
Lori Styron
Report basically right yeah that's exactly right and we can hope in the future that as ai becomes more reliable or certain automation techniques become more reliable hopefully there will be some things that we can implement to make portions of the rating process more efficient but you know until the underlying data is reliable and doesn't need a lot of adjustments you know it's always going to be a somewhat manual process to get to the bottom of how donations are being used i can give you some specific examples there's one charity that they got a perfect score on another rating website it's still there the perfect score it's a cancer charity and they just got their fundraiser just got in trouble with the federal trade commission because it turned out that millions and millions of dollars that people had donated the donors were told that those dollars were going to be used to fund breast exams and instead less than one percent of the donations were used for that purpose and the vast majority of the money was actually being funneled to a fundraising company another example is there is a really large national charity that you know i'm not going to name names here just because you know for legal reasons i feel like to give all these charities a fair shot we'd have to just present too much information that would be kind of beyond the scope of our conversation today but these examples are real and they're based on real charities another example is there was a really large national charity that's a household name that they recently had to pay out two billion dollars with a b of sexual abuse claims and in the charity tax filing charities have to allocate their expenses to program or overhead overhead includes you know management and fundraising and then there's programs so when charities spend their money they have to tell you did i spend it on programs or did i spend it on overhead they booked those sexual abuse claims expenses as a program expense so interesting so in the automated database rating databases this charity got a ninety nine percent program score and it's like well okay sure that's where they reported the expense in their tax filing but and were they allowed under irs rules to put it there maybe but the fact is that if you're a donor and you're saying well if i give money to this charity how efficiently will it be used and then you're told well ninety nine percent of it will go to programs are you thinking oh that's a program is paying sexual abuse claims from decades and decades of sexual abuse right so you have to kind of see the forest through the trees here and a manual review can get down to what donors really want to know which is i'm being asked to donate for a specific purpose right to help injured veterans to help feed hungry people to help kids with cancer is my money really gonna be spent on that that's what people wanna know and the automated databases aren't going to tell you that or if they do tell you that it's just a very arbitrary moment where if the tax filing just happens to be perfectly completed then yeah then the automation can tell you that but there's so many instances where those.
- [17:57]
Ari Weitzman
Numbers aren't reliable and i'm thinking of one instance in particular here which you are being careful about avoiding using individual examples which i appreciate because you don't want to cherry pick things just for the sake of of elucidation for one interview listeners can go to charitywatch dot org and get any charities breakdown from you directly if they're curious but one example that i think goes into what i want to discuss with you more in depth is the american diabetes association's link to in store charities at cvs i know that there was recently a couple years ago a settlement that cvs had to a challenge that they had with the diabetes association where they had a pledge to donate a certain amount of millions of dollars i think ten million dollars to diabetes research they asked customers at checkout to donate money to diabetes association research and then that money they used as part of the pledge they had already made to donate to the diabetes association so in a sense they're saying yeah give us this money and then we're going to give it to the diabetes association they did exactly that but they had already pledged to do it so in a way they and from if you're looking at it from just the numbers perspective you might say all of that money is going to where they said it would go but when you broaden the scope out a little bit you can say well that actually doesn't kind of check out because they're telling us that they were going to donate this money instead but they're actually asking customers to do that for them so that's kind of an example of one of those instances where you might think that you're donating something in a straightforward way but when you look at it through a different perspective you might see a picture that's less no pun intended here but less charitable.
- [19:45]
Lori Styron
Towards the organization right right so that case is definitely unusual especially due to the scale of it because if you're you know shopping at a local grocery store a very small business it's anyone's guess right there could be a charity connected to a family member there could be anything going on but we don't really expect these kinds of things with like large national companies you know partnering with a large national charity but essentially in that case what happened is yes the company made a pledge from the company so the company should have used its own money to fulfill that pledge but instead what was alleged is that they were collecting money from customers to fulfill the pledge and right so that's a very different thing there's tax implications to that there's just being transparent with donors there's an implication of that donors thinking that their money is going to help the cause when really they're just fulfilling some other separate donor's pledge it's my understanding that that case was dismissed and you know i'm an accountant not a lawyer so i can't you know draw a legal conclusion about that it's my understanding that there were just you know of course you know in lawsuits you have to have a preponderance of evidence in many cases and there's a lot of technical reasons why it may have been dismissed but whether or not anything illegal was done you know we can certainly say that there were definitely some ethically questionable things about that arrangement but this should really just be kind of a learning moment for everyone but donors especially that it's just donating money in the checkout line you're inherently making an impulsive decision and unless you're familiar with the charity if this is a charity you already donate to routinely then okay maybe you know it's a good charity but you know if you're already donating to it anyway then you know giving eighty cents in the checkout line isn't going to move the needle very much but a lot of the time people don't know the charity you know when they're being asked to donate to it and so there's a lot of problems with that the first one being how soon will the charity get your donation like will the company hold onto it for months or years before it's conveyed to to the charity is it a good charity is it financially efficient does it have good independent governance but another issue that a lot of people don't think about especially in this impulsive moment in the checkout line is does the charity's mission actually align with your values because you might be solicited for example for a cancer research charity and who doesn't want to cure cancer that's great but what if you're like an animal lover and this particular research charity does vivisection right does live animal experiments then even though the cause is good and you'd like to support that cause maybe this particular charity isn't the one that would align with your values and so you're not gonna be able to make these assessments about a charity's efficiency and governance and values in the five to ten seconds you have in the checkout line.
- [23:15]
Commercial Announcer
We'Ll be right back after.
- [23:16]
Ari Weitzman
This quick break.
- [23:21]
Commercial Announcer
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- [24:20]
Lori Styron
Okay i have to tell you i.
- [24:22]
Isaac Saul
Was just looking on ebay where i.
- [24:24]
Lori Styron
Go for all kinds of things i love and there it was that hologram.
- [24:27]
Ari Weitzman
Trading card one of the rarest the.
- [24:29]
Lori Styron
Last one i needed for my set shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams one of a kind ebay had it and now everyone's asking ooh where'd.
- [24:38]
Ari Weitzman
You get your windshield wipers ebay has all the parts that fit my car.
- [24:42]
Lori Styron
No more annoying just beautiful millions of finds each with a story ebay things people love.
- [25:00]
Ari Weitzman
And personally i am this is going to be a little bit of a tangent but i'm going to bring us right back i'm a big fan of the cold war kids first album robbers and cowards one of the best rock albums of the century i'll stand by that they have a song about from the perspective of a person who's stealing from the church's charity from the donation bin and it includes in it this line this justification from the thief that was the sinners not knowing where their money's going is as sinful as throwing away and i think about that line all the time when i'm at the checkout line because i think yeah but i don't really know what i'm giving to here so as much as i want to support these charities i don't know anything about it and would it be actually ethical for me to save that dollar for later and give it to some organization that i already trust which it sounds like what you're saying then the counterpoint to that which i'd be curious to hear you respond to is from the perspective of the charity might this be a really efficient way to collect a lot of money because maybe my eighty cents is not going to move the needle but if i'm a charity that's able to get a deal with some large grocery chain and have them prompt millions of transactions over the span of a couple months to donate just eighty cents to me that's going to be a huge huge boon to my goals and it seems like it would be efficient if i'm thinking about it from the perspective of the charity there's already a payment mechanism right there if they're paying by credit card maybe that is part of the transaction fee i don't have to worry about that the way that that gets sent to me could be really effective so could there actually be a good reason to say okay maybe i don't know exactly where it's going but i have to trust somebody's doing some due diligence work here and if i see that my local grocery store in december is telling me hey give twenty five cents for this local soup kitchen or this general food pantry charity that's in the region if i'm doing that with a lot of people i could really be doing some good there so maybe that's worth it if i'm not sure what i'm exactly what the name of the charity is and just trusting that as part of a larger movement i could be effectively making a lot of change with only a little bit of effort for my part well you.
- [27:14]
Lori Styron
Know as with all things there's always nuance right and also there's no guarantees in life i do want to say i am going to borrow that line that you gave from the song i hope so great album yeah but you know as you said it's a completely legitimate point that you know this could be an incredibly efficient way for a charity to raise money because you have a captive audience the person's already there this is just kind of like a quick extra thing they're doing while they're already in line and so a charity can avoid paying millions of dollars potentially to telemarketers or direct mail companies or to a professional fundraiser an internal staff member to do fundraising but you're rolling the dice so i would say there are a few things that would help give you more confidence that maybe this is an okay way to donate on a case by case basis first do you trust the company like is this a grocery store or is this a local pharmacy or is this a company that you trust okay good if you kind of know something about them and you feel like you can trust them fine do you know which charity it is you know if it's a local food bank or soup kitchen those types of organizations domestic violence shelter those types of organizations usually have shoestring budgets and they don't have a lot of cash on hand and they're pretty much spending money as fast as they can get it because there's always more need than there are resources to meet those needs so if it checks those boxes in rounding up eighty cents you could make an argument that okay i'm probably not going to i'm going to procrastinator i'm probably not going to get around to donating otherwise so i'm just going to go for it and donate it's certainly a choice that you can make that if you have a reasonable confidence in the company and the charity and you're familiar with it you can do that but as a general point of view most people don't know a lot about the inner workings of the people who own the company or and oftentimes they're not familiar with the charity that they're being asked to donate to and so you're just you're really rolling the dice and you know charity checkout donations those were more i feel like you could make a better argument for that in the eighties and part of the nineties you know before we had the ability to donate online right because you know a couple decades ago it was like you couldn't even know that a charity existed without somebody kind of mailing you something or asking you for money in a checkout line you didn't even know.
- [30:07]
Ari Weitzman
They existed flyer at the grocery store in or out like the salvation army.
- [30:12]
Lori Styron
Bellringer for instance exactly right so that was the way you know to even have people even know you existed as a charity you had to really have boots on the ground right and have something tangible to hand somebody or a poster or a flyer or a meeting or something and these days that's just not really necessary anymore because everything's online including the ability to donate so it's also not the case that you'd have to drive home and get your checkbook and make phone calls and do research and then drive back to the store and write a check these days what you could do is you could say oh wow thanks for letting me know about this charity but i'm not gonna donate right now i'm gonna go home i'm gonna make sure this is a good charity and then i'll just go ahead and donate directly and hopefully i'll donate more than i would have in the checkout line instead of eighty cents or dollar two i'll donate dollar fifty so the logistics of everything are just very different now and it kind of makes less of a case for these checkout donations that makes sense and it.
- [31:14]
Ari Weitzman
Is a little bit reaffirming personally for myself the thing that i try to do is i have three or four charities that i researched i really like them they seem to get good ratings from watchdog groups and i set up recurring donations twenty dollars forty dollars a month to these charities and then when i'm at the trackout line i could think i already know what i'm doing i'm supporting these companies but i wonder if you can tell us if i'm a person who's looking for those charities it's christmas season it's holiday season i'm out shopping i get the checkout notification and this conversation's in my head and i'm thinking well i don't really know this charity i'm gonna say no this time but it's in the back of my head i don't think i'm doing enough when i go home and research charities what are some good guidelines for me to use when i'm trying to assess whether or not a charity is doing what it's trying to do.
- [32:06]
Lori Styron
It'S you know it can be difficult for a layperson because there's so many ways for charities to make themselves look good in their reporting and in their marketing even when they're doing very little but spending money on fundraising and overhead or funneling money to the people who run it so you know we are one resource charitywatch dot org we have about seven hundred charity ratings of large national charities and again we really dig into the finances and spend many many hours per charity figuring out what's going on so we can tell you the donor how your money will be spent but.
- [32:45]
Ari Weitzman
There'S thousands of charities out there right.
- [32:48]
Lori Styron
But most charities in the us have budgets of a million dollars or less so most of the money is flowing through the top eight percent of charities about ninety two percent of charities i believe have budgets of a million dollars or less so most of the large national charities that's really where most of the money is flowing through i see and that's really where and those are really the charities most people are familiar with right because if you have like a small food pantry in oklahoma that's not really of national scope or interest but some of these big name charities those are the ones that we rate due to the in depth nature of our analysis right it just that does limit the number of groups we rate but when we do publish a rating we can have a lot of confidence in it but we have a top rated list that we have organized by cause so if you're someone who wants to help veterans or animals or you know any sort of different cause we have things organized by cause and we have a list of top rated charities that if you know what cause you want to support but just don't know which charities working in that cause are good you can just refer to our top rated list and then if i.
- [34:00]
Ari Weitzman
Wanted to maybe try to maximize my dollar in my local community that would require me trying to find maybe local papers that have gotten into these organizations or looking at their timeline how long they've been operating or some other local authority that can try to help me out or what are some things that i could do if i'm like well there's this local food pantry it's trying to give back for instance i live in vermont i know that there are vermont based food banks that are trying to give to people in the state where i live that sounds really attractive to me what are some things that i can look at when i'm trying to ascertain one vermont based food bank.
- [34:38]
Lori Styron
Compared to another sure so you know one thing is even if you know there are not the resources to thoroughly vet every single charity you want to donate to there are conditions that make it more likely that the charity is good and responsibly governed right so you're going to want to look for charities and you can usually find this on a charity's website you can also look in many of the online databases that have charity tax forms in them so one of them is propublica it's a great one they have a nonprofit explorer where you can find charity tax filings the irs database also has charity tax filings but you can most often just look on the charity's website you want to make sure that the charity actually has a sufficiently large board of directors if there's a local charity and you just see one person's name associated with it and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of community involvement especially with something like a food bank or a soup kitchen then it's a little more questionable okay are there actually is there adequate oversight here is this just kind of of one person where i'm just trusting this one person when there's a large enough board of directors there's more of a diversity of opinion there's less likelihood that two or three people can collude if you have a board of five or ten people so charity tax filings and websites also have things usually posted about privacy policies are they going to respect your data as a donor do they have on their website a conflict of interest policy you know a document destruction policy these are all best practices so it's not a guarantee but looking at the board composition looking at the policies do they look like they're proactively governing the charity those are all good signals but again i think i alluded to this earlier food banks domestic violence shelters homeless shelters soup kitchens those are not the areas where we see a ton of fraud and abuse just because those types of organizations they're fulfilling a need that there's so much more need than there are resources for it so there's just not a lot of cash lying around for those causes so most of the time donating to those types of causes doesn't have quite as.
- [37:14]
Ari Weitzman
Much risk okay so if i were to try to this long thirty minute conversation so obviously there's a lot of gray a lot of nuance individual cases are going to be different i think i'm getting the sense of that but if i'm trying to take away a couple nuggets of information a couple nuggets of advice from this conversation it would be the best thing i could do is research the charities i want to give to be really confident in them and then give to those charities but if i'm at my local checkout store or local checkout in my grocery store and something comes up to prompt me to give one or two dollars to a local food bank i might not be a hundred percent confident but i can feel pretty decent about the chances of that food bank giving my money to the people who i'm hoping will get those benefits more or less right.
- [38:02]
Lori Styron
But you know again with these aren't.
- [38:03]
Ari Weitzman
Scams usually right okay usually not but.
- [38:08]
Lori Styron
This is an important takeaway cause i know we probably don't have too much time left charities can legally spend ninety nine percent of your donation on overhead without breaking the law that's kind of insane yeah so this is you know this could be a conversation in and of itself but basically in the nineteen eighties there were a few supreme court cases that you know states were trying to regulate charity overhead and there were fundraisers and charities that were saying but fundraising we incorporate a lot of messaging and a lot of education into our fundraising and so by limiting the dollars that we can pay for that you're actually limiting our speech so long story short on first amendment grounds these cases went all the way to the supreme court and on first amendment grounds basically the courts decided that governments cannot regulate the amount of money that charities spend on overhead so you know do we want the government regulating our speech right i mean that gets really dicey but on the other hand people need to understand that there's not just this inherent protection built into the law that's going to guarantee that most of your donation is actually spent on the thing that the charity was soliciting you for so you know being proactive is the number one thing that you can do as a donor to not be duped into donating to the wrong charity so think about what causes are most important to you find charities working in that cause that have a good reputation that have a good rating on our site if we don't have information do they have a solid board of directors do they have good policies in place you know and then once you find a number of charities narrow it down to ones whose programs align with your values some organizations are just doing advocacy while others are providing direct support to people in need figure out which thing you want to support right and then donate generously if you can right but it's always best to to donate from a proactive place of empowerment rather than from a passive place of letting the charity choose you and you know when it comes to the checkout donations in particular i think people need to self reflect and i have to you know i have to do this myself i'm a midwesterner we hate saying no to people you.
- [40:43]
Ari Weitzman
Know and there are other people watching you sometimes behind you that's part of.
- [40:49]
Lori Styron
It right are they gonna think i'm a horrible person so that's the thing we have to self reflect about what's our real motivation for donating in the checkout line are we actually donating because it's like oh i deeply care about this cause and i care about being a compassionate caring person who shares and who helps people or is it really more about avoiding social discomfort right because if you think of it from that perspective that's really a more ego driven decision than a generosity driven decision and so i would say again thank you for letting me know that this charity exists i'm not gonna donate right now but i'm gonna go home and check it out and then if i like it i'm gonna donate even more than i would have today and then check out your stuff and move on.
- [41:42]
Ari Weitzman
So before you donate at the checkout go home and check it out that's corny.
- [41:48]
Lori Styron
That'S right it's corny but it's accurate.
- [41:51]
Ari Weitzman
A lot of actionable information here it's good to know the resources exist it's helpful to know what kind of questions to ask if i'm trying to look at an organization's website myself and i really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today talk to me specifically and let our readers know about all of this it's really helpful and.
- [42:07]
Lori Styron
Appreciate your time yeah of course anytime if something comes up in the future please feel free to hit me up.
- [42:13]
Ari Weitzman
We'Re always here will do laurie styron thanks for joining us and happy holidays to you and yours and to you.
- [42:19]
Lori Styron
As well thanks so much.
- [42:22]
Ari Weitzman
Right that's it for my conversation with laurie styron very helpful for me i hope it was informative for you thanks for listening we're going to be back in your ear with other podcast episodes over break and then back in your inbox after we return in twenty twenty six happy holidays happy new year thanks for listening talk to you soon our executive editor and founder is me isaac sowell and our executive producer is john lowell today's episode was edited and engineered by dewey thomas our editorial staff is led by managing editor ari weitzman with senior editor will kaback and associate editor hunter casperson audrey moorhead bailey saw lindsay knuth and kendall white music for the podcast was produced by diet seventy five to learn more about tangle and to sign up for a membership please visit our website at retangle dot com.
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