I donated to this charity years ago. I picked the country, and was supposed to get back progress reports on which water project my donation was helping. But I never heard back.

They now have quite a list of full-time staff, possibly even bloated and top-heavy.

For those of you who are questioning charity: water, it gets a really good rating of 67.32/70 on Charity Navigator. 87.2% of its revenue goes towards program expenses, 5.2% for administrative overhead, and 7.5% for fundraising expenses. Those numbers are for the 2011 tax year.

http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary...

So we should donate to this because... it has "Reddit" in the title? The project description has no mention of how the funding will be used, just that whatever is planned will cost ~$50, followed by a meaningless message containing "facts" about water quality with no direct relationship to the campaign at hand.

I do believe that access to potable water is one of the world's largest issues, but I'd much rather donate my money to an organization with a clear plan.

(Also, does this money simply go to Charity Water, or does "Trey" run this campaign & project himself? I couldn't find anything about that, but I'd be concerned that the majority of his projects haven't even raised over $80 in funding. http://my.charitywater.org/p/myprojectsview?project_id=ET.IR... )

On a side note, has anybody heard of the LifeStraw (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeStraw)? It seemed to have massive potential to combat this issue, but I guess it was turned into a consumer product instead..??

Charity for water is an idiotic as well as dangerous idea .

Water is a precious commodity and it should be treated as such. You can live without Oil but not without water.

If you want to help people with their water shortages, give them money to buy clean water. If you are digging a well for them or any other such service, let the community pay for it. You will find that your wells and your equipment will last longer.

Once people understand precious water really is, they will stop wasting it and polluting it.

Moreover, India does not have shortage of fresh water sources and they also have ample rainfall, India has a shortage of efficient storage and distribution of clean water.

Why is there no Reddit integration?

Pitting /r/atheism and /r/Christianity together (just an example), might be quite effective. In fact I believe it already happened in the past though I can't remember the specific instance right now.

There's been a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#Philanthropic_efforts

Unrelated thing that crossed my mind: while brazilians that post here have a quality of life similar to americans, computer stuff is pretty expensive. Couldn't geeks travelling to brazil bring their MBPs and sell them for the price of a new one in the US?

You can also support this charity by buying this Humble Weekly bundle (there's one day left): https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly

Another reputable organization in this space is the 20 year old Kansas City based http://water.org/

I thought Steorn was going to do this!