Your local food bank. Now more than ever.
ACLU and NPR are my top 2.
I proudly donate to Planned Parenthood, The Satanic Church, and NPR on a monthly basis.
Edit: The Satanic TEMPLE. My mistake. 🙂
I reeally hope you mean The Satanic Temple? Because The Church of Satan is actually religious.
What are you trying to accomplish?
Are you trying to save human lives? Reduce suffering? Reduce some specific harm, such as from pandemics, or from severe weather due to climate change, or from trampling by elephant? Cure the specific disease that killed your great-aunt? Stomp Nazis?
If you say what you think is worth doing, people can point you to specific groups that are doing it.
Housing and food for your communities.
Then donate time and money to Habitat for Humanity. They’re the only reason I own a home.
If you’re in the U.S., the Institute for Justice does a ton of good work. They’re a nonprofit that picks up cases to help out those who can’t afford to do so. They’ve gotten a lot of cases all the way to the supreme court.
They’re committed to challenging things like qualified immunity, or civil asset forfeiture. Things that really need to be taken on given what we see happening today.
Edit: Link: https://ij.org/cases/supreme-court-cases/
Agree it’s dependent on your personal values and goals. I prefer environmental causes and also try to help smaller local animal rescues because they’re often run on shoestring budgets so a little goes a long way, whereas bigger non-profits have access to more resources.
Would recommend researching whatever you end up choosing.Many charities spend a lot of money on executive pay or marketing vs. core programs. I’ll usually check annual reports for budgets or see if they’re on Charity Navigator.
All my non profit/charity donations are informed by Effective Altruism. I’m very much against inefficient or highly bureaucratic organizations where 98c of your € goes to maintaining a monolith.
EA’s recommendations are based on: Extreme effectiveness, Research based practices, and Third-party evaluation.
Strongly recommend them as a way to make sure your donations impact the most lives.
Immune Deficiency Foundation
https://primaryimmune.org/