Or I can donate to a church that is doing all of it for free. If the issue is efficiency then isn't it better to donate to individuals doing it for free.
Free doesn’t imply better outcomes or efficiency (doesn’t imply the reverse either).
Imagine a charity could hire someone that would 100x the amount of donations, whether that’s through more effective marketing, connections, etc. how much should a charity be willing to pay for that?
Yes, there are massive systemic problems everywhere. Feel free to go ahead and policy change away the war, disease, hunger, homelessness and so on if you can do that?
You don't need to scale. How many churches are in LA? When I was homeless over there when I was younger, there were spots all over the city that were feeding the homeless. You don't need one giant entity. You just need the community to care. If your community doesn't care no amount of money is going to fix it.
Scale and agility matter during emergencies, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes. In such circumstances, the smaller local organizations are affected by the same problem.
Yeah, they DO need to scale or there wouldn't still be people in LA and everywhere else going hungry.
I'm a Christian who proudly supports our local church's food bank (no strings attached, walk in and take food) -- but I recognize that the Church can't do it alone.
The church down the street from me has it's own food bank (with actual staff, the leader earns $57k according to guidestar) and is also partnered with a local food bank network. It's not like these things run in isolation of each other or are necessarily running that differently just because it's a church.
