Want a place to check the legitimacy of a charity?
“Founded in 2001, Charity Navigator has become the nation’s largest and most-utilized evaluator of charities. In our quest to help donors, our team of professional analysts has examined tens of thousands of non-profit financial documents. As a result, we know as much about the true fiscal operations of charities as anyone. We’ve used this knowledge to develop an unbiased, objective, numbers-based rating system to assess the financial health of over 5,000 of America’s best-known charities.”
U.S. Federal Trade Commission web site advises those making donations for victims of the Jan. 12 Haiti earthquake to read their web page of dos and don’ts:
http://consumer.gov/ncpw/helping-haiti-give-wisely/
and check the InterAction web site for a description of legitimate charities at: http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti
InterAction is the largest coalition of U.S.-based international nongovernmental organizations focused on the world’s poor and most vulnerable people.