Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 02/10/18> Operation Grain Train Update….. Charity Navigator rating

On Friday afternoon I put a call into the Operation Grain Train offices in Norfolk, NE. to thank them for all the support that their organization has provided our local community since the disaster we have experienced in the form of flooding from hurricane Harvey. Before I made that call though, I took one last look around the internet trying to gather any additional insight into their operation.

I found a site that reviews charities called Charity Navigator (charitynavigator.com). So in the search box I typed in “orphan grain train” and up popped a page that revealed the information on this charity. Charity Navigator uses a “four stars” rating system. The highest rating would obviously be a four start rating and the lowest would be zero stars. I was not surprised that OGT has a four star rating. In addition to the overall rating system there are subcategories that utilize a rating system of 0 to 100 that contribute to the overall rating. The financial rating for OGT was 95.88 out of 100, their Accountability & Transparency rating was 100 out of 100. The overall numerical rating came in at 97.3 . Those are some pretty impressive numbers in my opinion, but how do they rate against some higher profile charities that we are more aware of, or I should say, we hear of more often?

Everyone has heard of the American Red Cross, seems like each time there is a natural disaster of some sort there will be all sorts ways to donate that appear on your television or computer screen. Radio ads even give you a number you text too that will add your donation to your cell phone bill. Here are the numbers for them; financial was 77.50 , Accountability & Transparency was 100 , making their Overall Score and Rating 84.09 and three Stars out of four.

Another charity I looked at is Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, did you know that there are over 100 of these SGK charities? Not a single one of them could be rated because they lacked the Form 990 that is needed by Charity Navigators to evaluate them. There was one charity though that had the Susan G. Komen name used that was evaluated and had a slightly different name than the others, Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The numbers for “the Cure” are not that impressive; financial 73.60 , A&T 96.00 making the overall 81.11 and a three star rating. This type of charity kind of makes me wonder a little, why are they not all named the same? Seems a little fishy to me that the only one rated is the one with the odd name, but very similar to the other 100. Could it be that the people running this organization have found a way to dupe the public? Have one charity that runs at a pretty decent rating and pretty transparent be the front for some bunch of others that may be just siphoning off charitable donations and rewarding their corporate officers? I don’t know if that is the case, but it does make you wonder about it.

Cancer is a big charity fund raiser for sure, so it would make sense to look at the big one we all know, The American Cancer Society. ACS has a two star rating and a overall score of 71.48 . The ACS financial score is the lowest we have looked at yet, 60.12 . The last time it had a three star rating was eight years ago in 2009. Just like Susan G Komen with multiple locations so does ACS. Right at 50 locations, but only one has the needed paper work in order to be evaluated.
Does this not seem odd that two major charities would have so many locations but so conveniently only one is able to supply the proper forms for evaluation?

To restore a little hope in the charitable organizations I looked at the oldest and largest when it comes to heart disease, The American Heart Association. AHA has four stars and an overall rating of 91.33 . It also doesn’t look like they are hiding anything; they only have one listing, no other similar named charities or locations for the AHA.

According to the Charity Navigator ranking system Orphan Grain Train out performs all these highly recognizable other charity organizations. That might explain why we don’t know much about OGT because they aren’t spending a bunch of money trying to raise more money.

When I called OGT on Friday a live person answered the phone, said hello and asked how can I help you? I asked to speak to Grant, she politely asked my name and said I will put you right through to him sir. Two seconds later the voice on the other end of the line was Grant Schmidt, the director of OGT. “How can I help you today?”, were the first words I was greeted with. I immediately told Grant who I was and told him I wanted to thank him and OGT for the donations of food and supplies that they have sent our way. He seemed a bit surprised, and admitted that he normally doesn’t get calls of thanks. The container of food our church received this week makes the fourth container thus far OGT has sent the church since hurricane Harvey.

I asked if he could tell me a little about how OGT operates and he was more than happy to take the time to do so. From our conversation I learned that OGT is closely aligned with the Lutheran church as an outreach program to help people in need. It is not a part of the church but the majority of the people who donate their time are members of the Lutheran faith. Their fund raising efforts consist of a quarterly newsletter that they print and mail to people who have previously donated or have signed up for their newsletter on their website. Inside the newsletter is a donation form and envelope so that people can enclose a check if they wish and send it back to them.

In talking with Grant he said that the majority of their donations come from people who are nearing retirement age or retired. He expressed that they have some concern about this situation and that was one of the reasons they had opened a page up on Facebook and had gotten a twitter account. They see the need to get younger people familiar with their organization and hopefully those people will be kind enough to help them financially so they can keep helping people. Grant indicated he himself is in his 50’s and when I asked him about his knowledge of crypto currencies his response was he really didn’t know much, but he had heard of BitCoin.

I gave him a brief explanation of the Steemit.com community and our currency, steem. He said that any decisions such as coming into the steemit community would be a decision that the board of directors of OGT would have to decide on and approve. That was the case with the Facebook and twitter decisions, and he is interested in learning more about steemit.com and steem. The major advantage of being a part of our community is you can not only raise awareness you can raise capital in the form of steem and he seemed to like that very much.

I will be working to put together some information that he could look over and ultimately end up taking to the board of directors for consideration. Here is where I can use some help myself; if any of you have any presentations that you have made in the past promoting and explaining steemit and steem I would greatly appreciate it if you would be willing to share that information with me. With me only being here now six months I don’t know enough that I can put together a presentation that would be a board presentation quality about steemit. I am sure though that there are people here who are, so if you’re one of those please help. If you’re not one but know one, please share this post with them.
Together we can help this organization do their mission of serving their fellow man in time of need. They have been around since 1992, and have supplied over 35 million pounds of food to people in need not only here in the United States but 65 additional countries around the world.

Here is my email address that you can communicate with me through, [email protected]

I look forward to seeing this through and I hope you will assist me.

Until next time,
@sultnpapper

https://sola.ai/sultnpapper