Freshman seminar donates a total of $50K to five charities

Tasked with donating $50,000 to charities of their choice through FRS 157: Philanthropy, fifteen freshmen voted to give the money to five organizations: Pratham USA, Breakthrough New York, CHOICE Humanitarian, charity: water and Give Me A Shot.

Wilson School professor Stanley Katz, who taught the class, explained the money was given to them by the Once Upon A Time Foundation. The only stipulation was that the beneficiary had to be a registered United States 501(c)3 organization.

Katz explained that he strived in his teaching to allow students to figure out for themselves how they wanted to donate the money. He did not give them any instruction or make any rules or procedures regarding how the class should divide the funds.

“My approach was in effect to push students into the deep end of the swimming pool without water wings,” he said.

Katz taught the class last spring to graduate students in the Wilson School and will teach the class one final time next fall as a freshman seminar, after which the Once Upon A Time Foundation will no longer donate money for the class to be taught at the University.

The Once Upon A Time Foundation was founded and is directed by Geoffrey Raynor ’89. Raynor’s goal is to encourage college students to understand what philanthropy is and develop the capacity to become philanthropists themselves, Katz explained.

The foundation makes grants to colleges and universities around the country in order to enable them to start courses on philanthropy with substantive funds that students can actually donate.

According to the foundation’s president Sam Lett, the Once Upon A Time Foundation provides the means for students in thirteen top universities to give back in a thoughtful manner and to understand its importance.

Students in the freshman seminar agreed that education was an essential area to which to donate, as many of them believed it is the “root cause” of other issues, Summer Shaw ’16, a student in the seminar said.

In total $28,500 was donated to organizations supporting education, including Pratham USA ($15,000) and Breakthrough New York ($13,500). Pratham USA is a 501(c)3 organization that aims to improve the quality of urban and rural education throughout India. Breakthrough New York is an organization that helps low-income, high-achieving students in New York City receive a college education.

Besides education, many students in the class believed that money should also be donated to international organizations, Tyler Lawrence ’16 added. Several students said that they felt that the donations may be worth more in less developed countries where costs for supplies and services are lower than in the United States.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

“In general, you ought to give to developing nations rather than to the [United States],” philosophy professor Peter Singer said, who believes that a dollar in a developing nation will go farther than a dollar donated in the United States.

In addition, the class donated $7,000 to charity: water, a charity that involves building wells to provide clean drinking water to areas of need around the globe and $13,500 to CHOICE Humanitarian, which helps develop impoverished villages in developing nations like Kenya and Bolivia.

The class also donated $1,000 to a charity started by one of the students in the class, Eduardo Lima ’16, who created Give Me A Shot, a foundation that aims to raise money to purchase basketballs for underprivileged youth. The money from the class will help create a Princeton chapter, as students believed local charities were valuable because they allow them to monitor their progress firsthand.

Singer explained that in his view, when donating to a charity, the ultimate goal should be to make the most difference. He explained that organizations that have high rankings in charity evaluators like GiveWell are usually a good choice. Some of the organizations that the class donated to are ranked highly by GiveWell, while others are not, Singer noted.

“I welcome the idea of the class and getting students to think about this,” Singer said. “We do really need more thought on where to give.”

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of the headline for this article misstated the number of organizations the seminar donated to. Members of the course donated to five organizations. Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this article misstated Center for Human Values professor Peter Singer's statement on the charitable organizations GiveWell rankings. He said they were not highly ranked. The ‘Prince’ regrets the errors.