Equality Golbat: “When you donate hair to Locks of Love, there is an 80% chance it will wind up in the garbage.”
I can get similar odds by literally throwing my hair at a garbage can.
Statistically, a charity that uses less than two thirds of its donation money for its central mission is in the bottom 10% of charities, in terms of efficiency and fiscal responsibility. Locks of Love uses less than one third of the hair they receive. (and I’m pretty sure they aren’t using the hair to buy TV spots.)
I should also mention that they actually don’t give people hair. They sell it. What good is a charity that doesn’t give free things to people in need? That’s not a charity. That’s a for-profit business.
I recommend Pantene Beautiful Lengths.
–Nidoqueen
Their website is dripping in pink ribbon (which I am not a fan of) but this is all really good information.
Just to point out, Pantene is owned by Procter and Gamble. They are literally a for-profit business. Not in the “nonprofit that’s using its money poorly” sense, but in the “actually a publicly traded company with assets totaling over $139 billion” sense.
Also, Locks of Love has a pretty solid rating from Charity Navigator, and appears to use 91.6% of their funds for their actual charitable purpose (which includes not just wigs but alopecia research). As for rejecting the hair, the reasons this happens seem to be the fairly sensible and straightforward “it is upon inspection not of sufficient quality to use in wigmaking,” which is actually a fairly good reason not to use it in wigmaking. Much of this seems to be donations that don’t meet their stated requirements.
Here, by the way, is the article where most of these facts come from – an eight year old New York Times article that is clearly also the original source for all of these criticisms, which are based on cherry picked facts that give a distorted picture of what the article actually says.
So as far as I can tell, golbatsforequality is spreading misinformation in order to get people to support a for-profit company’s “shit let’s reduce our tax bill” charitable donations department instead of a nonprofit organization that is, while imperfect, doing a pretty good job.
That eight year old NYT article is cool and all, but there’s this 2 year old article as well: