If you're more skeptical of charities than you used to be, you've got good reason.

The last few years brought a steady drumbeat of stories about organizations where almost nothing reached the cause, where a penny on the dollar made it to the people the charity existed to serve and the rest disappeared into overhead, fundraising costs, salaries, and consultants.

Closer to home, people are asking the question out loud. Local outlets and local voices are pushing nonprofits and government agencies to explain where the money goes, and they're right to. Nobody is owed public trust. Organizations earn it by opening the books, and you should withhold it from any organization that won't.

We'd rather be part of the answer than part of the problem, so here's exactly how we operate.

We'll show you the money

Friends of Jack publishes where our grants go and what they bought. Not a category breakdown. The actual grants, the actual recipients, the actual purpose.

You can read it here: friendsofjack.org/impact/transparency

Compare it to the alternative. You cut a check to a large national organization, you get a receipt and an annual report with a pie chart in it, and you have essentially no idea what happened to your money after it left your account. That's the norm, and most people have quietly accepted it.

At Friends of Jack, we believe you shouldn't have to.

Our overhead is two salaries

Two full-time people run this foundation. Our administrative cost is essentially their salaries. We have no rent and very little in the way of operational expenses. Jill Fearons, who founded the organization, went five years without taking a salary at all.

That structure is a choice, and it's what makes the rest of our work possible.

You can earmark your gift, even a small one

Most of our donors are surprised by this when we discuss it with them.

At most nonprofits, you can't direct where your donation goes. Or more precisely, you can, if you give an enormous amount of money. Restricted giving is a privilege reserved for major donors, which leaves everyone else contributing to a general fund and trusting the organization to allocate it however it sees fit at the end of the year.

We don't work that way.

Give us $500 and tell us you want it to go toward a specific thing, and if that thing is within what we do, we'll do it. There's no minimum for caring about where your money lands.

And if the thing you want to fund is outside what we do, we'll tell you so and point you toward the organization that can actually help.

As people become more skeptical of charitable giving, and they should be, there's going to be a sorting. Some organizations will be able to answer the questions about how donor funds are appropriated and some won't. We want to be one of the organizations that can.

We believe that if you're going to ask people in this community, most of whom give what they can rather than what's easy, to hand over their money for children they'll never meet, you owe them a straight answer about what happened to it.

Almost all of our support comes from local donors and local businesses. We rarely see a gift over $10,000. This foundation runs on ordinary contributions from people who live and work here, and that's the whole reason the books stay open.

See where the money has gone: friendsofjack.org/impact/transparency

Have a question we haven't answered here? Reach us at 508.758.5811 or through friendsofjack.org.