Contrarian Charity

摘要

When their father died 14 years ago, Eric Thurman and his three sisters were left with a $1.5 million foundation and a request: Give all of it away to charitable causes. But Thurman, a former radio reporter who later got rich running his own video production company, had little sense of which charities might be effective -and had no one to ask for advice. By 2001 they had distributed the entire fortune, but Thurman still doesn't know how well all the money was used. In the late Nineties he gave $50,000 to an international agency working in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda, "but to this day I don't know what was done with that money," he says.