The Best Charities That Don’t Take Taxpayer Cash

NEW YORK (MainStreet) – In the continuing aftermath of the Great Recession, spending at all levels of government and society has dried up. Charities have been some of the hardest hit, posting huge drops in donations in recent years, and the tightening of budgets at all levels of government spending has only made the problem worse.

But there is one group of organizations that doesn’t have to worry at all about proposals to slash public budgets and threats of government shutdown: charities that take no taxpayer money from Uncle Sam.

Using ratings from the monitoring website CharityNavigator.org, MainStreet looks at the 10 best charities that take no government money and instead rely entirely on fundraising efforts in the private sector and from the people at large to do their valuable work.

There are 520 groups of the thousands that CharityNavigator tracks that take no government money and carry 4-star ratings. Here we take the 10 best, filtering out organizations that operate only locally and those that operate mainly to collect and distribute funds to other charitable organizations.

We’ve looked at the darker side of the charity world, highlighting the charities with the highest administrative costs and the 15 highest-paid charity CEOs. So as you consider your charitable giving this year, here are some that are worth a second look.