Allison Mullen & Charlie Marban | GNP contributors
On paper, Jimmy Donaldson’s charity is innovative, successful and enviable. The epitome of best philanthropic practices.
He’ll tell you that himself, online. “We believe we can teach an entire generation to care a little bit more than the generations before them and to truly have an impact on the world, through the actions that we inspire rather than just purely the actions we try to undertake ourselves,” he says on his philanthropy’s website.
But try to do independent fact checks on the good works, and get ghosted, mostly.
The Greenville News Project spent the fall months looking into whether Donaldson’s Beast Philanthropy matches the reality of the spin of the charity’s website and YouTube videos. GNP contacted 26 people and organizations. Only six responded.
Holding private companies accountable is hard enough for journalists. Beast Philanthropy’s efforts to keep its workings away from the public eye are as innovative as some of his charity’s more laudable practices.
Even YouTube videos of Donaldson’s good works are short on details about where and why. The exception is when the work happens in Greenville.
Concern about charity as entertainment
Matthew Wade studies ethics, morality and charity work at Australia’s La Trobe University, and Beast Philanthropy worries him. It turns the people it helps into commodities and fashions into entertainment, he said in an email to GNP.
He makes that point and more in a 2023 commentary on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and in a 2024 article in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing. Wade’s article in the philanthropy journal was part of a special series on Beast Philanthropy’s brand of entertainment-charity.
The way Wade sees it, people who are in need are essential to the Beast Philanthropy revenue model because their responses to the charity fuel YouTube user engagement.
By concentrating on “grand gestures” that avoid the underlying socioeconomic that led to the need for charity, Beast Philanthropy risks trivializing complicated societal issues, Wade told GNP. Those issues involve systemic poverty, food insecurity and inequities in education and healthcare.
He said that turning charity into entertainment can encourage a passive attitude in YouTube viewers. They might believe that merely watching the videos is a meaningful way to contribute, “and that’s what worries me,” Wade said.
There is “the possibility that Beast Philanthropy will induce the exact opposite of political awakening in young people because it fosters a rather passive approach in framing our attention as a gift,” he said.
Beast Philanthropy director Darren Margolias disagrees. He says the philanthropy’s strategy is to build empathy, not make money. The entertainment part of it “has nothing to do with the revenue model. It has to do with the way that humans build empathy,” he told GNP in a Zoom interview.
“But what we try to do with our approach is that we try to humanize the problem,” he said. “And we always do it in a way that the audience will empathize.”
Still, in its annual reports, Beast Philanthropy defines “impact” as the quantity of views its videos get on its YouTube channel.
In one of those videos, Donaldson says that “100% of the revenue from this channel will go towards funding it.” That review comes from views.
To its credit, Beast Philanthropy is among the better-operated charities. Charity Navigator reports that for every dollar Beast Philanthropy takes in, it spends 95 cents of it on its charity programs.
That amounted to $6.9 million in charity spending out of the $9.5 million Beast Philanthropy it took in, according to its latest federal tax filing. It spent that money on organizations in the US and around the world.
Its IRS status as a nonprofit make its tax returns public information.
Good works locally
Beast Philanthropy has worked with charities in Donaldson’s hometown of Greenville to countries such as Cameroon in Africa.
In Greenville, Beast Philanthropy helped Pitt County Schools implement a STEM lab at Wellcome Middle School, and it donated school supplies to South Greenville and Wellcome Elementary.
Beast Philanthropy reached out to PCS with the offers to collaborate, said Beth Ullfers, the school district’s director for outreach and public relations.
Although Beast Philanthropy donated supplies to Pitt County Schools, Ulffers said PCS did not expect anything else to come out of it. “The two instances we had from them were kind of standalone events and we weren't expecting it to be a continuation,” she said.
However, one thing did come out of it and that was the impact, said Ulffers. “The kids absolutely loved it,” she said. “Children like to see superstars come into their buildings and show interest in them, it was a lot of fun for the kids.”
Sharing Excess is among the charities outside Greenville that Beast Philanthropy has helped. The Philadelphia-based Sharing Excess rescues surplus food from grocers, retailers and wholesalers, and distributes it to communities experiencing food insecurity.
The two collaborated in 2023 on a project in New York City, and that work expanded Sharing Excess into other communities in the U.S. and eventually the world, its operations director, Victoria Wilson, told GNP by email.
“We made a video with the Beast Philanthropy team that has over 22 million views,” she said. “We have received interest from individuals around the globe who are interested in starting Sharing Excess in their community. The impact has been incredibly rewarding.”
Sharing Excess continues to goal-set when starting its work in communities around the world, and that includes updates from Beast Philanthropy.
“Our teams regularly meet to give updates and see where we can collaborate,” said Wilson. “Sharing Excess does a lot of logistical work with Beast Philanthropy to help both organizations make as many meals as possible accessible to those experiencing food insecurity.”
Going global
The development charity CDVTA in Cameroon is among Beast Philanthropy’s portfolio of global good works The two collaborated 2022.
CDVTA director Francis Njuakom said that Beast Philanthropy’s Margolias visited Cameroon in 2022 to set up a project to rebuild schools.
He said in an email that Margolias visited several schools and communities in the west region of Cameroon and saw the poor conditions in water and sanitation in the schools due to lack of clean water supply. From that CDVA and Beast Philanthropy built two wells in Cameroon.
CDVTA considers its partnership with Beast Philanthropy as a “hugely life impacting partnership experience,” Njuakom said. “The partnership exemplifies a collaborative approach to community driven development, focusing on building wells, solar energy installations and education infrastructure.”
Beast Philanthropy conducts annual visits to Cameroon to assess projects operations and maintenance and to ensure that the wells are functioning effectively, said Njuakom. It would go on to build more wells across Cameroon.
Mullen and Marban produced this story for the Fall 2024 course In-depth Reporting Capstone at the School of Communication, East Carolina University.
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