Update May 2021 (Charity and Leftover sales)
Its been quite a while since an update. We have completed sending out and remedying issues with orders and shipping, and compiled our finances. Here is a update on our status and changes we are making:
We have just finished sending out the shares to our contributors and will be sending the other part of the profits to charity. We have raised a total of $2,617.06 to donate to charity so far all thanks to everyone!
Initially, we meant to send our donation right after sending out everyone's partial shares, but on closer inspection of our chosen charity (Rainbow Railroad) we found some things that raised concerns:
We were unable to find any independent audits of financial statements from rainbow railroad, except for a single one issued during 2017, and the only reports available on their site are infographics (presumably unaudited). Additionally, charitynavigator states that Rainbow Railroad is unscored on their site "due to only having one year of electronically-filed IRS Form 990 data."
Knowing these, we could not donate our funds to Rainbow Railroad in good confidence. After deliberating further, we decided it would be best to switch to the runner-up charity from our original poll: The Trevor Project . The Trevor Project has consistent, independently audited financial statements starting from 2008 until 2019, and is rated 4 stars on charitynavigator.
For reference, here are the sites and files we used for our research:
Rainbow Railroad:
Website: https://www.rainbowrailroad.org/
CharityNavigator: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/474896980
Financial Infographics: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hyOOPejGRi1u7-Ek1Q7hIhU4UXP31N63?usp=sharing
https://www.rainbowrailroad.org/about#reports
The Trevor Project:
Website: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/
CharityNavigator: https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=11281
Financial Reports: https://www.thetrevorproject.org/about/financials-annual-report/
We have started preparing to send out leftovers to our respective interested contributors. Due to how long this project has gone on, we hope to have as little leftover stock as possible. However, in the case that we do have leftovers to sell, we will update everyone!
Thank you everyone for being patient with us!