Category 1. When you pay your electric or gas bill, buy gas from the gas station, or spend on mass transit, we donate to Eden Reforestation Projects to plant trees. Planting trees helps to offset the carbon footprint of your purchase.
About the nonprofit: Eden Reforestation Projects works with local communities to restore forests on a massive scale, thereby creating jobs, protecting ecosystems, and helping mitigate climate change. Since its inception, they’ve produced, planted, and protected more than 900 million trees, at 266 project sites in ten countries, and empowered more than 11,500 employees with fair wages. Learn more.
How we calculated the donation amount: According to Eden Reforestation Project’s website, the general tree planting price is $0.15 per tree. This cost covers all expenses, including nursery costs, transportation of seedlings to the reforestation sites, planting, guarding, and weeding to allow a head start on vegetation.
Category 2. When you buy groceries or eat at a restaurant, we donate to the World Food Programme (WFP) to provide meals for children at school who are facing hunger.
About the nonprofit: WFP is the world’s largest humanitarian organization, saving lives in emergencies and using food assistance to build a pathway to peace, stability, and prosperity for people recovering from conflict, disasters, and the impact of climate change. Learn more.
How we calculated the donation amount: It costs WFP an estimated $45 to deliver meals to a child for a full school year. We applied a $56 discount to convert the 2012 USD figure to 2022 USD. With 198 school days in the year, the cost to deliver one meal to a child is $0.19. We added a $0.09 buffer to account for any imprecision within our estimate.
Category 3. When you buy coffee, tea, or juice, we donate to Evidence Action to provide a week of clean water for a person in need.
About the nonprofit: Evidence Action is a nonprofit that scales evidence-based and cost-effective programs to reduce the burden of poverty for hundreds of millions of people. Operating in seven countries across the world, their approach fills the gap between research about what works and solutions for people in need. At a cost of $1.50 per person per year, Dispensers for Safe Water is one of the most cost-effective ways to help prevent child deaths from diarrhea-causing diseases. Learn more.
How we calculated the donation amount: In 2019, it cost Evidence Action an estimated $.50 USD to provide clean water to a person for a year. To account for inflation, we brought this estimate up to $0.53 USD in 2022 and then divided it to understand the weekly cost, which is $0.01. We added a buffer of $0.04 to account for any imprecision within our estimate.
Category 4. When you pay for a hotel stay, we donate to GiveDirectly to send funds to people living in poverty.
About the nonprofit: GiveDirectly is a nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to the world’s poorest households. They believe people living in poverty deserve the dignity to choose for themselves how best to improve their lives and that cash enables that choice. They currently operate in 8 countries in Africa, and the United States. Since 2009, they have delivered $500M+ in cash directly into the hands of over 1 million families living in poverty.
As seen through GiveDirectly’s research papers, the beneficiaries often use these funds to repair or purchase new roofs for their homes or shelters, which is why we selected the safe shelter impact statement for Spiral customers. Learn more.
How we calculated the donation amount: According to a 2013 research study by GiveDirectly, one of the most visible impacts of cash transfers is an investment in roofs. Cash transfers increase the likelihood of having a roof by 23 percentage points relative to a control group mean of 16 percent. About 18 percent of the average GiveDirectly cash transfer was spent on the roofs.
The cost of a roof in 2012 was $564 (USD PPP, which stands for purchasing power parity, an estimate owned by the World Bank) or $403 USD. To account for inflation, we brought this cost up to an estimated $501 USD in 2022. A roof is estimated to last 25 years. Because about 18 percent of the cash transfer was spent on a roof, this comes to an estimated $0.08 cost per night. We added a buffer of $1 to account for any imprecision within our estimate.
For more detailed impact calculation estimates, please contact support@spiral.us.
