They're not, in any effective way. Re-read my post. All attempts to make non-profits accountable to someone else - government, donors - are an attempt to work around the fact that the only real stakeholders in a soup kitchen are completely powerless, and wouldn't it be nice if someone powerful could exert accountability? It would! And yet it doesn't seem to work in practice, perhaps because the homeless' interest is in soup, and the donor's interest is in plaques with their names on them, and the two aren't the same thing. It's often donor pressures that reduce non-profit effectiveness.

> And yeah one can argue that feeding poor people is of little value; that's the whole idea behind the parable of teaching a man to fish. Translated into modern terms, the right thing to do in terms of value creation is make poor people richer, not give them free food. Then they can feed themselves and much more. It's of course a harder problem but much more valuable to solve.

It is obvious to the point of complete absurdity that making poor people richer would alleviate poverty. Meanwhile, while you work on the small, pesky matter of solving poverty, people are hungry right now. Are you proposing we shut down soup kitchens until your plucky effort to solve all poverty succeeds? Because if you're not, we're back to where we started.

Posts are like these are precisely why HN isn't solving poverty. "Wouldn't it be nice if the poor weren't poor? Maybe we should teach them how not to be poor? That's surely never been tried before."