Source depth says where on the chain from symptom to source a piece of work acts. Charitology uses a five-level scale, numbered 0 to 4, set out in the Method. Every gift, program and organization can be described with it.
The five levels
| Level | Name | What it does | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Relief | Meets the need today | A meal at a food bank, emergency surgery, a disaster shelter |
| 1 | Repair | Restores what was lost | Rebuilding a home, rehabilitation after an injury, a job after a layoff |
| 2 | Prevention | Stops it happening to these people | Bed nets, vaccines, clean water for a village |
| 3 | Structure | Changes the rules that produce it | A lead-paint ban, a new public health system, a corporate standard |
| 4 | Source | Changes what feeds many problems at once | The story a society tells itself, how people coordinate, what a culture rewards |
Each level has a test question. Relief asks whether someone is fed, sheltered or treated right now. Repair asks whether someone is back where they were before the harm. Prevention asks whether these people will avoid the harm altogether. Structure asks whether a law, institution, market or norm changed so the harm stops being produced. Source asks whether something upstream of a whole family of problems changed.
Depth describes. It never grades.
Every level is needed. Immediate food matters to a hungry person tonight, and a change at the source can take a generation to arrive. A deeper level is not a better level, and nothing in the scale says a food bank matters less than a policy campaign. The scale exists so that a giver knows what they are paying for, and so the field can ask whether the system’s overall mix is right. That is the question behind the Symptom Trap.
How to place a piece of work
- Classify the activity, not the cause. One cause has work at every depth. Homelessness has emergency shelters (relief), rehousing (repair), eviction prevention (prevention) and zoning reform (structure).
- Classify what the money does, not the mission statement. One organization can work at several depths. Weight each activity by what it spends.
- Say when it is hard to call. Boundaries between levels are fuzzy. How often two independent people place the same work at the same level is itself worth measuring.
The top of the scale
Level 4 comes from Humanity’s Checklist, which argues that world problems grow from six shared sources: the story we tell, how we coordinate, what we can picture, what our feeds reward, what we admire and who gets to build. Charitology treats the claim that changing them would help everything downstream as a hypothesis to test.
What this project has not established
Charitology has not produced a public estimate of the world’s giving by depth and has not established the current mix. Measuring it is Open Problem 1, the Depth Census. Measuring the effect of source-level work, which is diffuse, shared and slow, is Open Problem 3.