How to structure a Bitcoin charity miner? I'm working on a project involving mining Bitcoins for charity. I'm writing my own miner, and though I may eventually set up my own pool for this purpose, for now I'm planning on using existing pools.

My question is: how can I set up the miner so that people can use it to mine toward my organization's Bitcoin address (if having a single address is even the right approach to take), without exposing this address to theft from anyone who reads the credentials from the miner's getwork requests? My understanding is that the HTTP Basic Auth used in getwork requests doesn't pass values in a safe way.

As is probably evident from this question, I'm generally pretty fuzzy on how wallets interact with payouts from mining pools and/or Bitcoins stored in accounts with said pools, so any explanation there would also be greatly appreciated.
You can give someone the necessary credentials to mine on your behalf without them gaining access to the bitcoins. Pools don't use the worker passwords sent with getwork for logging into the website and controlling where coins are sent. They are used only for fetching work and delivering the results.

As you say, basic auth over unencrypted HTTP is already unsafe handling of the worker passwords. You have to assume that those passwords are compromised anyway.

I think the most damage someone can do is to overload a pool server using your worker credentials. I suppose this could get your account temporarily banned, but I'm sure a pool operator would be understanding in this case. I've never heard of anything like that happening either.