In the wake of a public outcry over Susan G. Komen for the Cure’s now-rescinded decision to defund Planned Parenthood, Karen Handel—who was Komen’s vice president for public policy—steps down.
February 7, 2012; Politico | Karen Handel, who was vice president for public policy at Susan G. Komen for the Cure, has resigned after reports have surfaced pointing to her involvement in the now-rescinded decision to defund Planned Parenthood cancer screenings. Handel had joined Komen after a failed run for governor in Georgia. During the campaign, she had expressed her desire to defund Planned Parenthood.
Handel’s resignation letter reportedly references the Planned Parenthood funding debacle head-on, reading, in part, “I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve ... What was a thoughtful and thoroughly reviewed decision [to sever ties with Planned Parenthood]—one that would have indeed enabled Komen to deliver even greater community impact—has unfortunately been turned into something about politics.”
The charges of political motivations have largely been tossed in Handel’s direction, however, by those who say that the defunding attempt was little more than a thinly-veiled anti-abortion statement as opposed to a decision in the best interests of Komen or the women it serves. Meanwhile, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, said, “This is just more proof that Planned Parenthood will pulverize anyone who dares to question them.”
Nancy Brinker, Komen CEO and founder, acknowledged that the organization has made “mistakes” in its handling of the situation. –Mike Keefe-Feldman
AlterNet’s Sara Robinson offers an updated take on Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” though they clearly draw on the successful organizing tactics of past decades.
February 3, 2012; Source: Truthout | Are Saul Alinksy’s “Rules for Radicals” still applicable to the social activists and community organizers trying to effectuate change in our society? AlterNet’s Sara Robinson, a self-described futurist, suggests that the lessons of Occupy Wall Street require a different lens on organizing for social change. Her ten-point architecture of new rules for radicals—or perhaps rules for anyone who wants to promote social change—begin with the obvious #1: “The rules have changed.” She foresees “a whole new political era, one that runs by an entirely new set of rules—and one in which a great many impossible things may, all of a sudden, become possible.”
Robinson’s other “new rules for radicals” start with what she says is the most important:
#2: “No despair. Despair is a waste of time and energy.”
#3: Because no one really knows what will and won’t work—who would have ever expected Occupy Wall Street to accomplish what it has?—she advised, “try everything. Try it, even if you’ve tried it before and it didn’t work. Try it, even if it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Try it, just because it’s there. It’s going to take many thousands of experiments before we really understand the contours of this new political and economic reality we’re living in.”
#4. “Trust the vision,” she argues, meaning “a strong vision of what this nation can and should become.”
#5. “Focus on our goals, not on our enemies,” Robinson advises.
#6. “Expect resistance,” or as she says more colloquially, “whatever you do, you are going to piss somebody off.”
#7. “Find and nurture innovators,” she says, referring to the “people in our midst who are really good at this stuff…comfortable taking a lot of risks, and not afraid of bombing out.”
#8. “If there’s promise, stick with it,” Robinson says, “and give the innovator the chance to keep making it better.”
#9. “Celebrate every win, no matter how small. Every one matters.” Even if the results weren’t totally what was desired, she reminds activists “to reward the politicians who actually managed to deliver the goods for once.”
#10. “Replicate success,” Robinson concludes, writing “if it works, use it. Good ideas belong to everybody, and nobody is going to flunk you for stealing them.”
Maybe these are lessons from the Occupy movement that are making an impression on community organizers and political activists inside and outside of the nonprofit sector, but Robinson’s vision of Occupy-inspired rules for radicals sound much like the principles of good organizing practiced by Alinsky and every other successful grassroots organizer. Alinsky would have consciously changed the rules, always resisted despair, reveled in pissing off his rich and powerful enemies, and tried things that no one else would have ever tried, things that others might have described as silly and absurd, and then tried them again, reminding us that “if a tactic works, it’s not frivolous.”
Robinson’s new rules for radicals in today’s era of technology and social media trace their roots to effective grassroots organizing tactics that have been practiced over the decades.—Rick Cohen
The Chicago Tribune recently pulled the “Doonesbury” comic from the paper because it referenced Donorschoose.org, a charity that assists people in giving to classrooms in need.
February 6, 2012; Source: The Washington Post | Last week, The Chicago Tribune pulled the “Doonesbury” comic from the paper for the day because it mentioned Donorschoose.org, a charity that assists people in giving to classrooms in need. The reason they gave cartoonist Gary Trudeau is that the cartoon promoted Trudeau’s “self interest.”
While Trudeau’s son is a teacher in a low income neighborhood, he rejects the paper’s justification, saying that he has no connection to the charity, though he admits that his son’s classroom has received supplies from it. This is the second time that Trudeau’s column has recently been pulled by the Tribune. In September, Trudeau had excerpted passages from Joe McGinniss’s unpublished biography of Sarah Palin for “Doonesbury” and the Tribune pulled the strip, saying that it was unfair to excerpt from a book that was not available and therefore not reviewable by the Tribune. –Ruth McCambridge
In a troubling finding for those seeking a strong sense of corporate social responsibility to local communities, a Harvard Study suggests that most U.S. businesses want or plan to move overseas.
February 6, 2012; Source: Triple Pundit | For all of the corporate sector’s hoopla regarding metrics showing increasing corporate social responsibility, one critical component seems to be on the wane: corporate responsibility to local communities. The decline in this kind of social responsibility is seen via corporate willingness to pack up their business operations in American cities and towns and move manufacturing or processing overseas. According to a study designed by Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, two-thirds of American businesses want or plan to move their facilities out of the U.S. Just over one-fifth of U.S. businesses think that a business doing good for its communities translates to doing well for the bottom line.
Porter is the competitive strategy theorist known in nonprofit circles for his co-founding role in the Foundation Strategies Group (now FSG-Social Impact Advisors), the Center for Effective Philanthropy, the Monitor Group, and the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, as well as his co-authorship (with Mark Kramer) of iconic articles such as “Philanthropy’s New Agenda: Creating Value” (1999), “The Competitive Advantage of Corporate Philanthropy” (2002), and most recently, “The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value” (2011). Porter has long been a critic of the ad hoc and non-strategic uses of corporate social responsibility (for which Porter prefers the terminology “shared value”). The study seems to imply that corporate leaders may not necessarily follow the prescription of doing well by doing good.
Has the nation’s corporate sector moved into a dark alley of talking about social responsibility more so than practicing it? Or are corporations sensing a new recessionary attitude from consumers—or investors—pushing them to focus more than ever on corporate profitability over corporate citizenship? Or has the nature of the world changed, as the Triple Pundit author suggests, such that the competitive posture of state capitalism in China has induced corporations to redefine the communities that they serve to be the communities in which they have offices and plants? —Rick Cohen
The Obama administration blocked a bid by the state of California to require co-payments from Medicaid patients.
February 6, 2012; Source: Business Week | The Obama administration blocked a bid by the state of California to require co-payments from Medicaid patients. The payments would have levied fees of $3 to $5 for drugs and $100 per day for hospital stays. Visits to the doctor or the emergency room would have come with a co-pay of $5 or $50, respectively. The proposed change would have allowed health care providers to turn prospective patients away for an inability to meet the co-payment. If the measure had been allowed, it was expected to save the state $575 million in the next fiscal year.
The federal government refused the waiver because there was no support for it in law or policy. California is expected to appeal the ruling to Health and Human Services Secretary Katherine Sebelius, but it is not expected to prevail. –Ruth McCambridge
Providence, R.I. Mayor Angel Taveras says nonprofit property owners must agree to significant increases in “voluntary” PILOTs payments if the city is to avoid bankruptcy.
February 6, 2012; Source: Associated Press | If you nonprofits don’t start forking over bigger moneys, the city of Providence, R.I. could go bust and you’ll be to blame. That’s essentially the message—though not in those words—from Providence, R.I. Mayor Angel Taveras, who says that the city faces bankruptcy unless tax-exempt institutions such as the city’s several colleges and universities, including Brown University, don’t ante up larger payments in lieu of taxes (PILOTs).
At a city hall press conference, the mayor warned that the state’s capital city will run out of money by June. “Everyone must sacrifice or everyone will suffer the consequences,” he said forebodingly. One target is government pensioners. Mayor Taveras said that the city cannot afford to make the annually guaranteed cost-of -living increases of five or six percent.
According to the Associated Press, Taveras also wants nonprofit property owners to contribute an extra $7.1 million on top of their existing PILOTs payments just for this year, and to increase their multi-year commitments. For example, he would like to see $40 million more from Brown over the next ten years; currently, Brown pays the $4 million a year in “voluntary” PILOTs. Brown’s board has approved an increase of $2 million a year over five years, but that doesn’t look like it will satisfy the mayor, who says he favors state legislation that would compel nonprofit property owners to make payments to their municipalities. Mayor Taveras believes that Brown had agreed to—but eventually reneged on—the deal for an additional $4 million annual payment to the city. The largely corporate-supported Rhode Island Statewide Coalition has endorsed the mayor’s efforts to whack retiree benefits and to go after the nonprofits for higher payments.
Nonprofits disagreed. For example, the Hospital Association of Rhode Island, which defended the $9.5 compensation paid to the CEO of the Lifespan hospitals in FY2009 (compared to one-third that amount a year before), said the compensation didn’t indicate that the hospitals could afford to pay more to the city.
The battle lines are being drawn. On one side, the mayor, local businesses, and homeowners think that nonprofit property owners should be paying something closer to the $105 million the mayor says that Providence’s nonprofit property owners would have to pay if they were taxed at the full assessed value of their properties. Across the battlefield stand the nonprofits, an array of big and small organizations that worry about facing increasing demands on their coffers based on a property tax analysis that contravenes the meaning of “tax-exempt.” –Rick Cohen
It’s easy to find out where to donate on most major breast cancer charity websites, but if you’re a woman in need of a mammogram, your site search will likely be more complicated.
February 7, 2012; Source: Tampa Bay Times | The major breast cancer charities are so focused on fundraising, writes Deni Elliott in the Tampa Bay Times, that they have evidently forgotten that women needing services may be looking to them for references.
Elliott, who holds the Poynter Jamison Chair of Media Ethics and Press Policy at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg, is working on a book to be titled What You Think You Know Can Kill You: Busting the Myths of Breast Cancer. She invites the reader to explore the websites of the wealthiest breast cancer charities to get a true reading of what matters to them.
“The top 10 each claimed revenues of more than $4 million in 2010, according to the nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator. The websites provide multiple ways to donate, participate in fundraisers, or consume for the cure from user-friendly one-click locations on the home page. But if you go to those websites as a woman who needs funding for a mammogram, you’ll have a far more frustrating search. Finding financial assistance for screening is certainly part of achieving the awareness that they all promote,” writes Elliot, but, “only one of the top 10, American Breast Cancer Foundation, provides a phone number for the individual who can’t afford a needed mammogram more prominently than providing an opportunity to donate.” And the only exception to this rule was given lousy marks by Charity Navigator for spending more than fifty cents of every dollar raised on fundraising and administrative costs.
Elliott notes that even Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which had revenues of $312 million in 2010, has nothing on its home page about where a woman in need might get financial assistance. Elliott suggests that, for both those seeking to get help and those wishing to offer financial support, it would be better to start by looking to local groups such as one’s local Planned Parenthood chapter. –Ruth McCambridge
The Susan G. Komen for the Cure debacle is far from over. We need to know more about Komen’s corporate partners, research, lobbying and massive fundraising operations.
The Susan G. Komen for the Cure debacle is far from over. The implications of founder and CEO Nancy Brinker’s statement to the American public have been parsed ad nauseum in the blogosphere. For producing hard evidence that the Komen organization targeted Planned Parenthood for defunding, and for beginning to map the organization’s ties to the radical right and the one percent, we owe a debt of gratitude to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer in Mother Jones, and Richard (RJ) Eskow in Huff Post Politics.
Most recently, Huff Post Politics’ Laura Bassett reported that “Karen Handel, Komen’s staunchly anti-abortion vice president for public policy, was the main force behind the decision to defund Planned Parenthood and the attempt to make that decision look nonpolitical.”
Also thanks to these reporters, we now know that Komen funds at least seven institutions in addition to Planned Parenthood that are under federal or state investigation, including:
It appears that Handel neglected to review the Komen portfolio of grantees to make certain that their records were completely clear of investigations before she “ratchet[ed]… up the [Planned Parenthood] issue with leadership.” We also now know that Komen accepts donations from at least one corporation—Bank of America—under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (and the bank is also being sued by multiple state attorney generals for alleged mortgage abuses).
But we need to learn much more about Komen’s corporate partners and private donors—such as Caterpillar, which is the focus of a worldwide divestment campaign. And now, the hard work of scrutinizing documents related to the organization’s research and political lobbying activities as well as its massive fundraising operations awaits us in the coming weeks and months. In 2010, Komen reported total revenue of close to $209 million. The public must demand to know how this publicly-held charity—which paid a salary of $417,000 to CEO Brinker from April 2010 to March 2011—spends and invests its money. A quick review of its most recent tax return raises more questions than it answers. For instance, the organization reported just over $85 million in charitable contributions for fundraising events, yet more than $8 million in net losses from fundraising events. In the nonprofit sector, we recognize that special events are double-edged swords that often bleed red ink. But with a track record of nearly 30 years and a corps of “more than 100,000 survivors and activists,” you might expect that the Komen organization would have figured how to break even on the Race for the Cure®. But you would be mistaken.
Based on the reports mentioned above, it seems that Komen for the Cure has been caught lying to the public and conspiring to cover up its deception. In the days and weeks ahead, we will find out how many—and whose—resignations are tendered and accepted, if any, at Komen’s headquarters in Dallas. And in October, come Breast Cancer Awareness month, we’ll find out how many corporate sponsors and individuals continue to support the Komen brand, the Race for the Cure®, and everything pink.
R. Ruth Linden, Ph.D., a medical sociologist, is president of Public Health Associates, a San-Francisco-based consulting firm. An expert on mammography and the politics of breast cancer, she is the author or editor of several books, including Making Stories, Making Selves: Feminist Reflections on the Holocaust, which won the Helen Hooven Santmyer Prize. Healthcare justice is her passion.
Recent protests against Susan G. Komen for the Cure, proposed Internet copyright laws, and large banks demonstrate that online activism is quickly reshaping how we engage in democracy.
Over the past six months, we have all watched or maybe even been a part of fast-paced online activism that has led to some change. Over this past week, when Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced it would no longer be funding Planned Parenthood because it was under congressional investigation, a virtual firestorm was unleashed. The rule that Komen pointed to as the basis for its decision had, in fact, just been ratified and some excellent investigative journalism from The Atlantic pretty conclusively indicated that the rule was made specifically to exclude Planned Parenthood.
The backlash was fascinating. It rolled out first among individuals on the Internet, in the broadcast media and in Internet-based publishing. It then moved to Congress, where two dozen senators signed a letter of protest, and then to Komen’s affiliates in the states. Online, the message board at Komen itself was packed with statements from individuals who had supported the organization but were now declaring that they would take that money and go elsewhere. And there were also at least four major petition efforts that collected many hundreds of thousands of signatures in very short order.
We are appalled at Komen’s apparent lack of understanding about what their announcement was likely to unleash. An organization dedicated to women’s health clearly will have many supporters who are also pro-choice. Did Komen think they would not mobilize quickly enough to make a difference?
If they thought that these individual supporters would wait around for a single champion to emerge in reaction, devise a campaign and set about finding its supporters, they are out of touch with 2012. There were many nodes of action in the response to Komen and that created many consequences: withdrawal of financial support, alienation of affiliates, a blowing up of its own brand, and a scrutiny of, “What the heck is Komen, anyway?” That last question has not been put down and it should not be put down any time soon.
But this is not the first time in the last six months that we have seen citizen action rise up in a way that is coordinated only by like-mindedness on general principles. On January 18th, we saw a response to proposed legislation regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA)that included a number of major Internet actors like Google and Wikipedia but also an enormous number of individuals acting in concert to oppose these bills (which had some very powerful and well established lobbying interests backing them). According to SOPAStrike.com, which helped organize the protest, 75,000 websites participated by blacking out their logos, “going dark” or otherwise logging their protest. According to Google, 4.2 million people signed its anti-SOPA petition on January 18th, and according to Twitter, between 12 a.m. and 4 p.m. that same day, more than 2.4 million SOPA/PIPA-related tweets were sent out.This infographic provides an overview of the digital protests.
While we would characterize the anti-SOPA/PIPA campaign somewhat differently because of the central involvement of big players with their own institutional interests, it is related to the Komen backlash. In a discussion at the Sundance Film Festival, Chris Dodd, the former senator who is now president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), called the SOPA/PIPA response “a watershed event.” Dodd said that opponents’ “ability to organize and communicate directly with consumers” was a game-changing phenomenon he hadn’t seen in more than three decades in public office. NATO President John Fithian chimed in, saying the response was “the greatest backlash I’ve ever seen. This was historic.”
Other recent events might be viewed in the same online activism category, though each had its own unique form and purpose. On November 5th, we saw Bank Transfer Day, which was sparked by a combination of factors—the increased focus on financial institutions brought by Occupy Wall Street; the imposition of additional fees by one of its targets, Bank of America—and aided by some online organizing. According to a recent study by Javelin Strategy and Research, 610,000 people cited Bank Transfer Day as being the reason they switched their funds from big banks to credit unions between October and December. Note the number of Google searches for “Bank Transfer Day,” according to the January 26, 2012 blog of Javelin’s James Van Dyke:
“Bank Transfer Day and the Occupy Movement have received tremendous attention, and for the first time we have market research data to measure the impact on the financial services industry. Javelin’s research estimates that 5.6 million U.S. adults with a banking relationship changed providers in the past 90 days. Of those switchers, 610,000 US adults (or 11% of the 5.6 million) cited Bank Transfer Day as their reason and actually moved their accounts from a large to a small institution. With a Google search of ‘bank transfer day’ returning fully 22,000,000 responses we’re not surprised that these angry bank-switchers represent nearly a three-time increase over the amount of people who took their funds out of large banks for highly-similar reasons during the previous 90-day period in 2011.”
Another example of this dynamic occurred in response to indications that the Obama White House might choose a less than tough approach to the Wall Street honchos whose investments led the U.S. into a national economic meltdown. A social media backlash hit the Obama administration just before the State of the Union address, and the president surprised his listeners with a commitment to a muscled-up federal task force to be coordinated with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. The task force is supposed to go after financial fraud with more vigor than the settlement notions previously floated by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan. Given Schneiderman’s commitment to pursuing fraud, his appointment to the task force reflects the mobilization—largely online—of activists, including many progressives, to pressure the White House to be less forgiving to the nation’s mortgage lending malefactors.
Meanwhile, we are watching the hacking interventions of Anonymous in aid of WikiLeaks, Occupiers, and those fighting against what they see as overly-restrictive Internet copyright laws. And we are watching the increasingly linked nature of protests around the world.
We are all entering new political territory. Christopher Dodd is right when he says that the game has changed and that the moment is a watershed. But when we consider what might be ahead, the terrain is very unclear. Large, well-heeled systems are good at adjusting and, as we all know, power concedes nothing without a struggle. But those of us who have an interest in engaging in democracy may have other worries as well.
In the Komen case, it was very clear that Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic played a huge part in helping to ground the response with his excellent article confirming that the defunding was a conscious political act. Do we understand the critical importance of good journalism/information in these efforts and are we protecting it? Do we have the attention span to look more closely at the breast cancer cause-marketing industry? And what does it mean when we align ourselves with the likes of Google? Not to sound paranoid, but their organizing power (in terms of how information is received) is enormous, but they have strong institutional interests that many are beginning to feel may not be completely aligned with that “don’t be evil” slogan of theirs.
We are all entering a new era in which technology is enabling activism in a different way. Critics might suggest that the ability of people to mobilize quickly online has a political and perhaps ethical downside. Defenders of SOPA or Komen might argue that these powerful and almost-instantaneous backlashes distorted the issues and undermined a more measured political dialogue that might have occurred in a different media environment. It doesn’t appear to us that Komen’s shifting explanations would have been helped by more time and less activism than would have occurred without activists’ access to new technology. But an exploration of the ethics of the new uses of technology always lags behind the actual applications of new technologies. We would love NPQ readers to weigh in on the fast-paced online activism that showed its power and potential in these cases, inducing a national nonprofit, Congressional legislators, and the President of the United States to back off positions or make major modifications in their stances.
The American Red Cross and the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative are undertaking a major analytics study in an effort to turn one-time donors into ongoing supporters.
February 1, 2012; Source: Knowledge@Wharton | The American Red Cross is partnering with the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI) to study a pool of more than 500,000 donors who made a contribution to the Red Cross in the last five years.
The goal is to improve the Red Cross’ fundraising efficiency by examining customer data and then creating tools that can look for trends in the outcomes of different types of messaging on donor response rates. For example, analytics may provide messaging solutions for turning one-time disaster-response donors into those ongoing donors who support the organization’s core mission, a widely-acknowledged issue for the Red Cross.
Tony DiPasquale, senior director of market intelligence for the Red Cross, says that only 10 percent of those that give in response to a disaster return the next year. “The single biggest channel through which we can acquire new donors is in response to a disaster," says DiPasquale. "What we have long had difficulty doing is moving these donors from being disaster-response donors to ones who support [our organization's] core mission."
This would be important to the Red Cross, which has run into major problems with “donor intent” by using the spikes of donations made to relief of one disaster for other efforts—most notably with regards to the Liberty Fund established after 9/11. In this effort to strategically target donors for effective dollar outcomes, the Red Cross and WCAI partnership will also work with six teams of researchers across the nation, including experts from Baylor University, the University of Pittsburgh and the IBM Watson Research Center.
Peter Fader, a Wharton marketing professor and co-director of WCAI, says that analytics tools also come with risks and new responsibilities. Organizations that utilize such data must undergo a cultural shift if the information that comes from such models is to create new programs rather than merely justifying those programs or decisions already in place.
Kurt Kendall of the Consumer Marketing Analytics Center at McKinsey, says, “Today, if you look at all the contact touch points companies have with their customers, it is easily in the double digits…You have your website, related Internet sites, social networking sites and mobile devices. And the amount of data these channels create has expanded significantly, too. The technology has developed to combine all this data so that you have a 360-degree view of that customer," he says. “That includes not only when customers interact with you, but also when they interact with someone else. That becomes a tremendous asset—but it can also be massively overwhelming. You can capture greater and greater amounts of information, but that doesn't mean you are ready to use it.”
This, of course, may raise some privacy issues, but Fader argues that a lot of personal information is less than useful. “Demographics like race, income and gender tend to be very poor in terms of predictive power," he says. Instead, more straightforward data—including the frequency of someone’s donations and the average size of their past transactions—are better indicators of their future behavior.”–Saras Chung
Approximately 1,000 new millionaires will be created when Facebook goes public. Given that many will be relatively young, what should charitable causes expect?
February 2, 2012; Source: MSNBC | Approximately 1,000 Facebook employees who received stock incentives to complement their salary will literally become millionaires overnight when Facebook goes public. What would you do if you became a multi-millionaire overnight? Pay off your college debt? Boring. Book a trip to outer space? Maybe. Some analysts, however, believe that you would give some of it to charity—though perhaps not right away.
To avoid capital gains taxes and to become eligible for income tax deductions, the new Facebook millionaires could donate some of their stock to a donor-advised fund or a charitable remainder trust. Or, these newly-donned millionaires could follow the example of Facebook’s very own billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who recently signed The Giving Pledge, a campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to persuade America’s superwealthy to pledge at least 50 percent of their income to charitable causes.
Some charities will surely benefit, such as those who have included Facebook in their investment portfolio. For instance, The Nation has reported that one Hong Kong charity that has invested in Facebook will reap $340 million from the IPO.
However, some experts—such as Robert Frank, a writer on culture and the economy of the wealthy for The Wall Street Journal—do not think that most nonprofits (who, on the whole, do not have Facebook in their investment portfolio) will see an immediate impact on philanthropic efforts due to the generally young age of many Facebook employees. He indicates that many of these young employees are still in the “accumulation phase” of life. Frank believes that, based on behaviors of giving over a lifespan, these employees will probably not start sharing their wealth until they are in their 50s and 60s—though he says that some of their wealth will likely be channeled to foundations for tax breaks.
Patrick Rooney, executive director of The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, predicts that any nonprofits that garner Facebook dollars are more likely to be mission-focused niche groups, rather than religious groups. With a decline in attendance for religious services across the country, Frank concurs that more people will be giving money to causes with which they personally identify.
Whatever the cause, Frank thinks it will be a long time before charitable gifts from Facebook’s overnight millionaires hit the bottom line for most nonprofit entities. What do you think? Will Facebook’s IPO millionaires be purchasing space flights to the moon or share their winnings to cure cancer? –Saras Chung
Two unlikely nonprofit partners, a botanical gardens and a community service organization, have joined on a trial basis in an attempt to save one while providing a training ground for the other.
January 27, 2012; Source: Grand Junction Free Press | Mergers and partnerships in the nonprofit sector seem to occur most frequently when there is some element of similarity in the missions of the two organizations, which is why news of this 90-day trial partnership between the Grand Junction, Colorado-based Western Colorado Botanical Gardens and Mesa Developmental Services (MDS) comes as a surprise. According to the Grand Junction Free Press, the partnership has already saved the botanical gardens from risk of closing and has also opened up some new administrative and programmatic possibilities for both organizations.
On paper, one might see few similarities between the Western Colorado Botanical Gardens, a 15-year-old organization with a full-time staff of one, and MDS, a 46-year-old organization that employs 375 people and serves about 650 children and adults with developmental disabilities throughout the region. The Free Press notes that the initial link between the two organizations started a few months ago when the president of the board of the botanical gardens, Jon Schler, made it public that the organization was at risk of closing because of a lack of funds. MDS CEO Jeff Nichols then went to his board to explore possible administrative arrangements that might benefit both organizations.
The resulting three-month plan essentially provides a means for the botanical gardens to offset some debt and save costs by operating under the protection of Mesa Developmental Services. MDS CEO Nichols will serve as acting executive director and his staff will provide additional support to the botanical gardens’ single staff person, and presumably its board, in the areas of budgeting and financial planning, strategic planning and public relations. As the temporary new administrative center for the botanical gardens, MDS will also provide computer hosting, telephone support and information systems assistance.
According to the Free Press, at least part of MDS’s rationale for providing this aid is to cultivate the botanical gardens as a “vocational training” and “community volunteer site” for its own audience. “Experience gained through volunteering at the gardens could also lead to employment for MDS clients at other businesses,” botanical gardens president Schler told the Free Press. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of this partnership after the 90-day mark. –Anne Eigeman
Nonprofit hospitals in Atlanta have set up “captives” for self-insurance purposes, but their location in the Cayman Islands may raise some eyebrows.
February 2, 2012; Source: WSBTV | Some of metropolitan Atlanta’s nonprofit hospitals do only a pittance of charity care. By their own numbers, charity care makes up two percent of total expenses for the hospitals run by Emory Healthcare, less than three percent for Piedmont Healthcare, and less than five percent for the hospitals owned by the Wellstar Health System. This does not surprise us.
But it was a surprise to Channel 2 in Atlanta, and to us at NPQ, to learn that these nonprofit hospitals own insurance companies based in the Cayman Islands. These Cayman companies are called “captives,” and they are set up and owned by the hospitals for the purposes of self-insurance, but are run by local Cayman business operations that manage the hospitals’ insurance premiums.
Channel 2 Action News tracked some of the expenses of the Wellstar captive and it seems found top executives of the nonprofit hospital using the captives’ credit cards extravagantly. All three hospitals refused to appear on the air, but they issued statements describing the captives as “reducing…[the hospitals’] overall costs” or operating per the “industry standard.”
Officials in the Cayman Islands say that there are more than 700 captive insurance companies in the country affiliated with nonprofit and for-profit hospitals in the U.S.
It isn’t just the nonprofit health sector with captive insurance companies for risk management purposes. Other nonprofits and public institutions are doing the same. For example, many Catholic dioceses are members of the National Catholic Risk Retention Group. And now, many U.S. states, such as Georgia and Nevada, are trying to make themselves into attractive domestic alternatives to setting up captives in the Caymans.
Self-insurance is not a bad idea. Many nonprofits are moving in that direction with workers’ compensation, for example. But we suspect that relatively few nonprofits have set up affiliates for self-insurance based in the Cayman Islands, where cash flows between the parents and the captives may be a bit too murky for U.S. authorities to track. —Rick Cohen
Anonymous has been busy again. This time, they hacked, recorded and then placed online a call between the FBI and Scotland Yard about a cybercrime investigation.
February 3, 2012; Source: The Guardian | Anonymous, a loosely formed group of individual activists who work under cover of anonymity, has been busy again. On Friday, the group hacked, recorded and then placed online a 15-minute call between the FBI and Scotland Yard about a cybercrime investigation. Apparently, Anonymous hackers knew about the call in advance after intercepting an e-mail that set up the meeting. The call, which The Guardian reports was likely intercepted on the U.S. end, was posted to YouTube, as you can see here:
This comes after Anonymous’ recent opposition to the SOPA and PIPA legislation, which was met with the hacking and forced shutdown of a number of government and entertainment industry websites. NPQ has been watching Anonymous for some time now. Because they are loose and not driven by any central entity, Anonymous is a somewhat confounding—though potentially hugely powerful—presence in our midst. –Ruth McCambridge
Libertarian elements of the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Tea Party have found common causes in some U.S. cities. Are such cases anomalies or indications of a trend?
February 4, 2012; Source: Worcester Telegram & Gazette | Does it make sense to look for possible ideological and political overlap and comity between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, the two most significant social and political movements of recent years?
In a Rodney King-like “why can’t we all just get along” sentiment about the two seemingly very different movements, Christine A. Scheller , UrbanFaith's News & Religion editor, recently voiced her hope that the libertarians of the right in the Tea Party and the emerging libertarians of the left in the Occupy Wall Street movement would somehow find common ground.
Now, according to the Worcester, Mass. Telegram & Gazette, the Tea Party and Occupy movements have found a meeting of the minds. Tea Partiers and Occupiers in Worcester came together to protest provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a bill passed by Congress late in 2011 and signed by President Obama, which allows for the indefinite detention of American citizens without charges.
Although Tea Partiers and Occupiers joined to decry the NDAA as unconstitutional, adherents of both groups tended to congregate at opposite ends of the plaza in front of the court house, despite their occasional statements of support and appreciation for each other, at least on the NDAA front. This is not the only such gathering of the two groups.
Recently, in St. Petersburg, Fla., Tea Partiers and Occupiers came together to support the rescue of an old city pier that the City Council had slated for redevelopment. Speakers from both ideological wings cited the need for limited government and low taxes in support of their positions.
Also, in Jackson, Mich., a Tea Party leader wrote to the Occupy people to suggest the possibility of common ground between the two movements. He told the press, “We’re talking to each other and we’re figuring out that this is a big swindle that’s going on between the banks and the corporations.”
Will more Tea Partiers and Occupiers see themselves sharing common concerns, like those of both groups in Worcester, St. Petersburg, and Jackson? Or are the different styles of the movements too much to overcome? Are the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement elements of sharply divergent ideological visions of the future America, or are they part of a shared, populist angst aimed at big government, national political parties, big business, and Wall Street? –Rick Cohen
Because of their ability to guarantee secrecy to donors, nonprofits can—in the wake of the Citizens United decision—serve as instruments to circumvent transparency in election law.
February 3, 2012; Source: Los Angeles Times | Today’s political campaign ad financing game is played through “independent” tax exempt organizations such as Super PACs, 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, and 501(c)(6) business trade associations. “Secretive billionaires,” as President Obama describes them, are behind these organizations that typically do not reveal the names of their donors nor how much they have contributed to pay for the incessant campaign ads.
Contrary to the impression that President Obama is conveying on the stump, the recruitment of secretive billionaires to pay for the political advertising is being pursued by both parties. Democrats and even bipartisan groups like Americans Elect are using these campaign financing mechanisms and rejecting calls to reveal their contributors.
Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS gets lots of press coverage because it’s big and because of Rove’s presence as a fixture for political commentary on Fox News, but pro-Democratic groups such as Priorities USA, created by former Obama staffers, and American Bridge 21st Century are functioning on the Rove model and the money is flowing in. The nonprofit element of this dynamic is that the PACs, which disclose their funding to the Federal Election Commission, receive substantial grants for “operating expenses” or “overhead and staff expenses” from affiliated 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations which do not disclose their funders.
As a result, the nonprofit sector—through the confidentiality accorded to 501(c)(4)s—is, perhaps inadvertently, “weakening transparency in the political world,” according to Michael J. Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute. The Institute’s associate legal counsel, Paul S. Ryan, described the Super PACs as “a single political operation setting up two bank accounts, one of which has the primary purpose of evading disclosure.”
This is a terrible image, and a terrible reality, for the nonprofit sector: the notion that the nonprofit sector is the mechanism for making a corrupted electoral system even worse. The point of political campaign and PAC donor public disclosure is to let the American voter know which special interests, which millionaires, and which billionaires are financing, or perhaps trying to buy, the candidates standing for election. Because of their ability to guarantee secrecy to donors, nonprofit entities can serve as the instruments to mask the identities and presence of well-heeled political influencers. If this happens, nonprofits will play a major role in allowing the unrestrained corporate donors unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to circumvent the intent of transparency in national election law.
Don’t you really want to know who the electoral puppet masters behind the candidates are? How does it make you feel to know that the instruments for camouflaging these political puppet masters are 501(c) tax-exempt nonprofits? —Rick Cohen
While doing her part to help pay down the national debt, Katie Murphy, a 16-year-old resident of Northbrook, Ill., asked Warren Buffet for a matching contribution, and Buffett responded.
February 2, 2012; Source: NorthbrookPatch | In Northbrook, Ill., 16-year-old Katie Murphy decided to do her part towards paying down the national debt with a donation of $300, and in a smart leveraging strategy, she approached the lofty Mr. Warren Buffet for a matching gift. Buffet responded by mail that he was willing. Murphy says that she got the idea when Buffet made a challenge to Republican lawmakers to donate some of their money to the national debt. At that time, he also offered to double their donations. Murphy decided she’d take him up on it.
It was, says the teen, 15 percent of her current wealth. This video is worth a watch.
–Ruth McCambridge
Last week Google announced its new privacy policy to the public, which will be effective on March 1, 2012. Congress saw their public statement as ambiguous, leaving unanswered question. Google heard them loud and clear, responding with a detailed letter answering their concerns.
February 1, 2012; Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation | Last week Google announced its new privacy policy to the public, which will be effective on March 1, 2012. Google will be shifting towards a simpler, more unified policy. This transition has been praised by many professionals, including Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner. The new policy consists of a laundry list of changes, but the biggest change that will go into effect is an integration of personal data on Google with other Google products. For example, Google will be able to use data they collected to customize users’ YouTube experience.
Although most of these changes have been commended by experts, the Electronic Frontier Foundation saw their public explanation as very ambiguous and they were not alone. Eight Representatives from Congress wrote to Google, informing them that their announcement left unanswered questions and to provide details on the new policy. Their voices were surely heard, since Google responded on Monday with a response letter providing clear-cut answers to the holes left in their previous statement. EEF provides a simple and coherent explanation of what the new privacy policy will change and is worth a read. EEF also diminished one of the public’s main concerns on not having control over how their personal data is shared, and reiterated that Google users will still be able to create a divide between Google search, YouTube, and other products, since there is an option to set up numerous accounts.
One question still lingering is why it took a letter from Congress to coax Google into providing the public with straightforward answers on their new policy. –Aine Creedon
Rabbi Menachem Youlus, also known as the “Jewish Indiana Jones,” has been telling tales of Torah rescue missions for years and selling scrolls that he now admits he just purchased.
February 2, 2012; Source: The Washington Post | Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who has in the past described himself as the “Jewish Indiana Jones,” pled guilty to mail and wire fraud yesterday in U.S. District Court, admitting that he lied when he claimed that he had personally rescued vintage Torah scrolls in Europe and Israel for six years. In fact, Youlus, who headed the Save a Torah charity, rarely left the United States over those years and would simply buy Torahs from dealers in the U.S. which he would then resell for as much as $32,000. In the end, he defrauded the charity out of $862,000.
Prosecutors charged him with concocting tales of derring do in which he recovered Torahs lost or hidden during the Holocaust, and placing a third of the $1.2 million he raised into “his personal accounts, spending some of it on private school tuition for his children and on personal expenses, including meals and health care.”
Youlus’ attorney, Benjamin Brafman, called his client “a good man with the best of intentions who ultimately strayed into fraudulent conduct that he now accepts full responsibility for.”
“Despite the serious nature of his crime,” Brafman added, “this otherwise fundamentally decent man should be sentenced with great leniency.” We’ll leave the sentencing to the courts, but clearly Youlus is no mensch.–Ruth McCambridge
Donald Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, plans to donate his shares of the Facebook IPO filing to education-related charities in the Washington, D.C. area.
February 2, 2012; Source: The Atlantic Wire | With an estimated net worth of $500 million, Donald Graham, the chairman of the Washington Post Company, probably does not really need the $46 million windfall he got from the Facebook IPO filing yesterday. So, Graham plans to keep his shares for now but says he will donate them to three education-related charities in the D.C. area when he leaves the Facebook board, which he has been on since 2008. He and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are longtime friends. The 66-year-old Graham, by the way, has 4,888 friends on Facebook. –Ruth McCambridge