We’re heading full steam into giving season, when many folks open their wallets for good causes.
We may not be opening those wallets quite as wide this season as we have in past years, but they will open nonetheless.
Curious about a charity that you may donate money to? Post the name of that charity in the comments section below, and we’ll put it on our list for “Charity Checkups” this holiday season.
More Watchdog:
We received several phone calls from readers angry that many Susan G. Komen for the Cure affiliates - including Orange County’s - provide money to Planned Parenthood affiliates.
“I don’t want my donations to pay for abortions!” one irate woman told us.
So let’s set the record straight:
“The bottom line is that all of our community grants are restricted and closely monitored to provide vital breast health education, screening and treatment services for underserved women,” said Sonia Aujla, spokeswoman for OC’s Komen, in an email.
The Watchdog’s recent story on Komen’s finances did not list the Planned Parenthood grant because it’s small, and does not rank among the top grants given. In the tax returns we examined, OC’s Komen gave nearly $1 million to community groups for breast cancer screening, education and treatment; Planned Parenthood got the aforementioned $32,749 - about 3 percent of the total.
This sort of controversy is not new to Komen, and Aujla pointed us to a rather exhaustive treatment of the prickly Planned Parenthood topic on Komen’s national web site.
“Susan G. Komen for the Cure exists for only one reason: to save lives and to end breast cancer forever,” wrote Eric Winer, M.D., Komen’s chief scientific advisor, in an open letter to critics. Read the rest of this entry »
There was a lot of pink at the 18th annual Susan G. Komen Orange County Race for the Cure, which drew some 30,000 people to Newport Beach last week, and raised $2.5 million to battle breast cancer. (Hats off to the survivors and their senses of humor, including the woman who wore the ”Saving the TaTa One Step at a Time” T-shirt.)
An editor at The Orange County Register - which is a sponsor of the race - wondered aloud to us at The Watchdog about how Komen handles its money. And every reporter knows that if an editor wonders something, it’s a story.
So we spent some time with the organization’s tax returns and learned that Komen has two main branches that funneled more than $300 million into breast cancer research, screening and treatment in the last fiscal year. The Komens get high marks from charity watchdogs - four out of four possible stars from Charity Navigator. Meet:
Orange County’s Komen is fundraising until October 16, to meet its $3 million Race goal.
NATIONAL
The national office, in Texas, hands out the research grants - including $3.2 million for California researchers at the likes of UC San Diego, UC San Francisco and the University of Southern California. Read the rest of this entry »
She was the high priestess of profit, preaching “rational selfishness” and “laissez-faire capitalism.” So it’s fitting, perhaps, that the Irvine nonprofit devoted to Ayn Rand’s work is defying economic gravity - enjoying boom times despite the nation’s worst recession in decades (while charities preaching “help-others” get squeezed).
The Ayn Rand Institute, the largest of the Rand think tanks and perhaps Orange County’s most eclectic nonprofit (because how many nonprofits dedicated to profit are there, really?), has seen revenues shoot up 26 percent over the past three years (to $6.3 million), while net assets jumped 30 percent (to $1.3 million).
“And we might have our best year ever this year,” said a clearly-pleased Yaron Brook, the foundation’s president.
Why? “Something is going on,” he said. “People are frustrated. They don’t like what this administration is doing, they want answers, and she is viewed as having answers. The result is people are willing to write checks right now. It’s viewed as an antidote to where the culture is heading.”
The Ayn Rand Institute has thrived in Orange County soil, tripling in size since moving here from Marina del Rey in 2002.
BY THE NUMBERS
The chart below shows the growth of the institutes’s revenues, expenses and net assets over the past three years, based on tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service. These numbers show a drop in revenue in 2008 from 2007; Brook said that’s because of how the IRS requires it to record the paper value of some planned gifts. Read the rest of this entry »
The Festival of Children Foundation - brainchild of Sandra Segerstrom Daniels of South Coast Plaza fame - has deficit-spent in three of the past four years, and was $205,413 in the hole, according to tax returns.
The Festival’s mission is to “improve the lives of children by strengthening the charities that serve them,” it says. It just wrapped up a month’s worth of free kid-centered activities at the Segerstrom super-mall.
Much of its spending was on event coordination and advertising; Daniels serves as unpaid executive director.
In the interest of full disclosure, the Festival advertises in the Register and supports Register charities. Read the rest of this entry »
Just about all of us who cover government and politics for The Orange County Register have gotten emails and phone calls from folks who arer incensed that we’re not covering the ACORN mess as a local story.
“Why are you and your so called journalists not covering what is happening with the ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) scandal?!” says an email from one Susan Fink, of Ventura County. ”This is an unfolding story which is tied to both LOCAL, STATE and FEDERAL CORRUPTION on an unbelieveable scale, with TAXPAYER FUNDS! - with video evidence … Two young journalists have laid their lives on the line to get this corruption exposed to the public! Do you not care about the future of our country?”
In case you’ve been under a rock, a few employees for ACORN advised a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute about how to launder earnings, how to get a loan for a house that would be used as a brothel peopled by underage girls, and whether Tijuana is the best place to slip such underage girls into the country (to which an employee said yes, and offered friends who could assist).
These heinous things occurred in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, San Diego and San Bernardino. (You can watch video of these encounters at biggovernment.com.) Since none of it happened in Orange County, your local journalists did as they usually do with national stories - we let the national media handle things. The Register has run several Associated Press stories in the paper, and online (see for example, “House votes to take funds away from ACORN.”) We do confess, however, that FOX News has been A LOT more interested in this than we are.
But still, or maybe, because, the emails and phone calls keep coming. “Can you please explain to me why there has been no coverage or reporting regarding the ACORN videos that have been released last week?” said an email from Jenna Shimabuku.
Our editors are feeling a bit sensitive about all this, so when a caller reached The Register switchboard today and said 1,000 people would be protesting outside ACORN’s Santa Ana office at noon, well, we at The Watchdog were on it. Read the rest of this entry »
So how many of you did the chicken dance this year at the Orange International Street Fair ?
The Street Fair has been a Labor Day Weekend extravaganza since 1973, when the city celebrated its hundredth birthday. Its official raison d’etre is to give nonprofit organizations a place to raise money; where else can you consider yourself noble for consuming sausage and beer for charity?
The fair itself has had a rather erratic time financially over the past several years, as you’ll see in the revenue and expenses chart below. But first, our favorite source of revenue:
And our favorite expense:
Numbers for this year won’t be filed until 2010. But the fair spent more than it took in in two of the last four years, according to tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service (the latest of which you can see here: orange-street-fair-07), and dipped into its net assets to make up the difference. Take a look: Read the rest of this entry »
You know financial times are getting rough when even those preaching the prosperity gospel take a hit.
Revenues at the Trinity Christian Center of Santa Ana - which runs Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest religious broadcasting company - fell 2.4 percent over the year before (to $195.8 million), while expenses rose 27 percent (to $179.3 million), according to the most recent tax returns filed by the nonprofit (tbn).
Silver lining: Trinity’s net assets were up 2.6 percent, to a somewhat stunning $861 million.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
The crown for most highly-paid exec of a religious nonprofit in America came to rest again on the head of Trinity’s president, Paul F. Crouch Sr. (above left), according to nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator’s 2009 CEO Compensation Study.
TBN was tsk-tsked by Charity Navigator for having so many relatives on the payroll - whose combined compensation totals more than $1.2 million. To wit: Read the rest of this entry »
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