Last month, the Association of Fundraising Professionals announced that T. Boone Pickens of Dallas, Texas, would receive the 2008 Paschal Murray Award for Outstanding Philanthropist at the AFP’s annual conference which is wrapping up today in San Diego.

Based on size of contributions, Pickens would certainly qualify for an award. In 2007, he ranked 8th nationally in total individual giving, behind George Soros, Sandy Weill, and Michael Bloomberg, and ahead of Eli Broad, David Koch, and Pierre Omidyar, among others, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy . His new eponymous foundation ranks as the 5th largest single donor “hedge fund foundation,” trailing those of George Soros, Julian Robertson, Jim Simons, and Robert Wilson (and it is also smaller than the multi-donor Robin Hood Foundation founded by hedge fund magnate Paul Tudor Jones).

With billions in disposal income and a fertile mind for financial innovation, Pickens casts an increasingly large shadow over personal and corporate philanthropy. But is the impressive Pickens largesse matched with an equally impressive approach to innovative or ethical practice?

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Rick Cohen updates earlier stories from the Cohen Report, including Cry Me Five Rivers, Touring the Countrywide, Transparency After the Fact, Extravagant Credit Card Thinking, and Courageous Whistleblowers.
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In early February, the U.S. Senate accepted a revised economic stimulus package, reconciling conflicting House and Senate legislation and overcoming Republican opposition to provisions that would have aided senior citizens and disabled veterans.

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We should have expected it, but the Congressional hearing on egregious fundraising practices among veterans organizations and the unusual “nonprofit entrepreneurs” running a couple of them reminded us of a slight problem of nonprofit sector amnesia. The Cohen Report has been monitoring this issue of abusing veterans through despicable charities for some time now.

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We reported in the last issue of CR about the plight of black farmers and the nonprofits that were fighting on their behalf to secure justice. Even though a positive court decision supported the farmers’ rights, the federal government’s lack of diligent follow-up on the case has attracted the attention of Senators Barack Obama and Chuck Grassley in the Senate, and Congressmen Bobby Scott and Steve Chabot, in writing and supporting a bill that would extend the opportunity for black farmers to file for restitution for discrimination suffered at the hands of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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The subtext of film The Great Debaters was the dual life of the character played by Denzel Washington, by day a professor at Wiley College in Texas coaching the debate team, by night an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, established during the Great Depression to help black—and white—farmers. Fast forward to today, the plight of black farmers is still an issue in the wake of the landmark but unfulfilled class action lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, [i ]but it is not on the public’s radar screen—nor of national politicians, except for that of Barack Obama.

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Trivia question: Who did Barack Obama beat in his 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois?

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Earlier this year, when Republican Congressman Robin Hayes of North Carolina announced his intention to create the Congressional Philanthropy Caucus, nothing seemed amiss. The caucus was the lobbying creation of the Council on Foundations (COF)—so much so, in fact, that Hayes told interviewers to call “Steve” (as in Gunderson, the CEO of the foundation trade association) to understand the caucus’s agenda, as the Cohen Report noted earlier this year.

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Recently, the Washington Post revealed the multiple connections of one Linda Chavez; her husband, Christopher Gersten; and her sons, Pablo and David Gersten, in a number of 501(c)(3) nonprofits and political action committees (PACs). Chavez and the Gerstens drew multiple salaries for themselves and often delivered little in the way of program resources to constituents or, in the case of PACs, their intended political beneficiaries.[1] It is a story of the well-connected taking care of themselves, but hardly those they claim to serve.

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It was slow-pitch baseball at the House of Representatives Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight’s Hearing on Tax-Exempt Charitable Organizations chaired by Democrat John Lewis of Georgia on July 23, and the witnesses in the heart of the batting order belted the ball around the infield. Steve Gunderson of the Council on Foundations and Diana Aviv of Independent Sector pitched, batted, and fielded easy grounders like the pros that they are.

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Some types of nonprofits need to do more disclosure, not less. This is particularly true of those used by not just a few politicians — members of Congress, presidential candidates, and political shills — to do campaign dirty work behind the donor- and expenditure-anonymity of the 501(c)(3) public charities. The litany of many politicians and their charities, detailed in Nonprofit Quarterly over the years,[1] highlights the need for public disclosure of donors and expenditures in charities associated with members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. This now has to expand to include the charities and foundations linked to Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.

Not many voters pull the lever on presidential candidates based on their positions on charity and philanthropy. You’ll dig in vain in the current candidates’ platforms for coherent thoughts about the nonprofit sector, at best rare asides of 501(c)(3) pabulum.

But how prospective leaders of the U.S. approach their own involvements in the nonprofit sector might be windows to their attitudes and approaches to ethics and accountability, on charity and philanthropy to be sure, and maybe as applied to the operations of government itself.

With the campaign season starting so early that the primaries may be afterthoughts, it’s time to remind presidential candidates of all stripes to avoid mucking around — intentionally or not — with 501(c)(3) nonprofits in the course of their campaigns.

Our bipartisan tour of the current crop of candidates begins with America’s Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who ranks among the most nonprofit-experienced of the current crop of candidates, and John Edwards, who spawned a couple of charities after his vice presidential run in 2004.

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According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the House Ways and Means Committee is planning to hold hearings based on committee chair Charles Rangel’s (D-NY) interest in asking “nonprofit organizations to show why they deserve to be tax-exempt and what they do to help the poor and elderly.”[1] That sounds very tough, akin to his predecessor, Bill Thomas’s (R-CA), frequent and pointed inquiries into what nonprofit hospitals were doing to merit their status as nonprofits.[2]

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The Bush budget is a disaster for nonprofits, not just because of the massive spending cuts, but because the budget plays philanthropy and charity for chumps.

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Because this article is an early reflection on the tsunami relief effort, you may find, by the time of its appearing in print, that some of the numbers will have changed. They are accurate, as far as we have been able to determine, at the date this is written.

The response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 was a seminal moment for nonprofits and philanthropy. Equally pivotal is the response to the earthquake and tsunami centered off the island of Sumatra in Indonesia that leveled much of several Southeast Asian nations—perhaps more so, in fact, because of the scale of the tragedy. About 3,000 people died in September 11th violence, compared to more than 168,000 deaths and upwards of 5,000,000 people displaced along the boundaries of the Indian Ocean as of this writing; and these numbers could easily escalate.

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Illustrating the latest example of eyebrow-raising foundation behavior, the Boston Globe recently reported that the H.N. and Frances C. Berger Foundation invested $100 million of Foundation resources in distressed Texas real estate. The payoff? $4.2 million in “profit sharing bonuses” for the foundation’s seven trustees.1 Stories like this–and there are many of them–are hardly the publicity philanthropy needs.

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