The Cohen Roundup, or, Where’s Rick?
Readers of the Cohen Report may also be interested in these other articles by Rick.
Click here for the list of articles »
ACORN’s Dilemma and Ours
Quick, what’s the difference between Triantafilitsa Mattfeld and Dale Rathke?
Both were caught embezzling money from their nonprofit organizations, Mattfeld $180,000 from the Navy Elementary School PTA in Fairfax County, Virginia, Rathke exactly $948,607.50 while he was handling the books for ACORN, the nation’s premier community-based organizing and advocacy network founded by his brother Wade Rathke who also served until June as ACORN’s Chief Organizer.
Both reached agreements with their organizations to make some sort of financial restitution, Mattfeld pledging $75,000 after having put an additional $80,000 back into the PTA’s accounts in the previous five years, Rathke’s family making $30,000 a year payments since 2001, for a total of $210,000 according to the New York Times with an anonymous donor pledging to pay the remaining balance.
The differences are more than how much they pilfered and how much they or their families and supporters are pledged to repay.
A Chance to Break the Silence
When a prominent national leadership organization fails to take a stand on ethical issues that affect the nonprofit sector, particularly after trumpeting its own high standards, what message does it send to nonprofits and policymakers? Readers of the Cohen Report may remember our report (National Harbor, Not Safe Harbor) in June regarding the decision of the Council on Foundations to hold its annual meeting at the National Harbor complex in Prince Georges County, Maryland. Despite some press coverage pointing out the dubious arrangements underpinning National Harbor’s charitable activities, namely a philanthropic slush fund awarding grants to nonprofits linked to the County Executive of PG County, the Council remained silent in spite of, or perhaps because of, its close association with National Harbor. Fortunately the Council has been handed another opportunity to speak up, but will it?
Negotiating Diversity in Foundation-land and What it Means for the Rest of Us
As we predicted in the summer issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly and in the Financial Times, the California state legislature and the state’s biggest private foundations struck a deal to scuttle the looming legislative mandate (Assembly Bill 624) that large foundations report on their grantmaking to racially diverse communities and minority-led nonprofits. The deal was struck away from the public spotlight and announced on June 24th.
“Greenlining” Foundation Grantmaking: Racial Equality Reporting in California
Remember when the Atlanta Journal–Constitution published a pathbreaking series on racial discrimination in awarding home mortgages? The Color of Money won a Pulitzer1 and put juice into community-based organizations, academics, and newspapers uncovering patterns of racial discrimination—or redlining—in bank mortgage and home improvement lending practices. Just as the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires banks to report on their mortgages and loans, should philanthropic redlining in U.S. philanthropy be remedied by a mandatory reporting regime?
Obama’s Laudable Earmark Transparency
Whether one likes or dislikes the policies promoted by Barack Obama in his run for the presidency, he is impressively committed to transparency and disclosure. Obama appears unafraid of the cleansing role of sunshine in American politics, even if the disclosures spark some critical commentary.
Last month, Obama released a list of every — every! — earmark he had requested, successfully or not, in the federal budgets for Fiscal Years 2006 and 2007. In contrast, Hillary Clinton has not released her earmarks list, nor has she disclosed the names of contributors to her family’s and husband’s foundations or released her tax returns.
Can Diversity Make the Cut?
There is something wrong with the debate about “diversity” that has roiled the foundation sector. The problem is simply diversity itself. Like much of modern political syntax, it is the term of art because it is increasingly devoid of meaning — or because it is more palatable than other, older, more politically charged variations on the theme.
Spare The Ethics, Spoil The Pupil
When any sector of our society defends conflicts of interest as essential for their operations, creativity, and impact, something pernicious is going on and needs to be rooted out of the body politic.
National Harbor, Not Safe Harbor
It is not hard to find daily newspaper examples of nonprofit and foundation abuses sullying the charitable sector and a concomitant reluctance of nonprofit leadership institutions to say anything critical in other than the broadest, least specific terms possible. But a notable exception to this was the pledge by the Council on Foundations a couple of years ago in the wake of the Getty Trust scandal in Los Angeles, to speak out against foundation abuses wherever they might be, whether brought to the Council for action or simply stumbled across by newspaper-scouring COF staff.
Aftershocks of California’s Philanthropic QuakeGate
Remember Chuck Quackenbush? Barely avoiding a perp walk, Quackenbush had to resign his post as California insurance commissioner in order to avoid impeachment as a philanthropic miscreant. There’s something of Shakespearean tragedy in his story, plummeting from hotshot California state government official to foundation abuser to Hawaiian scofflaw—and now a Florida deputy sheriff under investigation for shooting an unarmed man.
Nonprofit Earmarking Under Scrutiny as Politicians Play Fast and Loose
One interesting and not insignificant sub-category of pork barrel spending at the national level involves earmarks to politically connected nonprofits. Some of these are, of course justifiable but some are pure tit for tat or disguised self-dealing. In the wake of a number of scandals involving nonprofits and their sometimes intimate relationships to the likes of Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, Duke Cunningham and Ted Stevens, we might have expected some lessons to be learned at the federal state and municipal levels but in some locales nonprofit earmarking does not fare well in the light of day.
Behind the Screen: The Clinton / China Connection
The controversy over the status of Tibet has embroiled nonprofits around the world—and in the U.S., most curiously, one large nonprofit known as the William J. Clinton Foundation.
Nonprofits and the Subprime Meltdown
In the subprime mortgage foreclosure fiasco, nonprofit organizations have stood out as relative successes compared to their counterparts in the for-profit financial sector and among federal government agencies.
Spare The Ethics, Spoil The Pupil
When any sector of our society defends conflicts of interest as essential for their operations, creativity, and impact, something pernicious is going on and needs to be rooted out of the body politic.
Nonprofit Ethics: From the Top
One never knows quite how much to make of research that depends on self-reported surveys (i.e. what people say they think, say, or do as opposed to empirically verifiable and measurable statements or actions). And there are numerous other concerns as well. Does the survey represent a good cross section of the sector? Is the sampling or stratified sampling robust enough to be reliable? Are the respondents’ survey answers accurate or hyperbole? Is the sponsoring agency credible, professional, and not tied to jimmying its data to make some ideologically predetermined answer?
