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A year-long examination by the Tampa Bay Times and a Center for Investigative Reporting ranks these U.S. charities as a 5 worst, formed on income blown on soliciting costs, according to a latest 10 years of accessible taxation filings. Click by a gallery for some-more details.
No. 1: Kids Wish Network: In a past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled scarcely $110 million donated for ill children to a corporate fund-raisers. That creates it a misfortune present in a nation, according to a Times/CIR examination of charities that have directed a many income to veteran questionnaire companies over time. Kids Wish Network says it has helped make a certain disproportion for thousands of children.
No. 2: Cancer Fund of America: CFA raises millions yearly and sends 82% to a for-profit fund-raisers. Over a past decade, fund-raisers have collected $98 million in donations. Patients have gotten reduction than $1 million in approach income assist over those 10 years, IRS annals show. The group’s owner said, “We can usually assistance others with a supports we net either it be 90 or 20%.”
No. 3: Children’s Wish Foundation International: This organisation reported spending about $600,000 extenuation wishes to terminally ill children in 2010 and gave them donated products valued during $3 million. It paid veteran fund-raisers scarcely $6 million for their services that year. Its owner pronounced telemarketing has helped a present find children in need of a help.
No. 4: American Breast Cancer Foundation: One of a many greedy charities in a republic for 13 years, this organisation lured donors by earnest to compensate for breast cancer screenings. It now says it’s regulating village events to lift money. In a latest taxation filing, a present reported giving a sum of $100,000 to 5 medical comforts to assistance compensate for breast cancer screening services for low-income women.
No. 5: Firefighters Charitable Foundation: This organisation says it provides financial assistance to people who have been influenced by a glow or disaster. From 2002 to 2011, it lifted $64 million in donations and paid $55 million of that to a solicitors. The present spent reduction than 10 cents of any dollar lifted on approach financial assistance to those in need. The organisation pronounced in 2007 that it designed to change. That hasn’t happened.
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Editor’s note: CNN has partnered with a Tampa Bay Times and a Center for Investigative Reporting to showcase a formula of their year-long examination to brand America’s misfortune charities. For more, watch CNN’s AC360° tonight during 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET.
(CNN) — The misfortune present in America operates from a steel room behind a gas sinecure in Holiday, Florida.
Every year, Kids Wish Network raises millions of dollars in donations in a name of failing children and their families.
Every year, it spends reduction than 3 cents on a dollar assisting kids.
Most of a rest gets diverted to heighten a charity’s operators and a for-profit companies Kids Wish hires to drum adult donations.
In a past decade alone, Kids Wish has channeled scarcely $110 million donated for ill children to a corporate solicitors. An additional $4.8 million has left to compensate a charity’s owner and his possess consulting firms.
No present in a republic has siphoned some-more income divided from a needy over a longer duration of time.
But Kids Wish is not an removed case, a yearlong examination by a Tampa Bay Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.
Using state and sovereign records, a Times and CIR identified scarcely 6,000 charities that have selected to compensate for-profit companies to lift their donations.
Then reporters took an rare demeanour behind to 0 in on a 50 misfortune – formed on a income they diverted to boiler room operators and other solicitors over a decade.
America’s 50 misfortune charities
These nonprofits adopt renouned causes or impersonate obvious present names that dope donors. Then they hillside in cash, year after year.
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The nation’s 50 misfortune charities have paid their solicitors scarcely $1 billion over a past 10 years that could have left to free works.
Until today, no one had tallied a cost of this parasitic shred of a nonprofit courtesy or traced a prolonged story of a misfortune offenders.
Among a findings:
– The 50 misfortune charities in America persevere reduction than 4% of donations lifted to approach income aid. Some charities gave even less. Over a decade, one diabetes present lifted scarcely $14 million and gave about $10,000 to patients. Six spent no income during all on their cause.
– Even as they beg for financial support, operators during many of a 50 misfortune charities have lied to donors about where their income goes, taken mixed salaries, personally paid themselves consulting fees or organised fund-raising contracts with friends. One cancer present paid a association owned by a president’s son scarcely $18 million over 8 years to appeal funds. A medical present paid a biggest investigate extend to a president’s possess for-profit company.
– Some nonprofits are tiny some-more than fronts for fund-raising companies, that stake their startup costs, close them into disdainful contracts during unreasonable rates and even expostulate a charities into debt. Florida-based Project Cure has lifted some-more than $65 million given 1998, though any year has wound adult overdue a fundraiser some-more than what was raised. According to a latest financial filing, a nonprofit is $3 million in debt.
– To costume a scanty volume of income that reaches those in need, charities use accounting tricks and increase a value of donated dollar-store cast-offs – break cakes and atmosphere fresheners – that they give to failing cancer patients and homeless veterans.
Over a past 6 months, a Times and CIR called or mailed approved letters to a leaders of Kids Wish Network and a 49 other charities that have paid a many to solicitors.
Most declined to answer questions about their programs or would pronounce usually by an attorney.
Approached in person, one present manager threatened to call a police; another refused to open a door. A third charity’s boss took off in his lorry during a steer of a contributor with a camera.
Kids Wish has hired Melissa Schwartz, a predicament supervision dilettante in New York City who formerly worked for a sovereign supervision after a 2010 BP oil spill.
Schwartz pronounced Kids Wish hires solicitors so a staff can concentration on operative with children, not on lifting donations. According to a 2011 IRS filing, a present has 51 employees. Schwartz also pronounced donors who give directly to a present instead of in response to solicitations safeguard that 100% of their oath will be spent extenuation wishes.
She declined to answer additional questions about Kids Wish’s fund-raising operations, observant a present “is focused on a future.”
Charity operators who would speak shielded their work, observant lifting income is costly generally in tough mercantile times.
“No primogenitor has ever incited me down for assistance given we got a income from a telemarketer,” pronounced David Thelen, who runs the Committee for Missing Children in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The present is No. 13 on a Times/CIR list.
Identifying a 50 misfortune
To brand America’s 50 misfortune charities, a Times and CIR pieced together tens of thousands of pages of open annals collected by a sovereign supervision and 36 states. Reporters started in California, Florida and New York, where regulators need charities to news formula of particular fund-raising campaigns.
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The Times and CIR used those annals to dwindle a specific kind of charity: those that compensate for-profit companies to lift a immeasurable infancy of their donations year in and year out.
Search for charities that have been disciplined
The bid identified hundreds of charities that run concession drives opposite a nation and frequently give their solicitors during slightest two-thirds of a take. Experts contend good charities should spend about half that many – no some-more than 35 cents to lift a dollar.
For a misfortune charities, essay vast checks to telemarketers isn’t an anomaly. It’s a approach of life.
The Times and CIR charted any charity’s opening over a past decade and ranked them formed on a sum donations diverted to fundraisers, nearing during a 50 misfortune charities. By this measure, Kids Wish tops a list.
Tracking donations diverted to fund-raising is only one approach to rate a charity’s performance. But experts called a rating satisfactory and pronounced it would yield a singular apparatus to assistance donors equivocate bad charities.
Doug White, one of a nation’s inaugural experts on a ethics of present fund-raising, dismisses a evidence done by charities that though telemarketers they would have no money.
“When we import that in terms of values, of what a present is ostensible to be doing and what a donor is being told in a process, a residence comes acrobatics down,” pronounced White, who teaches in Columbia University’s fund-raising supervision master’s grade program.
Share your tips on questionable charities
Collectively a 50 misfortune charities lifted some-more than $1.3 billion over a past decade and paid scarcely $1 billion of that directly to a companies that lift their donations.
If that income had left to charity, it would have been adequate to build 20,000 Habitat for Humanity homes, buy 7 million wheelchairs or compensate for mammograms for scarcely 10 million uninsured women.
Instead it saved charities like Youth Development Fund.
The Tennessee charity, that came in during No. 12, has been around for 30 years. Over a past decade it has lifted scarcely $30 million from donors by earnest to teach children about drug abuse, health and fitness.
About 80% of what’s donated any year goes directly to questionnaire companies.
Most of what’s left pays for one thing: scuba-diving videos starring a charity’s owner and president, Rick Bowen.
Bowen’s present pays his possess for-profit prolongation association about $200,000 a year to make a videos. Then a present pays to atmosphere Rick Bowen Deep-Sea Diving on a internal Knoxville station. The module creates no discuss of Youth Development Fund.
In a IRS taxation filings, a present reports that a programming reaches “an estimated assembly of 1.3 million.”
But, according to a sinecure manager, a uncover attracts about 3,600 viewers a week.
Bowen, who runs a present out of his Knoxville condo, declined to be interviewed. He shielded a use of employing his possess association with a public’s donations.
“We only happened to be a low bidder,” he said.
Good vs. bad charities
America’s misfortune charities demeanour zero like Habitat for Humanity, Boys and Girls Clubs or thousands of other charities, vast and small, that are dedicated to assisting a ill and needy.
Key questions to ask someone requesting a free donation:
• What is a full name of a charity?
• Do we work for a paid fundraiser?
• How many of my concession indeed goes to charity?
• Will any internal programs directly benefit? If so, how?
• What is a website residence of a charity?
Well-run charities rest on their possess staff to lift income from a accumulation of sources. They spend many of their donations on easy-to-verify activities, either it’s regulating soup kitchens, ancillary cancer research, lifting recognition about inebriated pushing or building homes for veterans.
The Times/CIR list of misfortune charities, meanwhile, is dirty with organizations that vaunt red flags for fraud, rubbish and mismanagement.
Thirty-nine have been trained by state regulators, some as many as 7 times.
Eight of a charities have been criminialized in during slightest one state.
One was close down by regulators though reopened underneath a new name.
A third of a charities’ founders and executives have put kin on a payroll or a house of directors.
How states unsuccessful to umpire present scams
For 8 years, American Breast Cancer Foundation paid Joseph Wolf’s telemarketing association to beget donations.
His mother, Phyllis Wolf, had founded a Baltimore-based present and was a boss until she was forced to renounce in 2010.
While she ran a charity, her son’s company, Non Profit Promotions, collected $18 million in telemarketing fees.
Phyllis Wolf left a present after a payments to her son captivated media courtesy in 2010. The present has given stopped regulating telemarketers, including Joseph Wolf’s.
Phyllis and Joseph Wolf did not respond to several calls seeking comment.
How to help: CNN’s Impact Your World
The nation’s misfortune charities are vast and small. Some are one-person outfits handling from run-down apartments. Others explain hundreds of employees and a half-dozen locations around a country. One lists a UPS mail box as a domicile address.
Several play off a names of obvious organizations, treacherous donors.
Among those on a Times/CIR list are Kids Wish Network, Children’s Wish Foundation International and Wishing Well Foundation. All of a names sound like a original, Make-A-Wish, that does not sinecure veteran telemarketers.
Make-A-Wish officials contend they’ve spent years fielding complaints from people who were solicited by sound-a-like charities.
“While some of a donations go elsewhere, all a bad open family that comes with telemarketing seems to come to us,” pronounced Make-A-Wish orator Paul Allvin.
Donors who answer calls from a 50 misfortune charities hear professionally honed messages, designed to precedence renouned causes and censor one essential fact: Almost zero goes to charity.
When telemarketers for Kids Wish call intensity donors, they open with a name we consider you’ve listened before.
Then they ask intensity donors to “imagine a heartbreak of losing a child to a depot illness,” according to scripts filed with North Carolina regulators in 2010.
Kids Wish, a callers say, wants to perform their wishes “while they are still healthy adequate to suffer them.”
They leave out a fact that many of a charity’s good deeds engage handing out present cards to hospitalized children and donated coloring books and house games to healthy kids around a country. And they don’t discuss a millions of dollars spent on salaries and fund-raising any year.
The biggest disproportion between good charities and a nation’s misfortune is a bottom line.
Every present has salary, beyond and fund-raising costs.
But several watchdog organizations contend charities should spend no some-more than 35% of a income they lift on fund-raising expenses.
The Make-A-Wish Foundation of Central and North Florida is one of dozens of Make-A-Wish chapters opposite a country.
Last year, it reported lifting $3.1 million income and spent about 60% of that — $1.8 million — extenuation wishes.
The same year, Kids Wish lifted $18.6 million, a taxation filing shows. It spent only $240,000 extenuation wishes — 1% of a income raised.
Read a full chronicle of this report
Center for Investigative Reporting: A disaster of regulation
Family of connectors connect several of America’s misfortune charities
Reprinted with accede of Tampa Bay Times, Inc. and Center for Investigative Reporting.
Article source: http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/us/worst-charities/index.html
