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50+ Worst Charities in the U.S.

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Majority of Donations Go to Fundraisers

Tzedakah – charity – is one of the most treasured values among the Jewish people. Virtually every Jewish child is raised to understand the importance of contributing a portion of one’s financial resources to causes that benefit the greater society, whether it is basic support for the poor, money to provide medical care for the sick, or funding for such vital religious needs as yeshivot and outreach organizations. In addition to the halacha mandating every Jew to donate one-tenth of their income to charity, we are trained to cultivate an instinctive inner sense of compassion towards our peers who are in need of essential help. And in the wider world as well, most people recognize the exalted value of giving charity to worthwhile causes that address fundamental societal concerns.

Unfortunately, however, there are unscrupulous individuals – in both the Jewish and general communities – who take advantage of human nature by falsely presenting themselves as advocates for the needy. These charlatans utilize slick and convincing-sounding publicity to make it appear that they are directing the public’s donations toward the worthy intended recipients – yet in reality they pocket the vast majority of the funds and dishonestly accrue wealth at an unknowing public’s expense.

In just the past several months alone, the Jewish Voice has highlighted two dramatic instances wherein Orthodox individuals – who happen to bear the title of “rabbi,” thereby adding insult to injury – have apparently engaged on a sustained basis in these types of deceptive practices. In April, we featured an exclusive report detailing how Rabbi Shlomo Braun’s United States-based Aleh Foundation has continued to raise massive amounts of money that supposedly goes to the Aleh organization in Israel, which provides crucial services for disabled children, despite the parent group’s claim that it receives no more than a small fraction of those funds. A few weeks ago, the Jewish Voice reported in great detail about the New York State Attorney General’s indictment of Rabbi Yaakov Weingarten and several associates for operating a group of 19 “charities” that – thanks in part to organizational names that sounded very much like genuine tzedakah organizations – took in millions of dollars from generous Jewish community members, but never actually sent the money to the stated causes.

According to a prominent expose in the Tampa Bay Times entitled “America’s Worst Charities,” at least 50 different national organizations have been consistently hoodwinking kindhearted donors who believe their donations are supporting needy and seriously disadvantaged individuals, when the harsh reality is quite the opposite. Some of the publication’s most shocking findings include the fact that the 50 worst charities actually transform less than 4 percent of incoming donations into direct financial assistance to the needy; operators of many of these groups intentionally mislead contributors about the destination of their money, give themselves multiple salaries from these funds, and clandestinely use the “charity money” to pay consulting fees to themselves; and, in efforts to camouflage the tiny amount of money that ends up in the hands of deserving recipients, these charities employ accounting tricks and inflate the value of such cheap donated items as snack cakes and air fresheners that they give to dying cancer patients and homeless veterans.

The newspaper reveals that the worst offender in this category is the Kids Wish Network, which annually raises millions of dollars for the alleged purpose of satisfying the special wishes of terminally ill children, while actually putting an overwhelming percentage of donations into the pockets of the organization’s directors and the for-profit companies hired to solicit contributions. The extensive investigation, conducted by the Times in conjunction with The Center for Investigative Reporting, shows that the Kids Wish Network has over the past ten years diverted almost $110 million to its corporate solicitors, while using another $4.8 million of “charity money” to pay the group’s founder and his consulting firms.

The organization ranked as the second worst charity as the result of the journalistic investigation, Cancer Fund of America, makes the claim to potential donors that it is in the forefront of the battle against cancer. But – rather than financing scientific research or subsidizing cancer treatment – the group collects donated items like shampoo and videos and ships them to terminally ill patients and their financially strapped families. As for the huge amounts of money coming in from donors, millions are given to for-profit fundraisers. Moreover, Cancer Fund of America’s founder and numerous relatives earn a combined total of $1 million in annual salaries from their positions within CFA and satellite charities.

According to Doug White, one of America’s biggest experts on the ethics of charity fundraising, charities that have tremendous fundraising expenses tend to claim that such costs are “necessary evils” in the first years of their operation as they attempt to establish themselves. But White said that the most consistently egregious charities cannot get away with that excuse. He also criticized reputable nonprofits that do not repudiate bottom-level charities. “When you start a charity, you have a sacred compact with society,” White insisted. “They are ripping off the public under the guise of an organization that’s supposed to do good for society.”

The Tampa Bay Times offers the scenario involving Gina Brown’s mother-in-law to illustrate the seriousness of the problem. Brown explained that the 72-year-old woman was coping with dementia when she began to be inundated with phone calls from telemarketers representing some of the country’s worst charities. The aggressive solicitors convinced her to make repeated donations, which eventually added up to a grand total of nearly $15,000. These shady groups included the aforementioned Cancer Fund of America, as well as the equally problematic Children’s Cancer Fund of America and the Committee for Missing Children. “She was such a vulnerable person, she must have been on the ‘A’ list,” Ms. Brown said.

It was first after her mother-in-law’s placement in a facility for Alzheimer’s patients that Brown found out about the numerous donations. “It’s hard to come to grips with the thought of her as a victim because she had been such a bright woman,” Brown said. “This can happen to anyone.”

The yearlong journalistic investigation revealed that the 50 worst charities altogether raised in excess of $1.3 billion during the past decade, while paying nearly $1 billion of that intake directly to the companies that oversee the fundraising. To put the meaning of this into perspective, this amount of money could have been used to build 20,000 homes under the aegis of Habitat for Humanity, or purchase 7 million wheelchairs. But rather than go for such noble purposes, these contributions enabled the operation of such charities as Youth Development Fund, which was ranked number 12 on the list of offensive charities.

In the course of the past decade, YDF has raised almost $30 million from donors by pledging to use the funds to educate children about the dangers of drug abuse, and proper health and fitness. But approximately 80 percent of the donations go directly to solicitation companies, while the majority of the remainder finances scuba-diving videos that feature the charity’s founder and president, Rick Bowen.

Youth Development Fund pays his own for-profit production company some $200,000 annually to create the videos. The Tennessee-based YDF then pays to broadcast Rick Bowen Deep-Sea Diving on a local Knoxville station. In its IRS tax filings, the charity states that its programming is viewed by “an estimated audience of 1.3 million.” However, the station manager discloses that the show only draws approximately 3,600 viewers a week.

Bowen defended the practice of using public contributions to hire his own production company. “We just happened to be the low bidder,” he said with feigned innocence.

As the Tampa Bay Times explains, charity organizations that are widely recognized for their respectability and efficiency utilize their own in-house staff members to raise funds from various sources. Furthermore, they expend the vast majority of their incoming donations on activities and services that are easily confirmed, ranging from the operation of soup kitchens that dispense food to the indigent, to funding research into potential cancer cures, to constructing homes for down-and-out veterans.

By sharp contrast, the publication’s list of 50 worst charities is filled with nonprofits that regularly exhibit instances of fraud and blatant monetary waste. Thirty-nine of these allegedly “socially beneficial” entities have been the recipients of multiple disciplinary measures by state regulators; in fact, eight of them have been outlawed in one state.

In one particularly egregious example of improper activity, one-third of these charities’ founders and executives have placed family members on their organization’s payroll or its board of directors. In one such outstanding case, the American Breast Cancer Foundation – headed by founder and president Phyllis Wolf – paid her son Joseph’s telemarketing company a grand total of $18 million to bring in contributions. Phyllis Wolf resigned from her post after the payments to her son were publicized in the media in 2010.

A number of these “50 worst charities” deviously give their organization a name that sounds quite similar to an established charity, with the obvious – and unfortunately often successful – intent to lead potential donors to believe they are supporting the viable nonprofit. For example, the Kids Wish Network, Children’s Wish Foundation International and Wishing Well Foundation are clearly named to sound like the original, Make-A-Wish Foundation, which does not employ professional telemarketers. In fact, officials from the recognized Make-a-Wish disclose that they have had to constantly deal with complaints from people who were solicited by the similar-sounding but mostly fraudulent charities.

“While some of the donations go elsewhere, all the bad public relations that comes with telemarketing seems to come to us,” bemoaned Make-A-Wish Foundation spokesman Paul Allvin.

So what’s the bottom line lesson from all this? The Jewish Voice would certainly not want its readers to become completely jaded and give up on the idea of giving charity. After all, this mitzvah is so intrinsic to our social ethos and way of life. We would rather suggest that one should use common sense and basic intelligence when deciding which charity organizations to contribute to. In the wider society, there are certainly charities with well-known track records and proven reputations for spending their income wisely. A few of these that come to mind include the American Heart Association, Direct Relief, Samaritan’s Purse and Teach for America, all of which are highly rated by the Charity Navigator website for their financial efficiency and good works.

More specifically to most of our readers’ interest, there are many Jewish charities / social service organizations that have built up essentially unimpeachable reputations for truly living up to their mandate as trustworthy tzedakah entities consistently acting for the benefit of the klal. Again, to name just a few, these would include UJA-Federation, the Met Council on Jewish Poverty, Agudath Israel of America, the Orthodox Union, Yad Eliezer, and Aish HaTorah, along with the numerous yeshivot with which most of us are long familiar.

Giving charity is one of the greatest mitzvot a Jew can perform. It behooves all of us to do so with foresight and judiciousness, so that we can rest assured our hard-earned money is going where it is supposed to.

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