Charities

Charities

About this time every year I see the same posting on Facebook listing salaries of charity CEOs in an obvious attempt to influence donations to certain charities. The intent is commendable, but the execution leaves a lot of questions in my mind. They always list a bunch of charities with directors or CEOs who receive $0 compensation. That runs red flags up right away.

Really? Did their children die of hunger last month? Are they living under a bridge somewhere because they couldn’t pay the rent?

Somewhere there must be a bookkeeping dodge explaining this. In the case of religious charities, maybe they are compensated as clergy, with a parsonage, expense account, and other funding provided by the tithes and offerings of his parishioners. Maybe that is a good deal for non members who donate, but you can’t compare charities fairly without having all the numbers showing.

Some of the numbers are just fabricated out of whole cloth, or are years out of date. I suggest a check with SNOPES.COM will reveal these

As a former board member on a local United Way group, I am always sad to see the United Way attacked as a “bad” group to donate to. Most of that goes back to a situation where a national director was living in an ostentatious lifestyle that offended many people. Some of the scandal was real, but some was from misunderstanding of the way a large national charity works. I would include the Red Cross in the same category in the following explanation.

The United Way of the USA is a national organization that provides lobbying services; television, radio and magazine advertising; presentation materials such as brochures and videos, affiliation with the NFL for game schedules; and training materials and legal liability coverage for local groups. They are NOT a fundraising organization. They are a corporation with benefits and services to sell to local groups, who are fundraisers.

The local group I was associated with was United Way of the Great Basin, which covered five northeastern counties of Nevada, which, before this group was formed, was a distant part of a United Way group hundreds of miles away based in Reno. When the gold mines were booming, some of the businesses and banks in Elko realized that fundraising for local charities was being made more difficult by the perception that we were raising money for a Reno charity, who only sent some of it back to us.  By having a local group we could fundraise with the idea that the money we raise here stays here to help local people. It was a good idea that caused problems later on.

Our local United Way paid a flat rate, about 1.4% I believe, to the United Way of the USA. For that we were allowed to use their logo on our literature, use their TV and other media advertising, and got lots of football schedules and videos with famous football players telling of the great things that local United Way groups were doing with the donations. We had no input into salaries, compensation, expenses or any other functions of the national organization. We just bought their product.

And their reputation, too, for good or bad. In the overall picture, though, we could not have printed the materials, bought TV and radio spots, etc, for the  money we paid them.

Local United Way groups are formed to facilitate fundraising and distribute the funds fairly to local organizations. For donors, the main benefit is the ability to donate regularly through payroll deductions at work. No writing checks or digging through your pockets for spare cash every month. For charities, they can cut back or eliminate all the time and trouble of raising money to continue their work. They get a predictable and steady supply of funding from the local United Way. Less pain and trouble for all concerned.

I got involved through a rather circuitous route. I was first asked by my company to be the coordinator/spokesman for our annual company United Way campaign at the power plant where I worked. This consisted of holding meetings to present the campaign and convince people they should donate, and passing out and later collecting the donation envelopes after they were filled out.

I wondered for years why they asked me, the machinist, usually found in the back of the plant running a lathe or mill, and not ever in charge of meetings or gatherings of any kind.

Then one day I remembered--the runway.

After finding that the plant property included a whole section with nothing on it, I pestered several plant managers for permission to grade a runway across it so I could fly to work now and then. After about three managers refused me, finally one said if I lined up all the permits from all the county, state and federal authorities, I could do it on my own time. So I did!

The county said if I wasn’t building a structure, no problem. The state of Nevada was very encouraging, as they liked to see more access to the back country. The Feds were not only happy to approve, they wanted to put it on the sectional charts when I finished it. I told them I couldn’t get them permission to do that yet, since I didn’t own the land. The plant manager seemed surprised when I returned with the results, but he kept his word and told me to go ahead.

One of the contractors on the site had an old grader that had sat unmoved for a couple of years, so I asked them what the problem was, and if I could borrow it if I fixed it. They agreed! It had a broken shaft to the lifting mechanism for the blade, and it needed a battery. I measured up the shaft and made a new one, being a machinist, and I went down to talk to Chuck at the vehicle maintenance shop about getting a battery. Chuck told me they replaced the batteries on the plant trucks on a regular schedule, so he happened to have a couple of batteries that had just been removed but still serviceable. He donated one, and I was in business.

So for two long weekends, I surveyed the strip using an ancient marine GPS, which told me my anchor was dragging if I moved it too fast, and then graded off the brush to make a smooth dirt runway one mile long and 75 feet wide. I enjoyed flying to work many times, and sometimes a tech from Reno flew out for a few hours of work at the plant. By flying, he could make a one day trip instead of needing a motel for a two day trip by car.

One day the plant manager called me to his office and told me I needed to defend my runway, grinning. We had forgotten to notify Idaho Power Company, a partner in the ownership of the property, that we had a runway on the plant site. He said they were panicked about liability issues, and wanted the runway closed. I asked the plant manager to schedule me for a presentation at the next ownership meeting, which he did.

If a computer presentation program like Power Point was available then, I had never used it, so after researching and calling for information from the Aircraft Owner and Pilots Ass’n and other flying organizations on liability issues concerning private runways, I put it all together and printed out brochures with a history of the plant, including the planes that had landed on the entrance road, the non issue of liability if someone landed on the runway uninvited (all the risk was his, and we could sue him for damages), and a follow up section to finish showing the very tangible benefits to the plant for alternate evacuation if the only access road were blocked by a truck or train wreck, and the possibility of mass casualty evacuation in case of a disaster at the plant, since the nearest trauma center was in Reno, over 200 miles away.

I brought a dress shirt and slacks to work on the appointed day, since several vice-presidents of both ownership companies were attending, and when introduced by the plant manager, I got up, went to the front of the room, had the brochures passed out, and remembering all I had been taught in college, gave them my best presentation of the facts and the benefits.

It was about a ten minute presentation, and knowing that some of the vice-presidents were also pilots, I added that rather than close the runway, they might consider improving it with pavement, so they could save time traveling to the plant on the next ownership meeting. Driving across Nevada can be so tiring. I got a brief round of applause when I finished, along with shocked looks from some of the management at the plant who thought I was just the  machinist. They tabled the motion to close the runway and I never heard of it again. They never paved the runway, either.

Funny how one topic leads into another! I believe it was shortly after this that I was asked by the plant manager to put on the United Way presentation for the plant. That’s how the machinist got to be in charge.

Since the operations crews were on rotating shifts, just one presentation wouldn’t do it. There was no way to get all the employees in one room at the same time. So I always had to hold meetings with small groups at different times to get all 120 people taken care of. I say always because every year, they asked me to do it again. I don’t think it was just because I was so good at it!

I had been putting on the meetings for a couple of years when the United Way of the Great Basin was formed. The first year they came to the plant to help with the presentation, they asked me if I would be willing to be on the Funds Distribution Committee. I didn’t know what that was, so they explained I would come to a meeting and listen as the various local charities explained their mission and goals, presented their budgets, and asked for funding from the United Way. When they were all finished, we would divvy up the funds we had on hand to distribute for the coming year.

The first year was easy! There weren’t very many charities and service groups asking for funding, and we had had great success in our fundraising, so everybody got what they asked for, and some even more. We told the Red Cross, who had no local office, that we would double their request if they opened a Winnemucca office, and they did it in two weeks!

We still had money left over and somebody mentioned a group of local ministers who put a fund together for travelers who came to the churches on the main highway through town to ask for help when they broke down or ran out of money on their way through town. The churches on Main Street got all the hits, and the churches out in the residential areas didn’t get hit that often, so they had arranged to share the load between them with an informal sharing pool.

We offered them help getting their credentials as a 501 (c) (3) charity and then helped fund them. Worked out great for both of us.

The next year wasn’t nearly as easy, as more charities and service organizations found us, and every year thereafter we had to disappoint some people who had hoped for more. We spent long hours arguing to come to a final conclusion on where the money would go. We were all non paid volunteers.

Which brings me back to the issue at hand: If someone is listed as receiving $0 for working for a charity, can you believe that? I got no salary for my volunteering, but my company gave me time off to travel to Reno for training sessions, they arranged for my time at the plant for meetings to be paid at the regular machinist’s pay rate, and they provided a meeting room and furniture as needed for the United Way campaign rallies. So while I wasn’t paid for my United Way work, I was paid my usual wages so I didn’t lose money, either.

So I would argue that when you are comparing charities, don’t just look at the national organization--find out what is happening locally, in your immediate area. Talk to people and find out who people go to for help when they are in trouble in your particular town. It may be a church that is particularly active. It may be the local Red Cross affiliate--each one is run by a local person. I’ve known good ones and I’ve met bad ones. Check out the Salvation Army--even though it is a religious organization, they work with volunteers from other churches. I’ve seen the local SDA preacher ringing the bell by the red bucket, and my wife volunteered one bitterly cold December evening.

If you have more time than money, ask if you can volunteer. Due to the recession and the recent political hostility toward poor people, there is a severe shortage of concerned, motivated volunteers.  When you volunteer to help others, no one is helped more than you. You will receive an education that cannot be bought.

I think this one is getting a little long, so I’ll quit and continue this narrative later.

December 4, 2014
Don Rogers