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

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

Politicizing philanthropic giving and charitable fundraising to serve the interests of politicians is a dangerous road for presidential candidates and for the nonprofit sector as a whole. In our continuing review of the nonprofit connections of current presidential candidates, the behavior of former Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona

A presidential candidate’s nonprofit history may serve as a mirror for the kinds of decisions he might make about philanthropy once he’s seated in the Oval Office. That history of nonprofit involvement by a candidate or his spouse may also shine a light on the political values of the future putative leader of the Western

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

Inequities in foundation grantmaking are sometimes geographic, with communities, regions, or even entire states sometimes receiving significantly less than they merit. Rural philanthropy is that kind of issue. The shortcomings in institutional philanthropy’s approach to rural needs should motivate nonprofit leaders in rural and urban communities to take action. This August, an important venue for

New York State’s new attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, recently got the nation’s largest student-loan dispenser known, Sallie Mae, to pay a $2 million penalty for providing various incentives to nonprofit colleges for signing up their students as borrowers—Note: Like Fannie, Sallie was established as a GSE in 1972 to facilitate a secondary market in student

Whatever one might have thought of the Fannie Mae Foundation, itself the subject of some critical scrutiny in the press for its astronomical executive salary levels (the Foundation’s CEO took home almost $650,000 in salary and compensation according to the foundation’s 2005 990PF filing), its absorption of much of the advertising budget of the corporation

It still takes the equivalent of Sam Spade to track corporate philanthropy, since so much of it occurs as “direct” corporate giving rather than publicly disclosed grantmaking through corporate foundations that have to file 990PFs. The nonprofit sector is still gunshy about asking corporate America for full corporate disclosure, despite lots of evidence of lots

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,

As, NPQ recently noted in two articles in its spring 2007 issue, nonprofit conflicts of interest come in many forms and they are not always easy to identify. Sometimes malfeasance tips right over into verifiable criminal behavior, but more often there is a accumulation of self interested behavior—stopping just short of the criminal, perhaps, but