From: stank@cbnewsl.cb.att.com (Stan Krieger)
Subject: Re: Jewish Charities
Organization: Summit NJ
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 21:54:37 GMT
Keywords: disgusting

stephan.gross writes:

>              From "The Jewish Voice,"  December 1992
>
>Article: "Where the Tzedaka Dollars Go - Giving 'Til It Hurts"
>
> .........
>
>Excerpts from the article:
>
>  "Internal Revenue Service filings of a dozen of the largest Jewish charities
>show that the leaders are making six-figure salaries that are significantly
>higher on average than the salaries earned by many of their counterparts at
>non-Jewish charities."
>
>  "If they look into these Jewish charities, they will find that, in a number
>of cases, the executive compensation packages well surpass the median packages
>at charities nationally."
>
>  "But in the Jewish community, there are nagging questions about whether the
>large numbers of Jewish organizations duplicate each other's efforts, wasting
>valuable donations on six-figure salaries rather than spending them directly
>on targeted recipients and programs." ......

Unfortunately, after all has been said and done, charity is big business,
and the real issue is whether there is a better way.  I mean, even
for "medical research" charities, our contributions are lining people's
pockets (which is a not so nice way of saying paying people a salary).
This not only includes full-time workers involved in the actual solicitation
and collection business, it also involves those who build
research facilities, those who manufacture medical and other industrial
equipment used in those facilities, and salaries of those doing the
research.  In short, all of our charity dollars are used to pay people
for the work they do.

Another problem, and this will skew the percentage figures, is that big
donors often need to be wined and dined.  Take, for example, a $500 a
plate dinner.  Such an event may well cost (and in this case, a caterer
is personally profiting from money donated to charity) $100 a person,
thus, off the top, 20% of the money raised goes for "expenses", but
in many cases it's money the charity would never have gotten if it
didn't have the event (and of course, there are people whose full-time
job is to create such events, thus even more of a percentage appears
to be siphoned off for fund-raising costs).   But the bottom line is that
more dollars were made available to the intended receipients, even
if a higher percentage was "cost of raising money".

Clearly, a lot of the inefficiencies of fund raising for charity is that
people will protect their own jobs (and this is no different than what we
see in business in general;  I mean, a division of a company will spend
$400K on an outside product rather than $500K on another division's
product because of that division's own budget; effect on the entire
company doesn't do diddly with that division's budget, and all the
way into Chapter 11, that division manager will swear that $100K
was saved), and that there must be an incentive for them.  A case
in point is State of Israel Bonds.  When I served on my synagogue's
education committee around 14 years ago, my job was to coordinate a
"Youth Builder" program, wherein we try to get Bar/Bat Mitzvah candidates
to use a portion of their gifts to buy State of Israel Bonds.  Well,
after getting nowhere with the NY office about what youthbuilder was
all about, I finally get referred to the Livingston, NJ office.  After
getting the info from them, as well as the prospectus, I realized that
their creating of this program was not altruistic; instead, they were
commission salespeople, and had simply created a gimmick to improve
their sales numbers, and thus the size of their paychecks; of course,
they used the "how can you not support Israel?" argument to sell their
product, but the bottom line was that they weren't working to raise
money for improving the quality of life in Israel.  That was just the
side effect of their working to pay their mortgage, car loan, and
grocery bills.

We even saw it with United Way this past year.  While our employers,
the National Football League, and tons of other organizations encourage
us to give with our hearts, if there weren't people who had full-time
jobs, the money would not be raised. 

Also, why are "charities" even formed to begin with?  Is it altruism,
or is it that some people are trying to create paychecks for themselves
(and how do we tell which is which)?  Even here in central NJ, there
was a territorial dispute between Jewish charities, and basically
the one who "lost" said something to the effect that they didn't even
know that the other was active (it apparently existed on paper for
a few years) until they were accused of encroaching on its territory.

Finally, how can anyone determine which expenses are necessities and
which are luxuries?  I mean, a USY chapter can "decide" that it can
"afford" to charter a bus to go to the convention 40 miles away
instead of hitting up parents to drive there.  Clearly, I didn't make
my donation to USY so that they could charter buses.
-- 
Stan Krieger                 All opinions, advice, or suggestions, even
UNIX System Laboratories     if related to my employment, are my own.
Summit, NJ
smk@usl.com
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish,soc.culture.african.american