Multiple Affiliations

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 03:16:29PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> Isn't this pretty much what the United Way (a very large charity in the USA) 
> does?

Not exactly, as I understand it.

The United Way is a fund that then funds other funds, sometimes
operated by other organizations.  Those organizations are usually in
themselves charities.  But the way the finances work is not a
straight "passing on" of money from one charity to another.  This is
why UW is able to soak up significant money in its own administrative
fees.  Each UW in an area is independent, and there are several
interlocking corporations that do the actual handling of money. 
Their finances are extremely sophisticated.  Several people have
suggested that the true overhead to the charitable sector by having
the UW involved is much higher than stated, because the support of
the UW charity itself sucks money away from actual charitable
activities.  That support is needed, however, because of the costs
involved in tracking and earmarking donations.

The UW of America is actually a trade association.  It sort of works
like PBS -- every local UW is actually completely independent, except
that they have to agree to certain rules. 

UW in Canada and in the US are structured slightly differently, so I
probably have significant details wrong.

Also, the UW of A was in considerable hot water a number of years ago
precisely because their executives spent rather more UW money on
being executives than people thought correct.  Two of them ended up
convicted of various frauds.

A

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Andrew Sullivan  | ajs at crankycanuck.ca
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