It started with inconsequential people frustrated by an inability to meet social needs. Year after year, despite the millions of dollars in annual United Way Services charity donations, they saw acute social needs unmet, year after year after year.
The dissatisfaction led an informal group to join together and talk about an independent united campaign in 1984. They had been upset by their inability to get United Way or the many Cleveland foundations to pay attention.
One woman wanted to start a women’s shelter and went to United Way. She was told, “We already have one,” said Charles “Chip” Bromley, one of the original members and now a housing consultant. Such negative responses led people to join together for an alternative.
United Way’s brush off propelled a competitive challenge. Community Shares has now completed 20 years as a minor, but important competitor to the Big Charity Drive.
The original few got in touch with another relatively new organization, the National Committee for Responsible Philanthropy (NCRP) in Washington, D. C. The NCRP sent a consultant to advise the handful of activists. The result was the first alternative charity fund drive in Ohio.
They hired the late Natalie Graham to run the operation. Graham took the agency from $27,000 to more than $100,000 by 1989, said Bromley, a big and important advance.
Community Shares was on the way.
Still a baby compared to the corporate-blessed United Way when it comes to fund-raising, Community Shares just celebrated 20 years in fund-raising.
Lana Cowell, executive director for 18 of those years, just retired from a Community Shares that has gone over the $1 million mark in raising funds for 36 agencies that get the stiff arm from United Way.
The first year Community Shares raised a measly $2,200. Shares had total income of $1,131,113, according to its IRS filing, for 2004
What has always held Community Shares back from really competing with United Way has been the corporate resistance to any drive other than United Way. Community Shares is kept out of many workplaces.
Getting in to solicit workers has been and continues to be a major problem for Shares.
It was not until later in the 1980s that Community Shares was able to convince a major employment center to allow it to pursue employees just as United Way.
The first big opening was at Cuyahoga County offices with its large employment force.
The reason: Shares finally convinced County Commissioner Tim Hagan to join with Mary Boyle, already converted for the need for Shares. What helped, according to Cowell and Bromley, was publication of salaries of top United Way officials. In particular, Jack Costello, executive director, was paid $158,000 in the mid-1980s.
In those days, I’d routinely publish annually the latest salary increases for United Way. The executive salaries were typically higher than what most social agencies received from United Way as an annual contribution.
Costello, however, went beyond a hefty salary. United Way paid $13,800 for Costello to join the Chagrin Valley Country Club.
The culture of we-can-do-what-we-want had developed at United Way and it irritated people, including Hagan. Bromley said the last straw was Costello complaining to the County that its employees were not giving enough to his drive.
Costello later got into further trouble when a lawsuit by an employee resulted in numerous charges. The suit charged Costello had secreted away a $1.5-million retirement kitty for himself; tried to keep executive salary hikes secret; used a UW credit card for himself and his family; enjoyed expense-paid foreign trips with his wife, paid by other United Way sources; and that UW funds were used to hire a stripper for a birthday party for an employee.
The suit cost United Way hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and was settled out of court with the stipulation that neither side would talk about the settlement to the former employee.
Community Shares remains an outcast as far as many corporate interests are concerned. Most corporations and law offices do not allow Community Shares to compete with United Way.
They like one choice: United Way.
Community Shares actually helps United Way by funding small, typically more activist non-profits that United Way, because it caters to a corporate strategy, would never fund. Shares relieves United Way from having to deal with pesky activists.
The reason corporations feel so strongly about United Way is ideological.
United Way’s resistance really says is that serious human problems are better solved by charity, by contributions usually squeezed from its employees. Some of the most leaned-upon are middle management people.
The reason: If you can fund something by charity, you don’t use tax money and corporate and wealthy people love to keep everything they get. It’s another shift of the burden from the rich to others. They also enjoy the tributes paid them when practicing tax-evading philanthropy. Check Peter Lewis and the Wolstein family. They love their names on buildings.
Carl Bakal in his 1979 book “Charity USA” noted, “In Cleveland and elsewhere corporate treasury contributions, which nationally account for about 26 percent (down from a one-time 40 percent) of all United Way collections, in contrast to 50 percent or so that come from company payroll deductions and other employee contributions are also often shrouded in secrecy. “It isn’t anybody’s goddamn business to know how much individual corporations give, and you can quote me on this,’ San Francisco’s United Way then campaign director told the authors of the aforementioned Society article.” (In Cleveland, a corporate leader wanted the corporate share down to 25 percent.)
He had mentioned previously that in Cleveland after donations were published in the newspaper that revealed, when contrasted to income, the corporate executives didn’t give their fair share, “the local United Way finally stopped publishing its annual list of$300-and-over givers.”
United Way’s director Michael Benz is paid $233,719, gets $18,970 put aside for a pension and spends $8,319 in expenses. Those 2003 figures are the latest filed by United Way.
Cowell, after 18 years heading Community Shares, was paid $45,000 with no benefits or expenses.
The top six United Way executives cost donors a hefty $787,786 in 2003. That is not the end. Another 27 employees make $50,000 or more, adding $1,350,000 to the payroll.
It’s nice how well United Way officials treat themselves.
Although many corporations and even some public places refuse Community Shares equal standing with United Way, their employees may elect to give to Shares.
Unfortunately, the donor’s desire does not mean Shares will get the amount they intended.
The method used to distribute the money donors meant to go to Shares shows what a con game United Way can play.
In workplaces denied a Community Share drive, donors who select anyway to give to Share get a surprise. Fifty (50) percent of any such contribution to Community Shares still goes – not to Shares – but to United Way. Atop that, United Way also takes a 13 percent as an “administrative fee.”
I’m not a lawyer but I’d say that taking of 50 percent of money a person selected to give to another agent is an invitation to a lawsuit. Both United Way and the corporations that participate in this con seem to me to be operating, if not illegally, certainly immorally.
Community Shares provides a way to contribute to non-profit organizations “that work for structural change and that increase the opportunity of those who are less well off politically, economically and socially,” says Cowell.
Among those receiving funding from Shares are neighborhood, women’s, and other small organizations unlikely ever to receive funding from elite sources.
Some of them are the East Side Organizing Project (ESOP), Heights Community Congress, Ohio Citizen Action Education Fund, Slavic Village Development, St. Clair Superior Development Corporation, Women’s Center of Greater Cleveland, Near West Theater, Cleveland Jobs with Justice, Cleveland Public Theater and Domestic Violence Center.
From Cool Cleveland contributor Roldo Bartimole hidden-email:ebyqb@nqrycuvn.arg? (:divend:)