Do the Komen donations to PP come from the national organization, or from local organizations?
The Connecticut SGK statement linked to above says that they’ll continue the current grant through the end of their commitment in June. That doesn’t sound like they’re standing up to the national directors.
Doesn’t that imply you’re pro-abortion? Maybe you are but not all pro-choice advocates are. I try to use labels people use for themselves, and so I usually use the terms ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice.’ Both are objectionable to the other side and neither fits me well, but it’s an imperfect world. I don’t care what the fuck you call me but getting all pissy about it when I’m your side in this thread is stupid. Since we’re not in GD that’s all I’ll say about it.
Why on earth would it?
Can we drop the pro-life, pro-choice terminology discussion from this thread?
Pro-choice means the choice is left to the women. My opinion on whether or not the abortion should happen is irrelevant. One can be against abortion, personally, but pro-choice. The label pro-abortion does not accurately reflect the true sentiment. Most pro-choicers are pro-life in that the life and well being of the mother is paramount.
ETA: Didnt see Franks post, but still feel its worth clarifying.
That is what the National Organization seems to be saying as they scramble to cover their hiney’s…
They cut off future funding. They will continue with current grants through the current cycle, but will not be granting any future funding.
Well, see, that’s it. What is the point of Connecticut (and Denver, and Oregon) saying, “We’ll continue funding until our commitment ends.”?
Komen is a top-down organization. These comments and back-pedaling from the regional leaders are pointless and meaningless.
Ok, some Florida politician has announced he is “launching an investigation”. What does this mean? Who is doing the investigation? Who is funding it? Who do they report to? What is the timeframe? Who will the results be reported to?
Can anyone in Congress “launch an investigation” into anything?
Is it just me or does this seem like extreme recreational outrage? PP’s most recently published annual budget is over $1bn, SGK generates over $400m in revenue yearly and spends some $290m on program services, research, and education. SGK is ending an annual payout to PP of around $600k.
The woman who is apparently responsible for this policy wasn’t some person with a secret history, she ran for Governor of Georgia. I’m assuming her positions and associations are well known and were well known by Komen’s CEO and Board when she was hired. This decision was approved by Komen’s CEO and Board. What I’m guessing is a woman with ties in the right-wing religious community has put together some pie charts in Excel or perhaps had an assistant throw together a Power Point slide showing that the $600k they spend on PP each year is essentially irrelevant to PP’s operations and will be easily replaced, and cutting it creates a large pool of potential donors at the institutional level in the right wing Christian community who can now be solicited for big time bucks.
I’m guessing like with any business decision they factored in public outcry/outrage and made the projection that increased revenues available from the religious right will more than make up for any decreased revenues.
Just like companies organizations can get these sort of things wrong see: Netflix with is various subscription/pricing changes, they projected a decrease in subscribers and revenue but the initial response was far worse than expected and aside from an illusory bump in December because many people bought tablets/other devices that come with a free month subscription Netflix is still hurting big time from those decisions.
At an individual level I don’t really know how much the outrage will hurt Komen or help PP. When you talk about entities like that, with budgets and earnings like that, typically they have extremely steady cash flows that are tied in with grants they are very good at getting renewed annually, agreements with major corporations and etc. Essentially once a not-for-profit is that big they have very steady revenue streams that aren’t dependent on individuals. Individual contributions are important of course, but without looking into the annual report of either entity I’m willing to bet a large portion of their money (and fundraising efforts) come from long term arrangements and will come from pursuing more of those opportunities in the future.
Anyway, as an old male I don’t care if both organizations go defunct tomorrow.
While the actual money involved might seem small, the symbolism of that money is part of what’s creating the outrage. Here you have an organization that ostensibly was created to find a cure for a cancer that is tied pretty specifically to women (yes, men get breast cancer, but let’s not get sidetracked from the fact that breast cancer in women attacks their femaleness in a pretty obvious way). They were giving money to an organization that for many women is the only source of affordable health care. That grant money was targeted for breast cancer screenings, the supposed foundation for the entire SGK organization. Then, along comes a political fight regarding one of the smallest amounts of care that Planned Parenthood provides, once that is completely separate from the breast cancer screenings. The fight is pretty clearly related to a woman who was unsuccessful at defunding Planned Parenthood at a state level, so she manages to get herself hired to a national organization and defund them in some way, abandoning the screenings for the very cancer SGK was formed to fight.
And then SGK donates money to PENN STATE. After stating that they defunded PP because PP was under investigation.
The outrage isn’t JUST about the money. It’s about women’s health care being once again a political football.
Let me play Devil’s Advocate on that, though. Say you’re the CEO of the SGK, and you’re told you can decide to not send $600k to PP, and hey, PP does great work but they have a billion dollar a year budget. They have wealthy donors like that person in Texas who are more than going to make up for the shortfall when they hear this story. By not sending that paltry sum to PP, you project you can bring in many many times that amount from major conservative Christian organizations that before, would not send money to you because of your association with PP.
While I can see how it is “philosophically significant” these organizations are supposed to be about raising money to perform roles, it seems possible that both PP and SGK may actually “win” from this move. PP certainly isn’t going to lose money, and SGK may make more money off of new potential revenue sources than they will lose from people angry over the decision. In fact, many of the people who are angry will just divert money they were going to spend on SGK to PP, while SGK may now be getting money from right wing organizations that before would not consider funding them. That means that the actual umbrella of “women’s groups” is bringing in more aggregate money than they were before this happened.
I don’t really think this woman from Georgia “got hired by SGK” through subterfuge, the way you say it you almost make it sound like she hoodwinked the Board and the CEO and snuck her way into a job and snuck this policy in. Unless SGK is ran totally incompetently (and their size suggest at least some operational skill), you don’t hire executive level people without significant vetting. I don’t think it was a secret to the CEO or the Board this woman ran for office in Georgia and was pro-life, and since they also signed off on defunding PP I think it more likely this woman was hired to do these things not that she was hired and then changed SGK’s direction. A hire like that is more likely indicative of a shift in the position of the larger indication than it is of an outsider coming in and steering the organization in a different direction.
Everything issue that affects more than one person in a democratic society is going to be a political football.
Certainly, if you’re going to consider financial calculations in that way, coldbloodedly, I can see how the SGK board might come to that conclusion. But that in and of itself is part of the problem - whether accurately or not, SGK has been perceived by its supporters and sponsors as a charity focused on a particular illness, not as a corporation. And as a charity focused on breast cancer, the decision to defund breast cancer screenings at one of the largest women’s health care organizations in the country strikes its supporters as absolutely contradictory to the purpose of the charity.
This can’t be boiled down to “hey, it’s just money, this’ll end up being a net win for both organizations.” A woman’s organization fighting breast cancer just ended a long-standing cordial relationship with another women’s organization that does breast cancer screenings, all because of the red herring of “investigation.”
Yes?
This is a defense of Komen?
No, I’m not defending Komen. I’m also not against what they did. As I said, I don’t care one way or another. I’m just interested in what I feel is the needless outrage.
I just don’t think it likely a major organization was hoodwinked by some fundie woman, so I felt I’d rebut that particular part of what someone else had said.
Caught up now?
I referred to this idea in passing earlier, and if it’s the case (which we don’t know), it can create a difficult situation for a charity. The problem is that they’re undercutting their own mission, doing something blatantly political, and put that way, they’re selling out Planned Parenthood. It doesn’t reflect well on them.
Well, what you’re saying may be intuitive but I’m not sure it is right. One of the things, in my opinion, that the really good charities have done is think about things “like a business.” The Bill Gates Foundation is in the business of giving away money, in fact I believe it is set up by both Gates and Buffet so that some 50 years after their deaths the entirety of the Foundation will have paid its assets out. This is an organization funded by massively wealthy billionaires who are not in any way interested in just running some big charity and getting personally wealthy from it (they decided to start massive multinational corporations to get personally wealthy.) Bill Gates approaches lots of his foundation’s charitable works in a very business like manner. When you have many billions of dollars to give away it may seem at first that you can just throw it wherever you want, but instead Gates has specifically focused on areas that governments don’t do a lot of work in, and into specific programs and activities that, through evidence based decision making, he has seen lead to greater returns. He’s even talked in interviews about how they will analyze programs in Africa to see which sort of activity is correlating with larger decreases in malaria, and he’ll funnel more money into those activities and less into ones that aren’t working.
Again, I’m not in the breast cancer “business” but if SGK can raise $20m from Christian organizations by breaking their financial tie with Planned Parenthood I can’t see how that isn’t materially superior to the fight against breast cancer than $600,000 to Planned Parenthood. The $600,000 to Planned Parenthood is going to be replaced, and SGK is very likely going to be bringing money into the breast cancer field that wasn’t there before.
Finally, SGK spends some $46.9m on health screening, so if they bring in more money through this from donors who previously weren’t giving to women’s causes then you probably will still set a net increase in money for breast cancer screenings.
Basically to me it seems like:
Before: Less money coming in for breast cancer research, education, and screenings.
After: More money coming for breast cancer research, education, and screenings in aggregate, but with PP receiving $600,000 from private donors that before was coming from SGK.
Ah, still dismissing the symbolism, I see. We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this issue. In the opinion of those of us who are outraged, we see one women’s organization pulling money from another women’s organization due to a failed anti-choice politician’s vendetta. While continuing to provide money to an organization under investigation, which was the smokescreen used to defund Planned Parenthood. YM, obviously, V.
I’m not sure I follow. The job of a charitable organization is to raise money to pursue its charitable goals. If it is doing something that is controversial to a large group of potential donors, then it isn’t anything but proper fiduciary duty to the charitable mission for the officers of the charity to correct that.
Abortion is an extremely contentious issue, and it’s very possible that SGK, by removing any direct association with PP is positioning itself much better long term. Komen’s primary purpose (at least as I can tell from their spending outlays) is public education, followed by research, followed by health screening. We can argue that screening should be a bigger part of their spending, but just like businesses attempt to operate in niches, it makes sense to a degree for charities to try and find a niche as well. With a big organization out there like Planned Parenthood, which has an annual budget over three times the spending of SGK that does lots of screenings, it probably makes more sense for SGK to primarily focus on other areas. Especially since PP isn’t primarily about generating money for medical research, which is one of SGK’s largest outlays. (In fact if you guys actually remember how the government got into the business of funding Planned Parenthood, it has jack all to do with women’s health and everything to do with us wanting less white trash and inner city blacks having tons of kids that will grow up to be on welfare–there’s a reason funding for PP was passed by Nixon with large bipartisan support.) SGK and PP have intersecting goals but SGK is more focused on a narrower niche and I don’t know that it is entirely incorrect that say, 5 years from now the controversy from this will be long forgotten but SGK will be better positioned because it will be separated from a politically sensitive issue.
For as long as private donors make up the shortage, and that could stop after the issue is out of the limelight.
Maybe. Of course, since they haven’t discussed problems in raising funds because of their association with Planned Parenthood and haven’t said anything about the effects of that association or differences in the mission of their two organizations, we’re just assuming. Even if all of that were true, you might wonder about Komen deciding to cut Planned Parenthood off rather than explaining that they were funding mammograms for low-income women, not abortions.