Well, you’re not actually presenting a persuasive argument that the symbolism is anything more than just fluff.
I also think you need to consider that Planned Parenthood and SGK seem to have very different overall missions, that intersect because PP’s large umbrella of women’s health issues obviously includes breast cancer. But if I was the CEO of SGK I might, for example, be hesitant to continue a $600k a year association that might be costing my organization millions of dollars. If I’m running a charity that is primarily focused on breast cancer research and education, I probably don’t want to be associated with more controversial outfits like Planned Parenthood that are irrevocably caught up in the abortion debate.
I’m not convinced it is desirable by anyone but radical politicized leftists for SGK to see itself as part of the “larger women’s movement.” I think that positions them on a certain side of the political spectrum; that’s unavoidable for Planned Parenthood but I think it’s unnecessary (and thus unwise) for SGK.
[Again I’m slipping into the first person here but I’m still mostly playing DA’s, I don’t think any of us know enough about the inner workings of SGK to know their motivations or what numbers they’ve seen so I’m just working off the fact that organization administrators whether they be corporate CEOs or not for profit CEOs are validly interested in maximizing revenue because it takes money to achieve you goal whether it b maximizing shareholder value or maximizing aid to your chosen charitable cause.)
Right, but PR is a difficult game. Lots of people in the pro-life crowd insist the U.S. government is paying for abortions, when the government funding for Planned Parenthood very specifically does not pay for abortions. More than half of Americans think that abortion is immoral. The strongly pro-life are a large and extremely activist minority. This is political toxic waste and I’m not convinced that it’s easy (and thus perhaps not a good use of limited organizational resources) to try and fight a PR battle that will probably not change perceptions when you could just sever the ties between organizations.
I think in reality you’d be hard pressed to make a strong argument that severing the ties has materially hurt Planned Parenthood. So the question is, does it hurt SGK or help SGK? It could hurt them short term but long term it’s possible they’ve projected it is a better move.
If that’s the charity you’re running, then the mission of your charity is to fund breast cancer research and education when politically expedient for you to do so. This appears also to be SGK’s new mission. Many of those who previously donated money to them thought that their mission was to fund breast cancer research and education, full stop. Presumably you are clever enough to understand the difference. Whether you personally find it significant or not, rest assured that many, many other people do.
Maybe the people in the pro-life crowd weren’t intending to make a factual statement. Saying this hasn’t hurt Planned Parenthood in the short term (because a couple of people are making up for the shortfall for now) is, well, short-sighted. Planned Parenthood now has to keep going back to those donors or find other ones to replace this source of funding. It may not make a difference when the outrage is fresh, but later on, who knows.
I’m quoting myself because I’d like to have someone give me a clue on this.
I just don’t get Handel. How can a woman be so hateful toward other women? More of PP’s funding goes toward education and contraceptives than toward abortion. How better to reduce abortions?
She reminds me of those women who “regret” having had an abortion, so they want to ban it for everyone else. “I got mine when I needed it, but since I changed my mind/got God/became a politician I want to deny you the choice”.
Upon closer inspection, SGK looks like an awful charity. They spent a lot on overhead. A lot of people supported both organizations, but with this divorce, people are going to have to choose sides. I hope many more people choose PP over SGK.
So all that has to be done to get SGK to stop funding something is to get a friendly Congresscritter to “investigate” the said something for improprieties? How about if Nancy Pelosi investigates SGK? She’s in a really safe district. Does that mean that they would burst into a big ball of flaming contradiction?
Well, sir, if you feel the outrage is needless all I can say is that your opinion is your opinion. Clearly, a LOT of other people feel otherwise. It’s not just about the numbers here, it’s about a large “charity” doing something that appears counter to its alleged core mission. Given that breast cancer is a life-or-death thing for millions of people affected by it (patients, their families, their friends) yes, there is going to be outrage.
People have supported SGK; morally, financially, and with their time. They believed in it’s mission.
A very large proportion of those same people also support PP. The organizations’ missions do overlap after all, in that they both focus mainly on women’s health issues.
Suddenly, SGK launches what many see as a blatantly political attack on PP. They launch that attack seemingly based on opposition to something that many of SGK’s supporters see as a basic right that has been very much under attack in recent years.
So they see an organization that exists largely because of their time and money suddenly turning and attacking them.
You may not agree with their viewpoint, but it shouldn’t be difficult to see that this is very real outrage and not “recreational”.
I’ll add that the right-wing accusing people of “recreational outrage” is hilarious.
If this is typical of many SGK supporters (in this post-divestment time), then it appears to be a philosophical action, although dressed up with recently enacted procedural reasons to give it plausible deniability. SGK is completely within its rights to do so, of course, but it ought to expect a lot of defection by previous supporters who don’t agree with its philosophy. Possibly a massive defection.
Yes, I know that several posters have made it clear that the SGK to PP grants weren’t used for abortion funding. But it pretty clearly doesn’t make a difference to this writer. Their view would probably be that, even if the money wasn’t allowed to be used for abortions, it freed up other funds that would otherwise have been targeted at mammograms, so the noe could be used for abortions.
I know that a lot more of SGK’s beneficiaries will become public now. As other posters have noted SGK has a grant out to Penn State which is under investigation. I wonder it the ‘pro-life’ brigade will pay any attention if they find out that any of SGK’s beneficiaries subsequently send money or use money for any kind of military funding. Surely that would go against their ‘pro-life’ stance. Or does pro-life only mean before birth?
It could be that they turn out losing money because of donors who are upset about SGK refusing to fund Planned Parenthood. In which case this will turn out to be a bad business decision. Catering to the “recreational outrage” of pro-life people who refuse to donate to SGK, if SGK helps Planned Parenthood do breast cancer screenings for poor people, might actually end up hurting SGK in the long run.
That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is you have X amount of dollars as any sort of operational entity that you can spend on different things. If you’re SGK you’ve made the decision to spend around $45m a year on screening. I don’t know where most of that goes, but it doesn’t go to Planned Parenthood. SGK was previously sending some $600k to PP divvied up among 19 State PP organizations.
If you can decide to no longer spend $600k on PP, and it generates $5m in revenue (from “new customers”), so you now spend $47m a year on screening instead of $45m, you’re actually doing more screening because you have made a decision that increases your revenue. That has nothing to do with only doing screenings when it is “politically expedient”, instead it has to do with maximizing charitable spending, which should be the goal of charitable organizations.
Even if it hurts Planned Parenthood, it won’t hurt them much. It was $600k out of a $1bn + budget, and it only impacts 19 State Planned Parenthood associations because SGK didn’t even have a relationship with PP in the rest of the States.
If you’re running SGK, your operational goal isn’t to “make sure nothing we do negatively impacts Planned Parenthood.” You’d probably like that you don’t step on other not-for-profit’s toes who work in the same general field, but your goal isn’t to make sure that not-for-profit is doing well. If you can “hurt” PP to the tune of $600k but generate $5m more for yourself, you an very logically argue you’ve helped the “cause” more in the aggregate so the “cause” is better off even though individual participants in the cause may be worse off.
Not it isn’t. That’s more than Bill Gates or Steve Jobs made in salary, but not more than they earned running those companies. At one point Steve Jobs was gifted an $85m jet for personal use by the Apple Board. That alone is more than 6 lifetimes of earnings by the CEO of SGK.
Plus, Jobs made around $50m/a year in dividends from Disney stock he owned. It’s not really meaningful to compare his salary at Apple to the salary of someone running an outfit like SGK who probably has that as 80% of their income stream.
I have no idea if SGK misuses funds, but $480k isn’t outlandish for the CEO of a large not for profit. Especially since unlike private sector CEOs there isn’t the potential to earn vast sums in stock options and etc. Lots of private sector CEOs of large companies only make a few hundred thousand a year but irregularly get stock grants (which they often immediately execute) that can total in the tens of millions.
SGK’s “core mission” is to fund PP $600k a year? I find that strange since if it was their core mission you would expect them to have been spending more.
I’m not “the right wing.” I’ve never engaged in recreational outrage, so I don’t give two shits if other people of the same political persuasion have, has nothing to do with me. I’m not making sweeping generalizations about a whole political persuasion here, I’m talking about the specific recreational outrage in this thread. If you think you’ve seen me engaged in mindless recreational outrage somewhere here then let me know, because I assure you that is never my intent.
Right, I’ve admitted we’re just speculating (and pointed out the Netflix pricing example as one where a corporation miscalculated how much a change would piss off its customers.)