October 7, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Non-profit groups, anticipating a transfer of trillions of dollars from parents to their baby-boomer children, are becoming “all too willing to trample over donors, their heirs, one another, and anyone else who gets in the way” as they compete for a share of it, says SmartMoney magazine (October). “Welcome to the era of extreme fund raising.”
The magazine says that “charities are getting pushier than ever before, and there’s a simple reason for it: money.”
SmartMoney points to an often-cited statistic that some $10-trillion will change hands from one generation to the next in coming years. As the country’s more than a million charities “scramble to profit from this gold rush,” SmartMoney says, they are increasingly crossing ethical, and even legal, boundaries.
The article quotes several people who believe that their parents or grandparents were misled by fund raisers for non-profit organizations.
Several of those interviewed took their grievances to court, including Erich Gibbs, who, according to the article, persuaded a federal court in Indiana that the local Nature Conservancy “unduly influenced” his father to bequeath the charity his 125-acre farm.
Dennis McGrath, state director of the Nature Conservancy’s Indiana field office, told SmartMoney he disagrees with the verdict, saying the charity “felt a moral and ethical obligation to defend what was rightfully ours.”
The magazine acknowledges that “people are always reluctant to part with their money, and heirs are notoriously jealous of their relatives’ estates.”
But, it says, “as charities become more aggressive, donors and their families all too often wind up feeling taken advantage of,” the article states.
An excerpt of the article is available on the magazine’s Web site at http://www.smartmoney.com.
