March 12, 2009 | Read Time: 4 minutes
The lawsuit filed by the five people seeking permanent reinstatement to the governing board of Feed the Children, one of the nation’s largest antipoverty charities, presents one side of the controversy by outlining a dramatic story.
The suit says the board members were supposed to attend a scheduled meeting on December 8, 2008.
At the meeting, several members planned to discuss placing the organization’s founder and president, Larry Jones, on a sabbatical to allow the board to “further deal with those actions Larry Jones had continued to take contrary to or without” its approval, the suit says.
“Seeing that his days of freewheeling dominance over FTC were numbered, and seeing that certain actions he had taken to the detriment of FTC were about to be exposed, Larry Jones … made a desperate power move,” the suit says. “He secretly hand-selected new purported members of the Board of Directors who would be friendly to him. In short, Mr. Jones decided to ‘pack the board’ in his favor.”
To do that, the suit alleges, “he only invited certain members of the actual board to a dinner party” on December 4, at the Deep Fork Grill, in Oklahoma City, to discuss his retirement and that of his wife, Frances Jones, who is Feed the Children’s co-founder, executive vice president, and secretary.
“However,” the suit says, “his real purpose was to turn the dinner party into some sort of impromptu meeting of the board so that he could pack it with his friends — all fellow ministers.”
Adding and Subtracting
“It soon became apparent,” the lawsuit says, “that Larry Jones had misrepresented the real purpose of the dinner party” when he told one of the board members, Rick England, that he wanted to add an invited dinner guest, a minister from Hawaii, to the board.
Because the minister was black, “Larry Jones said that he should be on the Board of Directors,” said Mr. England in an affidavit filed in Oklahoma County District Court. “Larry Jones went on to say that FTC needed a ‘black’ board member because Obama would not look favorably on charities without a ‘black’ board member.”
Mr. England said he told Mr. Jones that he “did not have a problem with the eventual inclusion” of the Hawaii minister as a board member, but that a vote should take place at the next board meeting, on December 8.
The lawsuit alleges that Mr. Jones went ahead and added the Hawaii minister to the board, as well as four other new members. He took steps to remove five other members, now plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Mr. Jones’s actions broke Feed the Children’s bylaws and state laws, the suit alleges. “The Board of Directors as it was comprised on December 4, 2008, survived the coup attempt by Mr. Jones, and they began this action against Mr. Jones’s puppet/pseudo board members,” the lawsuit says.
Warning of ‘Severe’ Harm
Court papers filed in a countersuit filed by the five new members of the board condemn the “ad hominem attacks” on Mr. Jones, deny any wrongdoing, and say the restaurant meeting was entirely proper and official.
Minutes of the restaurant meeting prepared by Frances Jones say the directors there were introduced to the Hawaii minister, “who came highly recommended, and the directors expressed their desire to promote diversity on the FTC board.”
The lawsuit by the original members of the board “is a protest by a faction of previous directors of FTC who were removed from office after new directors were nominated and elected,” says the countersuit. “These self-interested former directors have improperly used the name of the charity to mask their selfish interests in their former titles.”
The countersuit challenges on several grounds the right of the former board members to be reinstated.
For one thing, it says, because Feed the Children is a religious charity, the court would violate the constitutional separation of church and state by intervening in issues about the makeup of the board.
The countersuit also says the harm of disrupting the organization’s management would be extreme.
“Larry Jones has always been the public face, spiritual leader, and chief officer of Feed the Children,” the countersuit says. “Notwithstanding the current imbroglio, he has continued to carry out his charity’s solemn mission to feed hungry children. There is still much work to be done. If the present board is disrupted and the complainants are placed in effective control, the potential consequences are severe. The expected sidelining or dismissal of Jones would leave the organization without its principal fund-raising personality, impacting probable donations and damaging its good will and reputation.”
