Nonprofit Leaders Express Ambivalence About Examination of Political-Giving Habits

While federal records that show the political giving habits of foundation and charity officials are open for anyone to examine, people in the nonprofit world are deeply ambivalent about turning public attention to those donations.

In fact, many of the charities and foundations that were contacted by The Chronicle said they would not discuss the findings of a study of Federal Election Commission records examined by the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group in Washington, at the newspaper’s request.

For example, when The Chronicle asked about the $2,300 donation made by Hala Moddelmog, president of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, to support the election of Barack Obama, the breast-cancer charity’s spokesman, Sean Tuffnell, said, “The donations you cite from FEC records were made by Ms. Moddelmog as a private citizen. As such, she wishes to keep her decision process private as well.”

“Organizationally, we really don’t talk about candidates or campaigns or the election process,” said Adam Coyne, director of public affairs at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, in Princeton, N.J. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, the foundation’s president, does not show up in Federal Election Commission records as a campaign donor, but other employees have given a total of more than $9,000, all to Democrats.

Some foundation spokesman said they thought it was inappropriate and intrusive to ask employees about their giving, since political donations are made from an employee’s own checkbook, not from the coffers of organization where they work.

Heidi Sinclair, chief communications officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said in an e-mail message that the foundation’s “employees, management, and trustees are free to be active politically in their private lives, but that activity is completely separate and apart from the foundation and is done on their personal time as individuals. We therefore have no ability as a foundation to verify individual campaign contributions and find this whole exercise irrelevant to the activities of the foundation.”

Interesting and Relevant’

At least one scholar of the nonprofit world, however, says charity and foundation officials should not be so reluctant to discuss their giving practices.

Peter Frumkin, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, said he thought it was “absolutely interesting and relevant for the public to know where employees are coming from in terms of their own ideological and political perspectives.”

Democrats may draw a larger share of donations, Mr. Frumkin said, because both progressive politics and many people in the philanthropic world “are committed to structural reform: They believe that human problems are functions of structural inefficiencies, breakdowns in the markets, problems in the way the system is set up. And they believe deeply in the power of rational, serious, systematic thought. They believe that these problems can be remedied if only the right intervention is crafted, if only the right policy is implemented.”

Support for Democrats “is not problematic or in any way revealing of some kind of fatal flaw in the world of philanthropy or charities,” the professor said. “It simply reveals that the people who populate large foundations and large charities believe that the failings of society can in fact be remedied and don’t believe that these problems adhere to the human condition. They don’t believe that these flaws are absolutely part of the world we live in. They believe in the possibility of change, either through policy or funding.”

Mr. Frumkin said he suspected that foundation employees are uncomfortable discussing their political contributions not because they are hiding something or are embarrassed, but because the topic “represents a crack in the veneer of detachment, of neutrality, of proceduralism, of technocratic reason — a crack in what they believe is a very important public service to philanthropy.”

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