Letters: Critiquing Coverage of the Humane Society and Fretting About Philanthropists’ Role in Public Policy

To the Editor:

The Chronicle should be embarrassed for printing freelancer Marc Gunther’s groveling piece on the Humane Society of the United States (“Humane Society Notches String of Big Wins Under Aggressive Leader,” December).

The most shocking part of the article was a quote from Humane Society CEO Wayne Pacelle claiming that the organization’s settlement of a bribery and fraud lawsuit for $11 million in 2014 was actually a good thing for the organization’s advocacy efforts. George Orwell couldn’t have put it better.

The rest of the article reads as if the Humane Society’s PR department wrote it, with spin being put on declining fundraising and massive layoffs.

Meanwhile, no mention is made in the piece that in recent years the organization has been the subject of a public consumer alert by a state attorney general and that lawmakers representing 11 states have called on their attorneys general to investigate the group.

In this more fleshed-out context, the attitude of Humane Society executives that everything’s all right could be seen as pride before the fall.

Will Coggin
Research Director
Center for Consumer Freedom
Washington, D.C.

To the Editor:

Joanne Barkan’s excellent opinion article, “Democracy Endangered When ‘Philanthro-Barons’ Try to Tip Courts” (December 16), pulls no punches, nor should it.

I spent my entire career in the nonprofit sector as a fundraiser and witnessed the tectonic shift of foundations toward funding “public-agenda-setting” programs devised by the foundation philanthropoids (as long as we’re inventing names) and away from selecting nonprofit institutions that are best suited to determining the solutions that satisfy foundation areas of interest.

The main exception to this rule was the well-regulated capital programs sponsored by the Kresge Foundation, which worked extremely well. But that was nothing really akin to the disturbing trends we are seeing in philanthropy today.

John Marksbury
Palm Springs, Calif.