Watchdog Standards Promote Abuses They Seek to Discourage

To the Editor:

The summary of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance findings about Animal People (Watchdog Watch, December 13), omitted any recognition that Animal People has for more than 15 years pointed out in the newspaper it publishes that many of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance standards tend to encourage the very abuses that they are supposed to prevent.

Before we started Animal People, Kim Bartlett and I worked at the Animals’ Agenda, where we had begun publishing annual financial summaries of the leading U.S. animal-protection charities, based on IRS Form 990 filings, including chief-executive salaries and the charities’ balances of program versus overhead spending.

Animals’ Agenda and its board conformed with the Wise Giving Alliance requirements. But that meant that the board could — and did — consist of people employed by the very organizations we were evaluating, who were thereby empowered to interfere with our work.

After two years of almost nonstop board interference, Kim Bartlett and I formed the Animal People newspaper to continue our work of reporting the news for people who care about animals, with emphasis on monitoring the accountability of animal-protection charities.

To avoid any further possibility of outside interference in the integrity of our work, we structured our Board of Directors to exclude people not integrally involved in fulfilling our mission, and to keep control of the board in the hands of the founders.

This is only common sense for structuring any small or highly specialized charity. No one understands the mission of a charity better than the founders; no one is more dedicated to succeeding, or more willing to sacrifice personal benefit in order to fulfill the charitable mission.

In our case, we maxed out our own personal credit to get started, and went without salaries for our first two years.

We also made a point, right from the beginning, of publishing our financial particulars in depth and detail.

In May 2003, we published our own 10-point code of ethics for animal-protection charities and fund raisers. Some of our recommendations parallel those of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance. Others are fundamentally different.

Most significantly, among the differences, we believe that charities should be under the control of the people who most care about the work. The BBB Wise Giving Alliance standards require that as a small charity grows, the founders must make a choice between remaining in control of the board and becoming employees. Whichever choice they make, the founders end up losing control of either how their charities perform at the point of service, or how policy is made. Either outsiders control the board, or hired guns control the delivery of service.

Animal People believes that if the purpose of a code of ethics is to prevent conflicts of interest and misuse of funds, then the code of ethics should address those issues, not the peripheral issue of how a board is structured, which has no direct bearing on the issues.

Indeed, looking back at the many major scandals afflicting charities during the past 15 or 20 years, it seems that the overwhelming majority involved organizations whose boards met all of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance standards, but still failed to meet the tests of integrity and deep concern about the quality of management of the organizations under their direction.

Animal People is not flunking the BBB Wise Giving Alliance standards out of any disregard for ethical performance. On the contrary, our very purpose is monitoring and encouraging ethical performance — and we belive that many of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance standards are detrimental to that goal.

Merritt Clifton
Editor
Animal People
Clinton, Wash.