ACLU was the first to warn its supporters of the demise of two foundations known for funding progressive organizations. Both had their funds invested with Bernie Madoff and both apparently have shut down following the collapse of his elaborate $50 billion ponzi scheme.
ACLU’s email came yesterday:
In the last couple of weeks, however, we’ve been hit hard in a way that no one could forecast. You have, no doubt, heard about the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme in which investors have been horribly defrauded of up to $50 billion. What you may not know is that two foundations that have been incredibly generous and longstanding supporters of our national security and reproductive freedom work have been victimized by the Madoff scandal — forced to close their doors and terminate their grants.
That means that $850,000 in support we were counting on from these foundations in 2009 simply won’t exist. We’re dealing with that reality and remain committed to continuing our critical work in these areas. But, as you can imagine, the year-end donations of you and other ACLU supporters are now more important than ever.
A Bloomberg News story describes one of those, the JEHT Foundation (which stands for Justice, Equality, Human Dignity and Tolerance), which specialized in funding of groups in the relatively neglected area of criminal justice reform.
Other foundations which have taken big hits are described in stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, NY Times and the NY Daily News. And here’s a listing of JEHT Foundation grants via Daily Kos.
Added on top of investment losses from the overall financial decline, the impact of the Madoff scam will be reverberating down the foundation food chain through local nonprofits for some time.
From the blog world, an interesting discussion of issues raised by news aggregation, via the blog, Good Morning Silicon Valley.
There’s a fresh dust-up over news headline aggregation going on now in Massachusetts as yet another publisher, in a misguided effort to keep its content in a silo, tries to buck the very nature of the Web. GateHouse Media, which owns 125 local papers across the state, is suing the New York Times Co., parent of the Boston Globe, over the links to GateHouse stories from the Globe’s Web sites
Key issues here for the blogging world.
And here’s a transportation solution I hadn’t heard of before: Car sharing, where groups of people share a car. The Cleantech Blog says there are already programs in 600 American cities. Can that be correct? If so, it’s the kind of solution that could be in place long before the electric car solution being promoted by Better Place, although the two are certainly not mutually exclusive.
I hope to be back online later this morning with a bit of Christmas from Kaaawa. Stay tuned.
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I don’t doubt that “nonprofit” organizations such as JEHT have been supporting worthwhile causes. However, what is also worthy of consideration is the apparent fact that while an organization such as JEHT was supportive of societal improvements – at the same time it was relinquishing its fiduciary and social responsibility of demanding that its capital was invested in similarly right ways. To the contrary, it would seem that these organizations (and Madoff’s individual investors) conveniently, and frankly, greedily, let the bottom profit-line be the determining factor. So while the ACLU frames it as having “been victimized by the Madoff scandal”, it might be useful (albeit less reported) to consider that “nonprofit” organizations had better well reject an ethic, that in the name of “profits”, turns a blind eye to socially responsible investing.