Today’s post continues from my previous post, “Corporate Accountability International Stretches a Claim,” where I demonstrated that in 2009 the NGO Corporate Accountability International (CAI) received 80%, or less, of its funding from individuals. This was in contradiction to a claim by CAI that it received 90% of its funding from individuals.
In this post, I’ll take the examination of CAI’s funding a bit further. Today’s look at CAI funding will be focused on the concentration of the remaining 20%, which is donated by organizations. Further research shows that three-quarters of that 20% (i.e., 15%) came from only two organizations.
One of those contributing organizations, the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, in 2009 donated $300,000 to CAI. Click here to see the documentation, then scroll to page 22 on the PDF. The other contributing organization, the Deborah Rose Foundation, in 2009 donated $250,000 to CAI. Click here to see the documentation, then scroll to page 14 on the PDF.
Please consider that for fiscal year 2009, CAI brought in a bit over $3.7 million in revenue and when the simple arithmetic is done (($300,000 +$250,000) / $3.7 million = 14.86%), it’s clear that CAI received a significant portion, about 15%, of its funding from only two sources.
This finding further adds to the doubt expressed in “Corporate Accountability International Stretches a Claim“ that CAI, an influential NGO, is as widely-supported as perhaps they would like the public to believe.
Corporate Accountability International (CAI), a Boston-based NGO, makes the following claim on PDF page 9 of their publication “30 Years of Setting the New Standard.”
Members range from doctors to students to teachers to members of faith communities and provide 90 percent of our funding.
This claim gives the impression that CAI is 90% supported financially by individuals and not by organizations. Certainly, that’s an admirable position for an NGO to be in. Such financing adds to the much coveted “grassroots” caché. But is the claim true? Is CAI actually 90% supported by individual donors?
If you’re thinking “I suppose it’s not true, otherwise why would Richard be writing about this?”, then you’re right. Since companies have their claims challenged frequently, I thought I’d be different and challenge a claim of an NGO that doesn’t get as much oversight.
The CAI claim of 90% individual donor support is not accurate. Let me explain how I discovered this.
How I Discovered This
As I’ve noted in my previous post about Corporate Accountability International, this organization has published a listing of their donors. So, I used this information to test the accuracy of their 90% claim. The list of donors I chose as a sample to analyze appears on PDF page 11 of CAI’s 2010 annual report. The donor list contains names of individuals and foundations and corresponds to CAI’s 2009 fiscal year.
The contributions of individuals are private information that is not required to be released to the public. But, the contributions of foundations are public information and can be seen on the donating foundation’s Form 990, a publicly-available tax return document required for annual filing by non-profit organizations in the United States. Foundations qualify as non-profit organizations.
The 2010 annual report’s list of donors is broken down into contribution ranges. The first range contains donors contributing over $5,000. The second range contains donors contributing between $1,000 and $4,999. There are other ranges, but their contribution ranges are smaller. Since I was just trying to get a “ballpark” estimate on whether the 90% claim was true, I chose to concentrate on the first two ranges only. And anyway, after examining the total list I found that most of the foundations donating to CAI fell within the first two ranges, so that was another reason to just concentrate on only those two ranges.
In the two ranges on this list I identified 30 foundations for research. I used Guidestar.org to access each foundation’s Form 990. (Guidestar.org is a great free resource for this type of information.) Here’s what I found.
What I Found
Of the 30 foundations in the first two ranges on the donor list, there were 14 for which I could identify no donations to CAI. This lack of information was due to mainly two reasons. First, for some of the foundations shown in the donor list I simply could not find any Form 990s for the organization’s name as shown. Second, for some of the other foundations, I found
Continue reading Corporate Accountability Intl. Stretches a Claim
Corporate Accountability International (CAI) is a non-governmental organization (NGO) that “demand(s) direct corporate accountability to public interests.” Indeed, in their “Standards of Political Conduct for Corporations,” CAI says that corporations must “be more transparent about their activities” and calls for “independent oversight” of corporations. Some of the companies CAI has targeted in the past are Mc Donald’s, Burger King, KFC, and Nestlé.
Those mission statements certainly make sense given the name of this organization, don’t they? And this $3.7 million dollar per year operation goes to great lengths to support that mission. I’ve seen extensive documentation of their campaign efforts given in their annual reports and newsletters and you can see it there too. But what I haven’t seen in those reports and newsletters, nor will you, is information detailing the accountability or transparency of Corporate Accountability International itself. Ironic isnt’ it?
It’s ironic that an organization calling for the accountability of other organizations makes little to no effort to provide information about their own accountability to act in the public interest. I’m speaking of the public interest which they declare to protect as shown on page 32 (PDF version) of Corporate Accoutability International’s booklet “30 Years of Setting the New Standard.” On that page is the quote “we must continue to adjust and act – always representing the needs of people worldwide.”
Such a claim is, of course, not unusual for an NGO. It’s pretty much boilerplate. We expect NGOs to make those types of claims, but few, if any, actually back up their claims with information on their own accountability. I have written much on the subject of the accountability and transparency of NGOs. No NGOs that I have researched meet a high standard in this area and Corporate Accountability International is no exception. Let me explain my findings, or I should say lack of findings, for you, starting at the macro-level.
What I mean here by the macro-level is the employment of a larger organization through which NGOs can report their accountability and transparency. Sort of a “monitor of monitors,” if you will. Such an organization exists. I’ve written about it before on this blog. It’s called the Global Reporting Initiative. As I’ve written before:
“The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ‘is a network-based organization that produces a comprehensive sustainability reporting framework that is widely used globally. . . . GRI’s core goals include the mainstreaming of disclosure on environmental, social and governance performance.’ Via the GRI, many corporations, labor, academic, and professional organizations report to the world their positions on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. To improve this process for NGO (non-governmental organization) reporting, during May 2010 the GRI created the NGO Sector Supplement, which was a framework modeled on other GRI report structures, affording NGOs a way to better report their accountability and sustainability positions to their stakeholders.”
The
Continue reading Corporate Accountability International Rates Low on Accountability Reporting
During the past couple of weeks, I’ve blogged about Greenpeace’s transparency as enabled by the reports they have filed with the Global Reporting Initiative. To explain the GRI reporting objective, as I wrote previously in “Why Doesn’t Greenpeace Report Its Credibility?,” please continue.
Per the Global Reporting Initiative, the GRI “is a network-based organization that produces a comprehensive sustainability reporting framework that is widely used globally. . . . GRI’s core goals include the mainstreaming of disclosure on environmental, social and governance performance.”
Via the GRI, many corporations, labor, academic, and professional organizations report to the world their positions on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. To improve this process for NGO (non-governmental organization) reporting, during May 2010 the GRI created the NGO Sector Supplement, which was a framework modeled on other GRI report structures, affording NGOs a way to better report their accountability and sustainability positions to their stakeholders. Greenpeace International was one of the founding organizers behind the establishment of the NGO Sector Supplement.(3rd paragraph of link)
According to the Global Reporting Initiative, you may view the GRI transparency reports that Greenpeace International and its 28 independently operating organizations have filed by going to this link (see “Download the GRI Reports” list). As that reference doesn’t appear to be complete, curious as that may be, you will also find some additionally referenced Greenpeace GRI reports on the INGO Accountability Charter Web site.
Summarizing these two sources, I have found only seven GRI reports for Greenpeace at-large. Those seven reports are spread over three years. The two sources show that Greenpeace International filed GRI reports in 2007, 2008, and 2010. The two sources also show that for 2010, one GRI report each was filed by Greenpeace Australia Pacific, Greenpeace Netherlands, Greenpeace Japan, and Greenpeace Mediterranean. Seven reports total.
Please keep in mind that Greenpeace as an organization has 28 independently operated offices around the world. Realistically, each one of those offices could file a GRI report about its own independent operations.
By going to the GRI site and downloading the reports list, as referenced in paragraph 4 above (or simply click here), you will see that the GRI has been accepting these transparency reports since 1999. That’s twelve years of opportunity that Greenpeace has had for all 28 of its independent organizations to file their transparency reports with the GRI. If each of the 28 organizations filed one report for each of the 12 years, then we would see 336 reports listed. But instead we see only seven.
Greenpeace has certainly missed a good opportunity to be more transparent to the public in whose interest it claims to act.
Last Friday, I posted “Greenpeace NZ ‘Accountable’ to Themselves” in which I reviewed Greenpeace New Zealand’s statement that they were committed to the INGO Accountability Charter principle of including campaign targets as stakeholders. However, in that post I showed how they failed to implement this principle as evidenced via their 2010 Annual Report.
Today I did some research on a neighboring Greenpeace, that is Greenpeace Australia Pacific. Unlike Greenpeace NZ, Greenpeace AP has filed a 2010 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) report.* In section 2.7 of that report they state:
. . . our stakeholders include those we seek to persuade
in government, industry and the media . . .
This statement adheres to the INGO Accountability Charter principle shown in my post from last Friday which states that NGO stakeholders are to include:
“Those whose policies, programmes or behaviour we (the NGOS) wish to influence.”
Parenthesis mine
Greenpeace AP’s position is somewhat of an improvement over Greenpeace NZ, and a move toward accountability. Although after an examination of Greenpeace AP’s annual reports, I could not find much information on their governance procedures, nor could I find any references to campaign targets as stakeholders. It would be nice to see such references in Greenpeace AP’s annual report.
Perhaps the 2011 Greenpeace AP Annual Report will contain this information.
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* The reader should note that, according to my review, only about five regional Greenpeace offices have filed a GRI report.
Today I’m going to discuss one of the lesser known, but still highly influential, activist groups in the environmental campaign business.
For readers who aren’t familiar with Friends of the Earth US, this organization is the American arm of the worldwide environmental non-governmental organization (eNGO) Friends of the Earth (FOE) and is one of the largest environmental advocates on the globe. Strategically speaking, FOE US differs somewhat from its eNGO cousins such as Greenpeace and Rainforest Action Network. In campaigning for the environment, the latter direct much of their actions directly at corporations while FOE US chooses to direct much of their campaigning effort at American legislators.
A few months ago I performed research which looked into the financing of Friends of the Earth US. The findings of the research were reported in a White Paper entitled “Friends of the Earth Received Narrow Financial Support from 2003 through 2006.”
The research I performed used information from publicly-available U.S. government documents and found that FOE US, for the period of 2003 through 2006, received almost 60% of their contributions from only 11 contributors. Given that FOE US spends much of its campaigning effort on American legislators, the implications of such narrow support are readily apparent.
The White Paper was published by The Kahuna Institute and if you would like to receive a copy of the White Paper - ”Friends of the Earth Received Narrow Financial Support from 2003 through 2006,” you may download a copy for free by going to this link.
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About  Here at " Richard Telofski on The War on Capitalism," I discuss and analyze the individuals and groups conducting campaigns against capitalism. In the articles on this site, I provide analysis on lesser known facts about this movement. More . . .
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