The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation pulled the plug on its funding for Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer care and screening program yesterday. Ostensibly, this is because Planned Parenthood is being investigated to see if it spent any of the money it got from the government to fund abortions. The Komen Foundation has a policy on investigations and they said they were simply following their policy.
(Update: Komen has now released a statement that the reason for this had to do with efficiency.)
Whether or not this was a good decision on the part of the Komen Foundation or not is not something I am going to address here. But the decision caused a friend
of mine to send me a link to Charity Navigator’s page on the Komen Foundation. The group has a four star rating from Navigator based on a numeric total in the mid 60s. I won’t pretend I understand how Navigator works, though at some point I intend to do the research so I can understand what their rating system means and apply it better than I can now.
But as I dug into the background materials I found on Navigator I became increasingly disturbed. The first little alarm bell was the salary of the CEO: more than $450,000. The average oncologist makes about $280,000. The average American worker makes $46,326–a little more than ten percent of the Komen CEO’s salary. My final year as a school teacher–with a masters degree, over 30 years of experience, and a wall filled with awards for scholastic journalism and my contributions to it–totaled just more than $64,000.
Maybe the Komen CEO’s salary is in line with what others in the field make. Maybe it isn’t. I know there was an enormous furor locally over what CEOs and board members of non-profits here make. Those numbers were in the low six figures, as I recall. But I don’t really know what the going rate is for a non-profit CEO is these days.
I intend to find out.
The second disturbing item came out of the low ratings commentators on the Navigator site gave to the organization–and the comments they made to back up those ratings. Several said too little of the money actually wound up in research. Navigator cited overhead costs of nearly 20 percent. The rest went to “program expenses.” But several people claimed the bureaucracies involved in those programs ate up a substantial chunk of the money.
Without getting into the nitty-gritty of the more detailed numbers I cannot verify the degree to which that is true either. But I intend to delve into those numbers in the coming days to see what I can decipher.
Finally, I encountered the trailer for a new Canadian documentary called Pink Ribbons, Inc. that raised some more disturbing questions about the whole business of breast cancer.
What I saw last night and this morning made me begin to wonder about what other organizations in the business of raising money for cancer are doing with the money we raise for them. How much are they raising? What do they pay their CEOs? How much gets chewed up in overhead–things like buildings and lights and advertising and managers? How much really goes into research and educating doctors and patients about what we know and what the options are?
We all need to know this. We want to be fighting cancer with our efforts–not building people big houses.
