The charities below are listed in the order of the greatest salary paid to an individual involved with it in compensation for their work. All were rated either three or four stars by Charity Navigator. These

were the latest figures available as of February 10, 2012.

 Name Top Salary Total Revenue

1. Prostate Cancer Foundation $1,204,968 $40,188,315

2. Dana-Farber Cancer institute $943,858 $894,169,076

3. American Cancer Society $914,906 $930,432,308

4. Breast Cancer Research Foundation $557,992 $36,214,286

5. Leukemia & Lymphoma Society $518,499 $246,744,046

6. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital $512,670 $923,146,466

7. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory $498,596* $132,495,902

8. Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute $422,252 $28,277,865

9. Susan G. Komen for the Cure $417,171 $357,832,083

10. Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Institute $399,872 $4,504,305

11. Damon Runyan Cancer Research Foundation $346,076 $15,978,604

12. Cancer Research Institute $342,500 $13,685,488

13. Huntington Medical Research Institute $340,000 $9,351,769

14. Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation $311,413 $24,207,399

15. Lance Armstrong Foundation $293,200 $41,770,001

16. Prevent Cancer Foundation $291,869 $6,129,688

17. Lung Cancer Alliance $233,672 $2,303,967

18. Ovarian Cancer Research Fund $230,550 $5,730,872

19. National Breast Cancer Coalition $224,167 $5,647,541

20. Pancreatic Cancer Action Network $222,300 $11,609,243

21. Lustgarten Fndn. for Pancreatic Cancer $201,002 $8,754,208

22. Breastcancer.org $199,409 $2,597,161

23. National Breast Cancer Foundation $177,912 $11,922,622

24. V Foundation $174,923 $12,053,629

25. International Myeloma Foundation $173,109 $8,521,636

26. Lymphoma Research Foundation $163,074 $7,138,185

27. Melanoma Research Foundation $156,923 $2,594,652

28. Colon Cancer Alliance $153,333 $1,782,313

29. Young Survival Coalition $152,908 $3,619,660

30. Childhood Leukemia $151,111 $2,991,137

31. Moffit Cancer Center Foundation $149,716 $14,602,928

32. Cure Childhood Cancer $145,000 $1,970,258

33. Roswell Park Alliance $143,941 $17,131,186

34. United Against Lung Cancer $132,500 $2,131,529

35. American-Italian Cancer Foundation $130,920 $2,035,087

36. American Skin Association $120,000 $1,730,156

37. Ovarian Cancer National Alliance $118,823 $1,536,050

38. MPN Research Foundation $117,091 $1,247,538

39. Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation $115,267 $5,784,888

40. Leukemia Research Foundation $110,052 $1,905,132

41. LUNGevity Foundation $108,096 $1,929,075

42. Israel Cancer Association, USA $102,400 $713,184

43. Breast Cancer Relief Foundation $99,936 $39,796,530

44. The Hope Foundation $98,000 $2,833,331

45. National Lung Cancer Partnership $85,583 $2,065,995

46. Pediatric Cancer Foundation $84,000 $1,160,841

47. Children’s Cancer and Blood Foundation $66,000 $1,513,993

48. Jonsson Cancer Center Foundation $41,530 $9,345,091

49. Kidney Cancer Association $48,360** $4,441,139

50. City of Hope # $891,189,944

51. Conquer Cancer Fndn. Of Amer. Soc. Of Onco. # $24,665,680

52. Minneapolis Medical Research Foundation # $26,649,107

53. Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation ## $940,838

*The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is not purely a cancer research facility. They do several other kinds of biological and medical research. **The head of the Kidney Cancer Society is not compensated. The salary listed is the salary of the organization’s secretary. #The head of City of Hope is not compensated from the charity funds, but does receive pay from an affiliated organization—I assume for running the medical side of things. That paycheck amounts to $1,110,580 and would place that individual second on this list.

The top person at the Minneapolis Medical Research Foundation is not compensated through the charity but receives $175,788 from affiliated sources. That would be twenty-third on the list above.

The person in charge at the Conquer Cancer Foundation receives no money from charity funds but does receive $77,000 from the affiliated group. That salary would place at #47.

##The Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation did not report on salaries to Charity Navigator.

We buy into a lot of strange ideas in the US. We seem to have very little trouble with Tom Cruise making $20-25 million a film–or with Kobe Bryant making over $21 million for playing basketball. But if a teacher makes $60,000 a year we think him or her grossly overpaid–especially if they are getting health insurance as part of the deal.

Last week I wrote a piece about what had inspired me to begin this series earlier than I would have liked to: the mess at Komen for the Cure. In that piece I brought up the salary of the person at the top–the CEO. Charity Navigator reported the salary at the time as about $450,000. This week, they have updated to the 2011 figure, which is $417,171. That still sounds to most of us like a lot of money.

But in terms of what CEOs at other cancer charities make versus how much the charity brings in a year, the number is not far out of line. Of the 53 cancer charities whose financial statements I have looked at, the Komen CEO’s salary finishes ninth overall–and ranks second among those charities which focus exclusively on breast cancer. Komen ($320,212,055) finishes fifth in total donations overall, trailing the big four–the American Cancer Society ($893,933,907), the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ($875,398,336) and the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital ($832,315,232) and City of Hope (total revenues, $891,189,944 but only $651,939,636 in individual donations)–by over $500,000,000.

The top salary in cancer charities goes to none of the above, though. Instead it goes to the top gun at the Prostate Cancer Foundation. He handles nowhere near the finances of any of the above. PCF raised a total of $40,188,315 from all sources yet their CEO received a salary of $1,204,968. That is about a quarter of a million dollars ahead of the second place finisher.

The head of Dana-Farber at $943,858 a year is that second place finisher. Including government grants and donations from foundations, he manages $894,169,076 worth of donations. In addition, he is responsible for the day-to-day running of a major cancer treatment and research center with nearly 4,000 employees and nearly 300,000 patient visits a year.

The third highest salary goes to the top person at the ACS. He pulled down $914,906 according to the most recent figures on Charity Navigator. He oversaw a total budget from individual, NGO and government (less than one percent) contributions of $930,432,308. The organization is huge, with close to three million volunteers nationwide. They claim one percent of all Americans participate in the Relay For Life each year.

Fourth on the list is the head of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation who makes $557,992 per year. The organization only grossed $36,214,286 last year–well behind Komen’s figure. The group does have one of the more efficient fundraising operations among the major cancer  charities at 6.1 percent and spends only 2.6 percent of its money on administration.

The person at the top of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society receives a salary of $518,499–which rounds out the top five. That individual oversees the raising and use of $246,744,046 in funds.

Sixth on the list is the person who runs the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, at $512,670. Like the head of Dana-Farber, he also runs a major research and treatment facility–in this case with overnight beds for its patients. But the cost of living in Memphis is substantially less than the cost of living in Boston, so perhaps that explains the difference in the two salaries.

The head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory–a lab that does cancer research as well as research into a number of other biological and medical areas–finishes seventh in terms of salary at $498,596. Some would argue he does not actually belong on this list since his lab does not work exclusively on cancer. Their total collections for last year were $144,576,370. That was substantially more than either the PCF or the BCRF raised–substantially more than the two raised combined.

The eighth highest paid cancer exec in those 53 charities reviewed is in charge of the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute at $422,252. That institute had donations of $26,221,857 last year.

Komen’s CEO finishes ninth on the list.

Finishing off the top ten is the head of the Samuel Waxman Cancer Research Institute at $399,872. That organization raises only $4,504,305, substantially less than any other group in the top ten for CEO salary.

The top administrator at City of Hope is not compensated on the charity side, but does receive a salary of $1,110,580 from affiliated groups. I assume that means the hospital pays the individual entirely out of non-charity income. That would place him second on the salary list.

Of the three and four star cancer charities I have reviewed on Charity Navigator’s list, top administrator salaries ranged as low as $41,000. Generally, as salaries decreased so did the size of the operation the person was responsible for running–although that was not always the case.

Of course without the full job description in front of us, it is hard to know what any of these people should be paid–or whether those drawing high salaries at smaller organizations are not working just as hard as those at larger operations because they have to wear more hats than they would in larger organizations with larger staffs.

But if we compare most of these people to their private sector equivalents we could conclude that many of them are underpaid for what they do.

I also looked at salaries for similar positions in the private sector.  The CEO at CBS, for example, generated and managed gross revenues of $400 million last year–drawing a salary of nearly $58 million for his efforts. The president of Merck had net revenues $982 million, for which he was paid nearly $17 million.

(Next: Fundraising efficiency.)

(If you are looking for another place worthy of a donation, visit Charity Navigator. They are a treasure trove of information on every major charity you can think of.)

A brief word about methods seems in order.

In total, I reviewed well over 100 charities in putting all of this together. For the sections on CEO salary, fundraising efficiency, program expenses, and administrative expenses I chose the 57 three or four star Charity Navigator rated cancer organizations that had research as a major portion of objectives. The organization did not have to be solely focussed on research, but that had to be one component of the mission.

Foolishly, when I thought i had all the major organizations covered, I began to write the piece

on CEO salaries. But as I continued to do research I found charities I did not expect to have high paying executives did. That led to a revision of that piece yesterday afternoon. Then i got a real shocker as I was finishing my research this morning. There is one executive salary that is higher than any of those I had covered in the original piece. There were also some other CEOs who were making more than I expected and changed where some of the CEOs of lager charities ended up.

As a result I am withdrawing Part 6 until I can make some revisions to it.

I will also be adding a second post to accompany each section that will show where each of the 57 ended up in each

category.

I hate it when I remember something wrongly.

In Part 5 of the business of cancer I said the founder of the Caring for Carcinoid Foundation picked up the tab for salaries and the like. That is not true.

It is thanks to the generosity of the Foundation’s Board of Directors and corporate sponsors, 100 percent of all individual gifts are directed to research.

I apologize for the error.

In July of 2011 I wrote to three foundations whose sights were set on Neuroendocrine Tumors and Carcinoid Syndrome. The first to reply was the Caring for Carcinoid Foundation which operates out of a small office in Boston.

The group was founded by a lawyer who discovered she had NET only after she collapsed in the subway. After discovering how little was being done to fund research on the disease, she created the foundation in order to increase funding for research.Thanks to the generosity of the Foundation’s Board of Directors and corporate sponsors, 100 percent of all individual gifts are directed to research.

I have met with two of the people running the organization face-to-face three times and walked in the Jimmy Fund Marathon Walk in 2011 under their banner. I raised about $4,500 through that walk–all of which went to genetic research on NET at Dana-Farber. In addition, I raised another $5,000 for CFCF last year. I speak with their CFO via email a couple of times a month.

Despite their small size and limited resources they seem to provide the lion’s share of the research money spent on the disease. They piggyback on a wide range of fundraising races and walks across the country. Exactly what they raised and spent last year I don’t know as I write this. I hope to have those figures by the time I write the last section of this series, but I will not even be asking for those numbers for another day or so.

I also heard from the oldest of the foundations focused on the disease, the Carcinoid Cancer Foundation in White Plains, NY. It was founded by Dr. Richard Warner, the father of NET research, back in 1968 when federal funding for NET research vanished due to budget cuts and the refocusing of NCI on the more major cancers. They do not seem to run as many fundraising activities as CFCF but have an extensive support system for NET patients. They helped set up some of the stories in the Press Kit. What they raised and spent on NET last year I do not know for the same reason I do not know what CFCF raised.

Both these organizations helped me sharpen the vision for what Walking with Jane needed to be doing. Their continued emotional support has helped keep me going on days when I just wanted to hang it all up as a bad business.

I have also had a conversation with the Carcinoid Cancer Action Network (CCAN) and another with the North American Neuroendocrine Tumor Society (NANETS). The first group does some fundraising and a lot of patient support work. The second is the professional organization for professionals in the field. They run an annual conference on the current state of research.

There are other groups working on NET and CS, but I have had no personal contact with them.

(Next: CEO salaries: How much are they and do they make sense?)

I had planned to post the next section of the Business of Cancer today but over the weekend I received an e-mail that requires a day away from that series.

Scott Atkinson serves on the Walking with Jane board. He and Jane were good friends throughout the time he taught in Westport. They had daily conversations about science–and many other things, including politics and religion. Like Jane and I, Scott reads from a wide range of subject matters. He is fascinated by the world and how it works. Before he became a teacher he worked in biology labs and has now taught bio-technology courses for a number of years. He is currently setting up a biotech program in the school he moved to last fall.

A few months ago he stumbled on a site called TED: Ideas worth spreading. The first piece he sent me was about an open source method for developing therapeutic drugs. The idea was a good one but I was in no position to do anything with it other than nod and say, “Neat idea.”

Friday night I got another email from him about a TED piece, but I had a number of other projects in hand so I put it on my list of things to do later and continued with the boring–and depressing–business of looking at cancer organizations and what they do with their money. (I promise I will try to make the writing up of those dry numbers more interesting than they are on the various websites.)

Sunday, he called me and asked if I had had a chance to look at it yet–and I had to say I had not. He launched into a description of the basic idea of the talk--and my eyes started to get as big as saucers. What he was describing was a fourth method of going after cancer–a method based not on drugs, surgery, or radiation with their attendant nasty side effects and risks–but based on electric fields. And he was telling me it worked–and that it appeared to work without the often debilitating side-effects of the other three.

The method is based on our improved understanding of how cell division works and a study of what happens to cell division when it is exposed to an electrical field. Essentially, the cancer cells stop reproducing and begin to die off. In the talk, they show scans of a man’s brain in which there is a tumor. By six months the tumor has nearly vanished–and at a year it appears to be gone.

A Phase III trial has been done

on brain tumors. The method is as effective as the traditional drug cocktail–but without the side effects. The quality of life gain is significant. Researchers are now looking at the use of this technique in combination with chemo and radiation therapy–including one at Harvard. The method is also being tried on patients with other forms of

cancer with–so far–promising results.

You should go look at this talk–especially those of you with greater biology and medical backgrounds than I have. This could open another front in the war on cancer.

If politics makes for strange bedfellows, the fight against cancer may create even stranger.

I love the people involved locally with the Relay For Life of Greater Fall River. I am impressed by the people who work in the first two tiers of the bureaucracy in the region. They strike me as people who really get it. It’s the higher-ups I worry about–and who do not make me 100 percent comfortable.

When Jane first got the diagnosis that she was probably looking at cancer–though it would take a biopsy to be sure–her doctor had her talk privately with one of his nurses. The woman was very involved with the Relay for Life. She tried to offer some comfort to Jane that day–and has since become a good friend to me and the other members of Walking with Jane.

I had heard about Relay for years. A number of my students were involved with it. They had lost brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers to the disease and talked about the solace the event brought them. They had told me how it helped them feel they were part of something that enabled them to fight back–to channel their anger at the deaths in a constructive way.

The Relay for Life was

the only general anti-cancer event I knew of when Jane died–other than the Pan Mass Challenge, a biking event I knew was physically beyond what I believed I could do—-and that night I silently vowed I would walk the entire 24 hours of a Relay that spring.

In May we contacted two local Relays, put together Walking with Jane, and started figuring out how to raise money. While we cannot earmark where the money goes that we raise for the American Cancer Society through the Relay, one can do worse than learn the ropes from what is the biggest single event fundraising machine in the world.

We made an immediate and outsized splash. In under two months we raised over $3,500. We embraced the idea of having someone on the track at all times–cancer never sleeps so neither would we. Our first Relay was in Taunton–and we figured out quickly all the things we had done wrong. And there were lots of them. We were rookies and we looked like rookies.

We were still rookies when we arrived at Somerset High School for the Fall River event at the end of June. We were overwhelmed by the size and scale of the event. Where Taunton had attracted hundreds of people, Greater Fall River attracted thousands.

This year I serve as the chairperson for the Relay for Life of Greater Fall River. The event raised just over $308,000 last year. Walking with Jane raised just over $4,300 of that. We won the Spirit Award at that Relay.

Figuring out what gets spent on what at the higher levels is less clear. I asked how much ACS spent last year on NET and CS. No one could really give me an answer to that question, though the head of the district office did try to get one. The record keeping on that kind of thing is a bit convoluted.

I’ve written the new England Regional CEO about increasing funding for NET/CS. He has written me that he has passed it on to the national chief medial officer with a positive push. I have not heard back from him yet.

(Next: Caring for Carcinoid and the Carcinoid Cancer Foundation finish my disclosures.)

Full disclosure also means I need to talk about Walking with Jane’s ties to the four organizations that raise money either directly from us or through us. These organizations will not gain an advantage over others in my reporting on the Business of Cancer here over the next several days. Those of you who know me know they will be held to a higher standard than anyone else will be because I will fight my biases toward them by being even more critical of the places they make missteps.

The first of these groups is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.  Our relationship with them began in September of 2010 when Jane became a patient of Dr. Jennifer Chan shortly after we got Jane’s diagnosis. We did not get home until 8:30 that night and, exhausted by the day’s events, had immediately crawled into bed. We were talking when the phone rang about 8:45. It was Jen. She’d had some ideas since we left that evening and couldn’t wait to share them with us. When I hung up the phone Jane and I both dissolved into tears–we were so glad to have met someone that caring.

Jen was a rock for us both in the days and months ahead. She came in to visit Jane on Thanksgiving morning even though it was her day off. And on the day Jane died she came by at noon–skipping her lunch to be with us. She told me as she left that she would be seeing patients all afternoon–but while her body would be there, her heart would be with us. She had a tear in her eye as she said it.

Jen was not the only person there who went out of their way for us. Dr. Javid Moslehi became Jane’s cardiologist. Like Jen, he made regular trips to visit even when he was off.  Both he and Jen have helped make sure the medical stuff I write here is accurate.

The nurses at both Dana-Farber and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Dr. Couper–her heart surgeon–the interns, the residents, the intensivists, the technicians, the chaplains, the social workers…did all they could for both of us–physically and emotionally.

The people and the place will always hold a special place in my heart–not because of the building or how it was equipped–but because of the way the people treated everyone as a human being deserving of love and affection and the best possible treatment.

Perhaps there are other places that deliver the same level of care and love–but this was the place we were.

Dana-Farber’s decision to move forward to establish a national center for research on NET and CS n the wake of Jane’s death pushed me to increase my involvement with them . The result is the Walking with Jane Dybowski Fund for NEC Education and Research at Dana-Farber. I have pledged to raise a minimum of $20,000 a year  for five years in support of their efforts to cure this disease and make primary care physicians aware of what it is and what they have to do to detect it.

Last year, just over $23,000 in contributions were made in Jane’s memory directly to Dana-Farber. An additional $4500 arrived there through another group.

(Tomorrow: the American Cancer Society and the Relay for Life of Greater Fall River)

Ethics matter to me, so in the interest of full disclosure I need to explain some things about Walking with Jane and our affiliations with other charitable groups involved in raising money to solve the multiple riddles that make up cancer in general and NET in particular.

Walking with Jane was created after my wife died of NET/CS December 10, 2010. The basic idea was to create an organization to raise money and awareness for the supposedly rare form of cancer that killed her. That mission has grown somewhat in the months since as I came to realize that patients with the disease and the general public needed to be able to find up-to-date information and support on the disease as seamlessly as possible. It is not that other groups don’t do this. But I come out of a journalism background. I have spent a good chunk of my life figuring out how to explain to general audiences fairly complex issues in terms they can easily understand without losing the complexity in the process. It is a lot harder to do than it looks.

All the money to run Walking with Jane comes out of my pocket. We have no overhead. I buy the merchandise that is listed in the store. When you buy something there all the money–with the exception of what it costs me to ship it to you–goes to the Walking with Jane Relay for Life team’s donations to the American Cancer Society. Even what I paid for the merchandise goes to Relay. If you buy something from us locally–meaning you buy it at an event–you pay a lower price because I don’t have to send it to you.

If you see us at a flea market, I paid the fee out of my pocket. All the money we take in from the sale of that merchandise goes to our Relay team. That may change in the future. We may decide it makes more sense to donate that money to someone else. We may get to the point we are selling so much stuff that I can’t afford to buy everything we need. But for right now, that is how it works. And I will tell you if it changes.

The hosting fees for the website come out of my pocket.

The people who designed this website did it for free. The people who write the articles for the Press Kit and edit the copy do it for free.The people who designed the t-shirts and the other merchandise do it for free. They do it because they feel my wife and I had an impact on their lives.

The people on our board of directors do not make any money from it. We do not pay them. They were all close friends of Jane and do it to honor her memory.

In short, what we do here either I pay for or people volunteer to do.

Everything we raise goes to one of four organizations. Tomorrow I will talk about one of those organizations and how we came to be related to them. In subsequent days I will talk about the other three.

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.