People often wonder when you send charitable donations to organizations, where does the money actually go? Well, unfortunately, money sent to help those in need doesn’t exactly arrive like we’d expect.
ProPublica and NPR worked together to figure out where money sent to the American Red Cross for hurricane Sandy actually went.
We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
By accessing public records, internal emails and documents, along with accounts from disaster relief specialists, reporters Justin Elliott, Jesse Eisinger and Laura Sullivan did there best to get to the bottom of it.
The team of reporters got together after someone requested that Eisinger figure out where the $312 million Sandy donations went, and they soon found out that the information wasn’t as easy to track down as they might have hoped.
We basically couldn’t answer the question,” Elliott said.
They didn’t get what they really hoped for, but it was enough to create a story. Elliot and Eisinger posted an article about how difficult it was to track donations from beginning to end. In the story, ProPublica included a call: “If you have experience with or information about the American Red Cross, including its operations after Sandy,” it read, “email [email protected].
In New York, the team had asked for information from the attorney general’s office, and even though some numbers were released, Elliot didn’t get the raw data he wanted.
In response to the Freedom of Information Law request, Elliott received a letter in the mail from the Red Cross that said the agency had hired a major law firm to fight the request. The agency argued that the information Elliott sought should be exempt as a “trade secret.”
“It struck us as incredibly strange because the Red Cross is not like Goldman Sachs or something,” he said. “If they have a trade secret about how they better respond to disasters, seems like that shouldn’t be a secret.”
Reaction to the story was swift. The Red Cross denounced the reporting and then, in what Elliott described as a slight softening in tone, admitted that there were some problems but they’re getting better. ProPublica and NPR have continued to report. Since the investigation, they’ve released a story about an internal survey that shows Red Cross employees’ distrust of the organization’s leadership.
As a result of all this, Elliot is encouraging other journalists to keep an eye on organizations, even non-profits designed to help others. It apparently isn’t as simple as it seems.
[Photo from flickr user Matt Chan]
