Stepping in Moral Quicksand: When a Horrible Person/Company Gives to Your Nonprofit

I was going to write about all the charities to which Donald Sterling donated.

I was going to ask if the standards of the organization should stand up against the horror of the donor.

After all, UCLA gave back $3 million of Sterling’s money.

But UCLA, where Jackie Robinson went to school, has only 660 African-American male students (out of 20,000 male students), 65% of whom are scholarship athletes.

Then I was going to ask about donations from companies that peddle “evil” – tobacco, liquor, oil, etc.

But then I thought about individual donors’ morals. Not just unethical oligarchs like Henry Ford, Rupert Murdoch, John D. MacArthur, or even Sterling.  What about all the philanthropists whose fortunes were built on a million broken backs?  Or a few? Or one?  And I thought about my experiences with morally corrupt donors.

I’m sinking.

Help.

 

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One response

  1. […] of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. There was little public outrage over that. In an old column back in my 137 Words days, I talked about the rejected philanthropy of noted get-off-my-lawn racist Donald Sterling. […]

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