K
KarenNC
Guest
What you are saying is that if I give you $5 to go buy Halloween candy for a class party, then you can turn around and use the $5 you intended and already had slated to buy Halloween candy for that party to buy beer.Doesn’t really matter where it’s restricted or unrestricted and I say this as a CPA who is the accountant for many nonprofits. Money is fungible. When people restrict their funds for a certain use that means that unrestricted funds don’t have to be used for this purpose and can be used for other things, in the end the nonprofit ends up spending the same amount of money on each function regardless.
That is very different than saying that I gave you $5 to go buy beer or that I gave you $5 to go buy anything you want.
In my experience in non-profits (perhaps other nonprofits are different–my experience was in services to people with developmental disabilities), grant money is used to fund programs that would not otherwise be possible (ie new programs) for the most part, programs that would not exist without that grant money or for which other funding has been cut. It is more a situation of “we don’t have any money to buy Halloween candy for the party and unless we get the $5 there will be no Halloween candy.”
Then I am at a loss to understand how goodknight proposes that the 990s prove that the contributions that Komen Foundation grants provide to Planned Parenthood constitute “unrestricted funds”.You would not know by looking at a 990 whether certain donors fund contributions were restricted or not.
I would rather say that one should look at the grant documents themselves for the restriction. Here is a link to one affiliate’s request for proposals for grantsI assume if the Susan G. Koman breast cancer foundation had restricted their funds they would tell us so. A press release saying they are giving them to Planned Parenthood for breast cancer screening is not a legal restriction of the funds. I think the fact that Planned Parenthood took their money and cut back on breast cancer screening is very telling.
komennctriangle.org/files/2008%20Grants%20RFP_v2.doc
(these are community grants, like the ones made to Planned Parenthood, as research grants are done through the National office).
I am curious as to the basis for your claim that Planned Parenthood “took their money and cut back on breast cancer screening”.
The only numbers that would be telling in this case are the ones associated with the specific Planned Parenthood branches that received Komen grants. It raises a few questions:
Which specific PP branches have received grants from the Komen Foundation and when?
Is there a documented decline in breast cancer screenings in the specific PP branch that received the grant?
Is the decline (if any) observable in the specific PP branch before or after the receipt of the grant? If before, could it be that that branch sought a grant to provide services because other funding sources had been affected or that they needed to better advertise their services? Was the number a result of women being turned away from requests for screenings?
