What's your name?
Who's your daddy?
Is he rich like me?
 -The Zombies (Time of the Season)

Several years ago, Ronald Kessler wrote a book called The Season, about Palm Beach charity events that raised little money for the charities they were supposed to help.

I thought about The Season while reading Linda Blackford’s excellent series in the Lexington Herald-Leader about the Shoemaker Foundation.  

Shoemaker once had hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets but is now in debt and closing.

The Foundation was supposed to help injured people affiliated with the horse industry pay their  medical bills. Instead, it became a big piggy bank for its director and others who used the money to throw high-society parties.

I wonder if the party planners invited any injured people to the bash.  I doubt injured people had the right social credentials.

The group lost $500,000 on parties in four years. That’s right, a HALF-MILLION dollars on high-society parties.

They didn’t have hot dog and keg parties like I do. If so, they really had some great hot dogs.

In addition to having lost a HALF MILLION dollars on the parties they threw to impress one another, the people in charge of the Foundation spent more than 50% of the money raised in 2004 on their director Rodney Pitts.

The Foundation paid Pitts $76,111 a year for his great work in wasting the $500,000.  

In the business world, we have a word for people who lose big money on stupid projects: fired.  Non-profits need to have it too. Since the money was not coming out of their pocket, directors did not watch the bottom line.

None of the high-powered people on the Shoemaker board would tolerate excessive spending in their own businesses.

In 2004, only $50,000 of the Foundation money made it to the injured workers.  In fact, the Foundation spent more ($68,000) renting the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in 2003 than it did on injured people.

The Wilshire was not a shrewd move. The Foundation lost $151,688 that year.

If they had fired Pitts and skipped the parties, they could have handed out checks for years. Instead, injured horse people will do without.

I feel sorry for the injured people and for the people who gave, expecting their money to be used for a worthwhile cause.

Caviar and champagne are not worthwhile causes.

I hope Pitts does not want to be hired at my business.  We don’t need an expert in running through someone else’s money. If we wanted to blow money, many people would help us for free.

The Foundation’s activities are an outrage and ought to be investigated by many government agencies.  I am not holding my breath waiting for the crackdown.

The group’s board of directors is populated with a lot of big-money types with connections. No government entity is going to ruffle their feathers.

After a big-time scandal at the United Way in 1992, the IRS instituted rules that require the pay for non-profit managers to be reasonable.

Looks like the IRS missed one with the Shoemaker Foundation.  If 50% of a group’s income is reasonable, what is unreasonable?  Pitts got more than all the injured people combined.

In Pitts’ defense, he probably made less than the caterer.

Blackford also said that the group was supposed to file tax returns with the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office but had not done so since 2001.

Many people add their names to non-profit boards, not realizing that they are actually supposed to do something.  Like find out where the money is going.

Under the law they have a fiduciary duty to monitor what is going on. Several of the Shoemaker directors said that the board never met and that they never got access to financial records. 

Someone needed to speak up and ask why.  Fiduciary means just that. Keeping an eye on things.

Instead of going to highfalutin parties and asking “what’s your name?” and “who’s your daddy?” the directors should have asked, “where did all the money go?”

 
Don McNay is the author of the Unbridled World of Ernie Fletcher , which will be out later this year.  You can write to him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or read other things he has written at www.donmcnay.com   His award winning-column is syndicated on the CNHI News Service.  He is on the Board of Directors for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, which can throw a decent party but does not pay its director 50% of what they bring in.