The top search result from typing “opaque foundations” into Google led me, depressingly, to a Cosmopolitan story about makeup and a list of the world’s 40 best foundations for “whether your skin is oily or dry”.
I was hoping for something rather different — information about how billionaires funnel vast amounts of cash through that kind of foundation, the ones with lofty ideals and great promises but little or no oversight and accountability.
But I did find a link to the Stupski Foundation, a US-based nonprofit that apparently works towards developing food justice. Its CEO, Glen Galaich, author of Control: Why Bigger Giving Falls Short, notes that billionaire donors get substantial tax breaks to set up foundations and other charitable funds, proving, if nothing else, that hoary cliché that charity begins at home.
As one disgruntled Saldanha Bay resident who was there told News24, the launch felt more like a Patriotic Alliance meeting
Galaich claims the $2-trillion apparently sloshing around in these various charities will top $18-trillion by 2050 … twice the size of the federal budget of the world’s biggest economy. The question he asks is, why is it mounting up and not going to the places it’s supposed to?
Gayton McKenzie is a long way from being the patron of a secretive billion-dollar charity. Still, the foundation he promised to set up two years ago in the name of missing Western Cape schoolgirl Joshlin Smith, along with donating his R2m MP’s salary, was finally launched in mid-March.
It has immediately come under fire, not least from the people it was reputedly set up to represent. No-one in the community from which Joshlin went missing sits on the board.
They are also unimpressed that the patron intends to take the missing girl’s siblings on a holiday to Hong Kong Disneyland. As one disgruntled Saldanha Bay resident who was there told News24, the launch felt more like a Patriotic Alliance meeting.
Which, if true, is somewhat different to an initiative that might actually protect children.
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