Archive for September, 2009

Federal regulators are looking into the financial practices of charities tied to the Phoenix televangelist Don Stewart, many of which are soliciting donations from U.S. government employees through this year’s Combined Federal Campaign, reports The Arizona Republic.

According to government e-mail messages, the Office of the Inspector General is probing as many as 20 charities run by people with family, professional, or other ties to the Don Stewart Association.

The charitable network’s accounting practices, such as frequently transferring donations of cash and goods among its member organizations, have been questioned by watchdog groups and have prompted investigative reports by the Republic and The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

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The financing and activities of the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s charitable foundations are the subject of a report in the Telegraph.

After leaving office in 2007, Mr. Blair set up the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, a high-profile religious charity that has raised millions of dollars using the former British leader’s Yale University seminar as a platform. Its Yale office is run by Scott MacDonald, a veteran of former President Bill Clinton’s foundation.

According to the newspaper, the faith organization “is key to Mr. Blair re-inventing himself as a brilliant, modern-day philanthropist.” He has also established a much smaller sports charity based in his former parliamentary district in Britain.

Frank Karel, a former vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson and Rockefeller foundations who is credited with revolutionizing charities’ media and communication strategies, died earlier this month at his Washington home, reports The Times, of Trenton, N.J. The cause was complications from prostate cancer.

A former journalist, Mr. Karel joined Robert Wood Johnson in 1974 and pioneered new approaches to crafting and publicizing the health-care charity’s message, working with advertising and marketing experts as well as policy analysts and forging a partnership with public radio and television to pay for medical reporting.

Mr. Karel “had the genius to recognize that strategic use of communications could move philanthropy from direct charity to an agent of change to help millions of people,” said Steven Schroeder, former president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Bill and Melinda Gates’s travels on behalf of their foundation’s multibillion-dollar campaign to overhaul American education are the subject of a column in The New York Times.

Columnist Bob Herbert, who accompanied the Gateses on classroom visits and meetings with school officials in Charlotte, N.C., said the couple is “traveling the country trying to see for themselves what really works and what has gone haywire” in American public education.

While the issues involved “can be maddeningly complex,” Mr. Herbert writes, the co-chairs of the world’s largest philanthropy “seem determined to master this issue and do what they can to help reverse the current dismal trends,” such as declining high-school graduation and college entry rates.

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