My Nonprofit Reviews

When you donate money to any organization, you trust that the organization will impose certain criteria in deciding how those funds will be used and that the organization will also ensure that those funds are only used appropriately. It appears that Komen's criteria for granting funds is that the grantee may not be under investigation. Rules like this exist within organizations in order to force fiduciary duty and not allow subjective bias and/or emotions (or politics) to cloud decision making. The management of Komen reports to a board of directors, and as such, must act in accordance with its policies and procedures, which is exactly what they did. So the issue, therefore, is that the criteria needed to be changed to allow more case-by-case discernment. This case perhaps should've involved more examination by the management and board to determine if the "investigation" criteria was met in its intended form, but nevertheless, the criteria was there to protect Komen and its donors from misuse of funds, scandal, PR disasters, etc, and that sounds rather responsible to me - not political. I do not have anything against Planned Parenthood, but I do not believe that Komen acted politically either. Instead I believe that they acted according to rules designed to protect donor funds and advance the mission. Komen does a lot of wonderful things and is the number one promoter of women's breast health in this country. I think it's shameful to allow political media to cloud out the accomplishments of such a wonderful organization.

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