One of the nice things about being blacklisted by a large segment of the atheist community is that I don’t have to be shy about criticizing…oh, hey, wait a minute, I’ve always been a pain in the ass. OK, I can be even more obnoxious now.
The latest troubling event in the world of atheist leadership is that Edwina Rogers has amended her lawsuit against the Secular Coalition of America. She’s now suing Richard Dawkins directly.
Now I have no brief for Edwina Rogers at all — she was a terrible choice for the job in the first place, she had little awareness of secular issues at all, and I have no idea how she landed the position. Someone seemed to have been enamored of bringing in a Republican lobbyist, and in fact there are way too many atheists trying to reach out to people with a deep ideological contempt for us. So I think her dismissal was righteous, and hope that will emerge in the lawsuit.
Her latest addition, though, points out some dodgy stuff in the Richard Dawkins’ foundation’s charitable work. They collected donations through a branch called Non-Believers Giving Aid, which I thought was a great idea. Only, unfortunately, it turns out that all the money donated may not have gone to the intended destination. There was an initial transfer of a substantial sum to Doctors Without Borders, Rogers say, but after that, she claims additional donations were misappropriated and used for the RDF operating budget. It’s worrisome, because at worst it’s illegal, and at best, it’s terrible record keeping.
If true, this is a disaster. It’s reminding me of the Josh Timonen affair, in which Dawkins had to drop a suit in which he accused Timonen of embezzling.
The fact is that I like Dawkins personally; he’s a brilliant writer and a good scientist; but what he is not is a competent business manager. I don’t think he’s interested in the day-to-day operation of a foundation, and he doesn’t use good professional criteria in hiring his managers. And that leads to situations like this one — I don’t think he’s malicious at all, he’s just lacking in a whole suite of skills you need to manage a large organization.
What it means to me is that I’d never donate to the RDF. I also wouldn’t touch any organization that hires Edwina Rogers with a 100 meter pole. There are serious skills to managing a major organization, and Richard Dawkins lacks them…as do I, I would add. So please don’t ask me to invest or manage your $100,000 donation to Pharyngula. I’d just blow it all on killing all the ads network-wide.
PZ:
Aw, fuck. I thought that was a great idea too, bought the T-shirt (still have it and wear it). That was the extent of my giving through RDF though. I’ve long supported Médecins Sans Frontières directly, and will continue to do so. I am not looking forward to yet another Dawkins shitstorm on the net.
I have always been a bit leery of ‘United Way’ type charities, where they supposedly vet the charities and then divvy up the donations. However, if RD or anyone else thinks an atheist United Way (or OxFam, which I think is the same kind of thing in the UK) is a good idea then they should hire managers away from United Way or OxFam. That sort of twice-removed charity giving is just too easy to mismanage, either with fraudulent intent or without.
The only good thing about this is it lead me to discover https://richarddawkins.net/ties/ Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES).
Its set up by the RDF to provide resources to school science teachers for teaching evolution to students.
Well, this is also interesting, isn’t it(from the link above):
Shabby. To say the least.
Interesting post about Secular Policy Institute by Stephanie:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/almostdiamonds/2015/04/10/a-little-background-on-the-secular-policy-institute/
Non-Believers Giving Aid was never a good idea and I said so at the time.
It had all the appearance of using a natural tragedy to make a point about non-believers and their charitable nature. It looked like a cynical marketing exercise. “Hey, everybody, look how generous we are!”
It also reduced the value of donations. Fonating to a third party involves extra money transfers, which slows down the delivery of aid and also erodes the donation through additional transaction fees.
I’ve done work with them before, so I had no difficulty in chosing to donate directly to Médecins Sans Frontières and doing so quietly.
Dawkins’ attempted a publicity stunt in order to try demonstrate something about non-believers. That was a shabby reaction to and exploitation of a disaster.
If some rich Pharyngulite could invest this amount of money immediately, I’d be most grateful.
Too bad. I was just wondering what to do with my spare $ 100,000. Maybe donate it to Patheos then.
@7 Thumper
A-fucking men. The adds are getting shady and spyware prone. I dont need popups tellibg me i have a virus and to pay for their antivirus which is a scam
Personally, I would prefer a world where charitable giving and philanthropy were much less significant because things like education, health care, disaster relief, the arts, and research received sufficient government funding. But that’s not the world we live in.
Many nonprofits raise significant funds from grants, that’s just how things work. Fundraising is hard, and frontline organizations have too much to do already. Some organizations specialize in just giving out grants, often because they were chartered with a large endowment, but they may also fund raise on top of that.
Any time money is involved, things can go wrong because people can be greedy or dumb. But a non-believer fund raising and grant writing foundation in not a weird idea that can’t work. It’s consistent with a part of how good things get funded in a system that relies on private donations. It was just (apparently) very poorly implemented. Which is all the more reason to be upset with the implementors in this case, IMHO.
@latveriandiplomat:
My point is that to create a charity on foot of a disaster is all very well and fine, but to twin its ambition not simply with helping the afflicted, but also, to as an aside, helping one’s own ideology is no longer charity. To derive benefit from it all as a mutual arrangement is crass.
There is attrition when funds pass through hands on the way to a charitable target. Some of thi money sticks to the hands which pass it on (some legitimately, some less so. There are delays involved in international transfers, which slow the flow of funding.
When one solicits funding to make a point (which is certainly what RD did), the point of the charity is diluted.
He got it all very seriously wrong. He inerted himself between donors and a charity. I have long experience of this and it is never a good thing. I’m in no sense accusing him of deliberate wrong-doing in any way at all, but of a degree of naivete which borders on idiocy.
The closue of his charity says it all really. Opportunistic charities which are seemingly based on a “pop-up shop” idea are not good for the charity sector. They involve lots of one-off startup costs and the creation of an administration for a single shot means that costs aren’t distributed over multiple campaigns. That word “multiple” also implies that a charity is in existence for the long run. It’s there to help with problems which are not yet manifest, and which will happen regardless of your own direct aims.
I spent a long time working with and in the charity sector. Dawkins’ efforts were appalling; I spoke out at the time on the issue.
this is what happened on the old site as well.
in fact, it was the very reason I started running adblock and noscript.
but it’s not the site’s fault really. it’s the adfeeders that don’t do any review of the ads they are sent.
which means I now keep up adblock and noscript everywhere I go.
sorry, web, but you will not get ad clicks from me ever again until you clean up your act, and start doing due diligence on your ad feeds again.
it’s not worth risking my software and privacy over.
not one bit.
Dunno why our esteemed host brings up today an amendment, and a story, dating back to mid-July – has he been unable to cease groaning for nearly four weeks?
rorschach @ # 4: … Rogers says Dawkins “enlisted Daniel Dennett and Michael Shermer to assist … every resignation was caused by Dawkins and SCA …
But note a little further down in the same linked Friendly Atheist article:
The shabbiness, in this case, does not seem to come from the defendants.
Hardly without historical precedent. There were some major scandals and squabbles back in the later Ingersoll era over the finances of the American Secular Union.
Unfortunately, it seems there’s often a temptation to sweep the embarrassing parts of a movement’s history under the carpet. Doing so makes it more difficult to learn from them.