The Road to Hell (27 page)

She restated the problem: “Even our best U.S. field office, Appalachia, using volunteers and community workers, spends 30% of sponsorship money on actual programs. It does not appear that we will ever exceed that amount in the U.S. In Senior Management Team meetings, the figure of $60-70 per sponsored child (25-30% of the sponsorship dollar) seems to have evolved as the optimal amount.

“According to the analysis prepared by Program Operations,
actual
program delivery in Bridgeport will be $22.82 per sponsored child in FY '94, under 10% of the sponsorship dollars attributable to that site. Further, in that location, a significant proportion of sponsored children will not be served by that office.”

Winnick writes of the Waltersville Elementary School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with 400 sponsored children, which should have generated $96,000 in sponsorship donations in that year. “I visited that school on June 8, 1994, and learned that for over two years, no benefits whatsoever have gone to this school. In July 1994 a check in the amount of $10,800 (barely 10% of the aggregate amount attributable to the four hundred children) will be given to the school for an ‘academic Olympics,' a writing contest for all 840 children who attend that school. In a city such as Bridgeport, is this an appropriate use of sponsorship money, both qualitatively and quantitatively?”

Winnick continues: “In light of examples such as Bridgeport, our presentation of sponsorship is highly misleading. The Sponsorship Guide, our communication with sponsors, states that ‘[Y]our sponsored child begins benefiting from your support right away—perhaps through nutritious food and clean drinking water…education…basic health care…' and ‘[Y]our continued presence in this young life can mean the difference between sickness and health, illiteracy and education,' and that ‘[o]ver 84 cents of every dollar we raise goes directly to benefit needy girls and boys.'
Television ads featuring Sally Struthers promise that 65 cents a day will bring lasting benefits' to communities and ‘help rescue one girl or boy.' How does a writing competition ‘rescue' a little girl or boy?”

In the same memo, Winnick reminds the board members: “The rules of the Better Business Bureau clearly state that ‘at least 50%' of public contributions be spent on the programs and activities described in solicitation, in accordance with donor expectations.”

In the fall of 1994, Winnick left Save the Children for “ethical reasons,” as she explained in a statement issued through her attorney. “During my tenure, I became concerned, both legally and morally, about their fundraising practices and undertook my own investigation. I presented my findings to Dr. MacCormack and then to the Board of Directors.”

D
elores Tootsie and Phyllis Wittsel were trying to remember what it was like when they were sponsored children on the Hopi reservation in the 1960s. The sisters didn't recall much. Those were the check-to-child days when Save sent a portion of the sponsor's donation directly to the children. Check-to-child was phased out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They remember getting $10 every three months or so that they would use to buy a new pair of shoes or some school supplies. Then Phyllis suddenly recalled getting a record of the soundtrack from the movie
Help
from her sponsor, a Beatles fan club, but she can't remember where they were from.

In the spring of 1995, we were having lunch at the tribe-owned restaurant, on the northern Arizona reservation just outside the town of Kykotsmovi, which everyone calls K-Town. The town is a collection of ramshackle buildings and mobile homes on a gentle rise emerging from the Arizona desert. It's just off the main road, not a place where the tourists stop. Road signs direct them past the town to the Hopi cultural center, restaurant, bookstore, and museum. In the middle of the morning, the town was completely silent. The most modern building in town is the twostory tribal council headquarters where Delores works in the personnel department.

The patrons of the restaurant were evenly divided between Hopis and tourists. As it was the only restaurant for miles, the dining room was hectic and loud. Many of the Hopis there seemed to know each other and many worked for the tribe, the only real employer around. The sisters were in their forties, soft-spoken, and well-dressed. Dee was more talkative but more cautious about what she said.

I asked them if sponsorship had changed their lives in any way. They both laughed. But, Dee explained, families whose kids are being sponsored
now would rather go back to the check-to-child days. “At least that way they know where the money is going,” she said.

Both sisters have worked with Save the Children recently. Dee was a community development coordinator for Save from 1988 until the end of 1992. And although Phyllis doesn't work for Save, her job on her village development committee puts her in charge of Save's project there.

“Westport was never really satisfied,” Dee said. “People here wanted funding for cultural type programs. They wanted to hire Hopi people to come and teach about Hopi things. Save wanted more visible projects. They were more interested in Christmas parties and Easter egg hunts. The parties were to serve as enrollment drives as well or as vehicles to gather already sponsored children to update their status for sponsor reports.”

Tootsie figures that, on average, Save's project grants were in the area of $1,800 for a year. That would be in a village of some fifty or sixty sponsored children, averaging $35 or less per child per year. (Those same sponsored kids would have generated more than $10,000 a year for Save the Children's administrative costs.) From here the gap between “program expenditures” was very real. While Save the Children might consider its executives' salary to be legitimate program costs, only the sum cash available for projects made much difference here.

Each year the local committees would have to produce a project proposal that Save would choose to either fund or return for changes. Year to year, the projects were unconnected. One year a playground might be built, the next year a summer program might be funded, but then there would be no money to maintain the playground.

“They would start projects that were never completed,” Tootsie said. “A greenhouse project was started one year. The greenhouse was built, but there were no funds available to keep it going. It's sitting there unused. There is playground equipment still stored. In my village, there is a foundation for a warehouse that's been there for years.”

It was a complaint I'd heard at two other Arizona sites I visited. The Save grants were so small that they would be used for little treats for the kids, not for serious developmental purposes. At the Gila River reservation outside of Phoenix, for example, Jeff Williams, who works for the council there, told me that Save's funds one year covered a couple of weekend trips to a swimming pool in the summer for fifty-six sponsored children.

Williams's Sacaton community was due to be phased out not long after I spoke with him in 1995, but he seemed unconcerned. I asked him if losing Save the Children would hurt the community? Williams shook his head.

“Has Save changed the lives of anyone here?”

“No, nothing has changed.”

“Did they ever provide medical care?”

“No.”

“Education?”

“No. It's fluff. We're not losing much.”

Williams told me I should talk with Christine Thomas, who used to work in Save the Children's Phoenix office as a donor services coordinator, the liaison between sponsors and children. Thomas lives on the Gila River reservation, just past where the air-conditioned shopping mall culture of Phoenix stops and the rural emptiness of the reservation begins. One of her jobs at Save was to open all the mail that passed between sponsors and children, mostly for the protection of the child, but also to prevent kids from asking sponsors for horses and cars and things that might alienate them. She would often send letters back to be rewritten. She also spent a lot of her time driving around delivering packages that sponsors would send to the kids. Shelby Killer referred to this as the Pony Express problem. Because of the vast distances between projects, people from the branch offices could spend ten hours driving just to drop off a small package of clothes.

“We're not benefiting all sponsored children,” she said right from the start. “We're not. We never have been.” Thomas said that when she went into the field, she found some sponsored kids were nineteen or twenty years old and were raising families of their own. “Some of them—quite a few—don't realize they're being sponsored. And a lot of the children aren't needy. The pressure is on from headquarters: We're given a month to sign up so many children or our budgets will be cut. So we signed up anyone who came through the door. As long as the sponsor doesn't ask, then there's really no problem according to Save the Children.” This was also a reaction that Delores Tootsie got when she first went into the communities. Thomas confirmed how little money was actually getting out to the villages. “Save doesn't like the communities asking where the money goes. I know several cases—like Blackwater—where we phased out because communities asked too many questions.”

And then some of what little money they had was spent on what many regarded as frivolous activity. According to Thomas and others, communities were told to use some of the available money to celebrate Save the Children's Founder's Day every May. The parties were designed as recruiting tools. “We were told it was mandatory,” she said.

Thomas lost her job at the end of March 1995 when the Phoenix office
was closed down as a cost-cutting measure. According to Thomas, sponsor notification letters went out on March 24. “We had known since October, but we were instructed not to tell anyone.” When communities phoned the Phoenix office to ask questions, they got a recording saying the number had been disconnected. Even as they were making plans to close the office, Save was still recruiting children and was distributing a flyer around Gila River, which read:

No one familiar with Save the Children found it surprising that they would still be looking for children while phasing out their programs. Recipients long ago seem to have accepted the fact that there is no connection between program and sponsorship. “What you've got is a system built on the backs of low-income communities,” Shelby Miller said. In fact, Save seems to be less of a development agency than a professional fund-raising operation, but with one big difference. No professional fund-raiser could get away with keeping 80 percent of the gross.

Save's rationale for spending most of the money in Westport, for charging executive salaries against “program,” is that people in Westport do “programming.” But there was little evidence of Save's hand in any of the development projects I saw in Arizona or anywhere else. In Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, Save was a relatively minor contributor to the Tabernacle Elementary school. The small private school supplied 325 children to Save's sponsors, and Save returned $16,000 a year, about 20 percent of the $78,000 it would have collected. The money was a tiny part of Tabernacle's budget, but it did help to slightly reduce the tuition costs for students' families. Save never did any programming, but they did hang a Red Baby Jesus outside the school, and would often show the school off as an example of its inner city projects. They were, in essence, trading photographs and biographies of their children for a small annual cash allotment.

In all the years that Save has worked on the Hopi reservation, Dee Tootsie can recall much activity aimed at signing up kids but can name only one or two projects that ever did any good. She doesn't remember ever getting any guidance or programmatic assistance from Save the Children, only pressure to sign up more children and keep the reports coming. One of the final insults came in 1992 when the organization turned down projects in
eight villages, and the committees failed to come up with any proposals acceptable to Save. According to the rules, if a community can't spend the allocation by the end of the fiscal year, the funds are lost. They can't, for example, wait two years and do a larger project. As time was running out, Save came up with a solution, and in 1992, several hundred children in villages received gift certificates to Wal-Mart for denominations of between $10 and $25. The store was located in Gallup, New Mexico, some ninety miles away. Dee Tootsie typed up the gift certificates and delivered them herself. Then she resigned.

Based on her sister's experience, Phyllis Wittsel wasn't eager to get involved with Save, but thirty-five sponsored children and an ongoing project fell into her lap. In June 1994, they submitted a proposal for a summer program for the kids, designed to keep them away from drugs and other problems that are common on reservations. The community wanted recreation equipment, arts and crafts supplies, and electronic learning games. Because the proposal was submitted late, the Save office in Gallup said it would take a few days to cut the check, but the money never came. The village ran the program anyway, ending it in late July. Two weeks after the program ended, they were contacted by Save, which told them that the money had been converted into a $1,700 credit at that same Wal-Mart in Gallup. They had two days to spend the money or lose the funds. “We couldn't find anything we needed,” Wittsel says. “So we called Save and asked if we could spend the money somewhere else and were told no. Get a VCR or a TV, they told us. Save only cared that the money was spent.”

Arizona is unquestionably the worst Save the Children has to offer. Its internal documents show that only $21.54 per child reached the field in 1993 out of the $240 donated. But, according to the same document, other regions didn't fare that much better.