Tag: Veterans

Wounded Warrior Project Spends Lavishly on Itself, Insiders Say

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In 2014, after 10 years of rapid growth, the Wounded Warrior Project flew its roughly 500 employees to Colorado Springs for an “all hands” meeting at the five-star Broadmoor hotel.

They were celebrating their biggest year yet: $225 million raised and a work force that had nearly doubled. On the opening night, before three days of strategy sessions and team-building field trips, the staff gathered in the hotel courtyard. Suddenly, a spotlight focused on a 10-story bell tower where the chief executive, Steven Nardizzi, stepped off the edge and rappelled toward the cheering crowd.

That evening is emblematic of the polished and well-financed image cultivated by the Wounded Warrior Project, the country’s largest and fastest-growing veterans charity.

Since its inception in 2003 as a basement operation handing out backpacks to wounded veterans, the charity has evolved into a fund-raising giant, taking in more than $372 million in 2015 — largely through small donations from people over 65.
Today, the charity has 22 locations offering programs to help veterans readjust to society, attend school, find work and participate in athletics. It contributes millions to smaller veterans groups. And it has become a brand name, its logo emblazoned on sneakers, paper towel packs and television commercials that run dozens of times.

But in its swift rise, it has also embraced aggressive styles of fund-raising, marketing and personnel management that have many current and former employees questioning whether it has drifted from its mission.

It has spent millions a year on travel, dinners, hotels and conferences that often seemed more lavish than appropriate, more than four dozen current and former employees said in interviews. Former workers recounted buying business-class seats and regularly jetting around the country for minor meetings, or staying in $500-per-night hotel rooms.

The organization has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years on public relations and lobbying campaigns to deflect criticism of its spending and to fight legislative efforts to restrict how much nonprofits spend on overhead.

About 40 percent of the organization’s donations in 2014 were spent on its overhead, or about $124 million, according to the charity-rating group Charity Navigator. While that percentage, which includes administrative expenses and marketing costs, is not as much as for some groups, it is far more than for many veterans charities, including the Semper Fi Fund, a wounded-veterans group that spent about 8 percent of donations on overhead. As a result, some philanthropic watchdog groups have criticized the Wounded Warrior Project for spending too heavily on itself.

Some of its own employees have criticized it, too. William Chick, a former supervisor, spent five years with the Wounded Warrior Project. “It slowly had less focus on veterans and more on raising money and protecting the organization,” he said.

Mr. Chick, who was fired in 2012 after a dispute with his supervisor, said he saw the Wounded Warrior Project help hundreds of veterans. But like other former employees, he said the group swiftly fired anyone leaders considered a “bad cultural fit.”

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Eighteen former employees — many of them wounded veterans themselves — said they had been fired for seemingly minor missteps or perceived insubordination. At least half a dozen former employees said they were let go after raising questions about ineffective programs or spending.

A spokeswoman for the charity said it fired those people because of poor performance or ethical breaches, and that each of them was given the opportunity to address their work problems.

The spokeswoman, Ayla Tezel, said that more than a third of the charity’s employees are veterans, and that the organization is rated one of the top nonprofits to work for by The NonProfit Times.

“Sometimes employees make poor choices that can’t be overlooked,” Ms. Tezel said. “And sometimes those employees are veterans.”

A For-Profit Model

Veterans organizations in the United States often reflect the era in which they were created: After World War I, they resembled fraternal orders. After Vietnam, many focused on advocacy in Washington.

Dubious Veterans Charities a Pervasive Problem Nationwide

Florida businessman Neil “Paul” Paulson’s campaign to replace Buddy Dyer as mayor of Orlando, Florida serves as yet another example, available almost daily, of how easy it is to screw around with veterans’ charities.  A former lawyer who gave up his law license while under investigation by the Florida Bar, Paulson also has his own veterans charity, “Help the Vets,” which might as well also be under investigation.  Paulson is an Army vet, according to the Help the Vets website, which uses a 1990 picture of him wearing fatigues.

Help the Vets says it exists to provide services not available through the Department of Veterans Affairs, to veterans with severe physical injuries or amputations.  The website cites one Iraq war veteran who lost both his arms and his legs due to a roadside IED who will receive educational support for the nonprofit later this year for educational services not supported by the VA, and a second veteran, from the Afghanistan conflict, who lost both his legs due to an IED, but will receive support from Help the Vets after his subsidization for home health care services from the VA runs out.  The website also indicates that in 2014, Help the Vets provided free gym memberships to 1,230 vets, distributed $258,000 in allopathic medical care vouchers (not covered by the VA), paid the entry fees for 53 veterans entering the Orlando Marathon, Half Marathon, and 5K races (Paulson is a director of the Orlando Marathon), provided hotline and home therapy services to disabled veterans, and helped raise moneys for other veterans-related charities.

Nonetheless, there are questions about the Help the Vets charity, including its proud announcement of 1.4 percent of its expenses for administrative costs.  In the Sentinel article, Sandra Miniutti of Charity Navigator commented on the charity’s small, four-member board, one of who is Paulson’s son, suggesting something less than arm’s-length board oversight. She also mentioned the charity’s receipt of $770,000 in Mexican vacation vouchers which Paulson said, without revealing names, were distributed to veterans, and Help the Vets’ use of a telemarketer that kept $1.16 million of $1.3 million raised in charitable donations.  Paulson appears to have another charity, the Breast Cancer Outreach Foundation, which uses telemarketers like Help the Vets does.

Like the reaction of national veterans service organizations to the sudden appearance of Michael Arends and the Veterans for a Strong America group, a local Orlando veterans organization, the Camaraderie Foundation, claims to have never heard of Help the Vets until Paulson began his mayoral quest.  Paulson says that the head of Camaraderie supports Dyer’s candidacy, which somehow explains its statement about the invisibility of Paulson’s veterans charity.

GuideStar’s profile of the nonprofit indicates that it is known by several names—Help the Vets, Military Families of America, American Disabled Veterans Foundation, Vets Fighting Breast Cancer, and Veterans Emergency Blood Bank, with the contact listed as “Dr. Neil Paulson.”  The entire story of Help the Vets ought to raise donors’ antennae, but Paulson and Help the Vets aren’t alone as veterans charities of questionable provenance.

Earlier this summer, the Chicago Tribune discussed the telemarketing fundraising of VietNow, a Rockford, Illinois charity that raised $1.4 million in 2014, but only delivered seven percent of the donations in direct service to veterans and their families. A Rock Island, Illinois charity called Illinois Vietnam Veterans delivered only five percent of its $20 million fundraising haul between 2003 and 2013 in direct services.  Our awareness of VietNow stretches back to 2003 when the Illinois attorney general took VietNow and its telemarketing firm all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court on charges that the fundraising fees were excessive to the point of being fraudulent.  Top charity associations such as Independent Sector at the time defended VietNow and its fundraising contractor, even filing a brief on their behalf, as having engaged in protected free speech, even if mere pennies of assistance ever reached veterans.  It should be of little surprise that the VietNow “services” to veterans consisted largely of fruit-baskets for some hospitalized vets and a handful of scholarships to a few kids.

The propensity of too many people to set up charities ostensibly serving veterans—unnecessarily, because there are already legitimate and capable organizations doing so, ineffectively, because so many rely on troubling, hugely expensive telemarketing fundraisers, and often unaccountably, because no one seems to be keeping a close eye on the proliferation of groups—is a problem that leads to groups such as VietNow, Helping the Vets, and Veterans for a Strong America.  America’s military veterans deserve much better than this.—Rick Cohen