(Janet Camarena is the director of the Foundation Center's San Francisco office and leads the Center's Glasspockets effort. This blog was originally posted on Transparency Talk.)
I love weddings
and I love philanthropy, so I have been following the fallout from Sean
Parker’s wedding with growing interest over the last couple of weeks of
unrelenting news coverage surrounding the big event. Mr. Parker is the co-founder of Napster and
was also Facebook’s first president. To believe the tabloids, the nuptials
involved an elaborate staging akin to those of sets for Lord of the Rings crossed with Game
of Thrones all under the canopy of old growth redwoods in Northern
California.
Unfortunately many new donors fear that
philanthropic transparency will lead to being inundated with requests,
and instead opt for treating philanthropy like a “stealth mode”
operation.
Couple those
images with the fact that he apparently did not secure the proper permits, and
in the end made a “voluntary payment” to make the whole brouhaha go away (the
California Coastal Commission can technically not levy fines), and you have the
makings of story that any news cycle will love about billionaires being able to
make up the rules as they go along. And
that is where philanthropy enters the picture, as when Mr. Parker has tried to catch up to the story and correct the record, he refers to his foundation and its work
supporting conservation efforts as a means to demonstrate his commitment to the
environment. And given this history of philanthropic support for conservation,
he also explains that his goal for the wedding was actually one in which the
event would leave the forest in better shape than when he found it, with ample
funds included for restoration.
As a philanthropy
observer, that was the sound bite that really grabbed my attention! Sean
Parker has a foundation? Who knew? I was aware of Mr. Parker’s
excellent work on the crowdfunding platform Causes, and in fact, we have featured its good
work on several occasions here at the Foundation
Center, since it is a
platform that has helped many nonprofits mobilize their networks to raise
millions of dollars for charity. Given
his efforts to build Causes soon after making it big with Facebook, it is clear
he has made philanthropy, and the technology that can serve as its catalyst, a
professional priority.
What surprised me
was the foundation part, as I had not previously heard of its work. So, I
looked up the Sean Parker Foundation in our Foundation
Directory Online database, which contains profiles of more than 100,000
grantmaking foundations, and I could not initially find any foundation there
listing Mr. Parker as its donor, officer, or trustee. So, next I reached out to our data department
to see if they had record of it and learned that it is indeed, a new foundation
in the process of being added to our database. This means that the only source of public information on the foundation
would be its 990-PF tax form, so I reviewed that to get a better idea of Mr.
Parker’s philanthropic activities.
Unfortunately,
given the nature of the turnaround with tax forms, the most current publicly
available form only provides insights into the Sean Parker Foundation’s giving
in 2011. At that time, this new foundation
had approximately $1.8 million in total assets and had disbursed three grants
totaling $225,000 and the funding was given to the Beckley Foundation to
support a global initiative for drug policy reform, to Gabrielle’s Angel
Foundation for cancer research, and to the Bridge School to support education
for developmentally disabled children. All
worthy causes, but nothing to indicate his interest in conservation.
Next I tried his
Wikipedia entry, and
found some good indication of his philanthropic interests there, and more
details about Causes, but nothing more specific about the work of his
foundation in the last year. I was able
to find one recent gift attributed to Sean Parker through a Google search, which yielded a general donor list
for Stand Up to Cancer, indicating either that his foundation’s work on cancer
has continued, or that he has multiple giving vehicles through a donor-advised
fund or supporting organization, which may serve to administer additional giving
on his behalf through a community foundation or banking institution.
This structure
does not reduce the value of his grantmaking, but the lack of transparency for
those vehicles make his good work invisible, which puts him at a distinct
disadvantage now that he is on the defensive. As a tech pioneer, Mr. Parker could have simply used the online tools at
his disposal and voluntarily disclosed his fund or foundation’s grantmaking
details and strategies on his own web site, or provided greater detail about it on
his Wikipedia profile.
Had he
established a web site for his foundation with a list of recently awarded
grants, his current giving would now be a matter of public record for all to
see, including prying journalists and an unforgiving public.
Although I cannot
speculate as to why Mr. Parker hasn’t chosen to be more open about his
foundation, the more private approach is not uncommon in philanthropy. Unfortunately many new donors fear that
philanthropic transparency will lead to being inundated with requests, and instead
opt for treating philanthropy like a “stealth mode” operation. However, the
philanthropic record and reputation private foundations can build ultimately
serve the philanthropist, particularly in occasions such as this. For if you don’t tell your own story, others
will tell it for you. And more
importantly, if no one knows you have a foundation, doesn’t that limit its
capacity to do good?
Furthermore, in
our work at Glasspockets.org, a web site committed to encouraging greater philanthropic
transparency, we have found that online foundation transparency has the power to
build public trust and credibility, improve relationships with grantees,
facilitate greater collaboration, reduce duplication of effort, and cultivate a
community of shared learning.
The forest Mr.
Parker and his bride selected as the setting for their nuptials is called the
Ventana Wilderness. In Spanish Ventana
means window, which seems fitting since thanks to news and digital media, we
now all feel like we got to peek through the reception’s window. Too bad we didn’t have more of a view of his
philanthropy leading up to this event, which may have made his efforts at
damage control an easier task.
--Janet Camarena
