Rick Cohen

The Walton Family Foundation, Wal-Mart, and corporate philanthropy

The recent New York Times article on Wal-Mart's philanthropy, or more correctly, the Walton family's philanthropy supporting Wal-Mart's business interests, merits some comment--in addition to the errant quotes that I got into the article at the very end of the piece.

In the overall scheme of Walton family's philanthropic grantmaking, their grants to the various conservative think tanks pale in size compared to their grants for a variety of other entities, including several in the Waltons' home state area, such as great organizations like Enterprise Corporation of the Delta and the Foundation for the Mid-South, along with a pre-Katrina seven-figure grant to former president Clinton's foundation, followed by over $20 million pledged to the foundation's Bush-Clinton Katrina apparatus by the Walton Family Foundation and by Wal-Mart itself).

The various Heritage-like conservative think tanks profiled in the New York Times article were not creations of the Waltons or Wal-Mart, though the practice of corporations providing charitable grants to sham nonprofits to carry out corporations' business and political agendas is certainly not unheard of. And the money the Waltons provided these think tanks, five-figure and sometimes even six-figure totals over multiple years, is hardly the dominant slice of their budgets.

But when these think tanks are writing about business policies where the major beneficiary of their research and advocacy happens to be the world's largest company measured in number of employees or annual sales revenue, a heightened level of disclosure and transparency on the part of these institutions is warranted. In the Wal-Mart case, they are writing in support of policies where the primary beneficiary, heads, shoulders, and other body parts above the competition, is the Wal-Mart corporate behemoth.

Walton Family Foundation grants are not the same as grants from the Wal-Mart company, but the Waltons who control the foundation also control 40% of the Wal-Mart stock, they haven't divested themselves of control of the corporation, and their future personal, family, and philanthropic wealth is tied to the business growth of Wal-Mart. For these conservative policy-oriented think tanks to disclose that they get funding from the Waltons who happen to control Wal-Mart when the think tanks write about Wal-Mart, what's the harm? Will it stop them from writing in support of Sam's corporate legacy? No. But the transparency is good for the public, for the corporation, and the think tanks.

Note: When my former employer, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, published a report on Wal-Mart's philanthropy, the Wal-Mart press flacks immediately charged that NCRP had been funded by Wal-Mart's top competitor, Target. They had it wrong. NCRP had received grant support before 1999 from the Dayton-Hudson Corporation's corporate foundation, but when the conversion to Target occurred corporately and philanthropically, NCRP was out. However, had we been funded by Target and not revealed that when we published our report, it would have been appropriate to call us to task.

One more comment about corporate funders: At one time, we wrote supporting Target's decision not to have the Salvation Army bell-ringers collecting money on Target store properties and criticizing Wal-Mart's trumpeted anti-Target invitiation to the Salvation Army to come to Wal-Mart stores and get their donations matched (for a short period of time) on a dollar-for-dollar basis. When our NonProfit Times article was published, we got a quizzical call from Target's charitable giving people assuming that they must have funded NCRP for us to have written the article. When they learned that we hadn't--and in fact, when they learned that we wouldn't have written it had the Target company provided us grant support--they were more perplexed than before.

Corporate funders, whether through the corporations' own grantmaking arms or through the owners' family foundations, have to understand that they shouldn't be able to buy corporate support in exchange for philanthropic grants. And, in such cases when they receive corporate grants and advocate for policies rather clearly benefitting the corporate grantmakers, nonprofits of all ideological stripes should be prepared to do a little extra disclosure.

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Posted at 12:03 PM, Sep 10, 2006 in Government Accountability | Wal-Mart
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