Money
Welcome to F4DC's new "Money" section! We're just getting this virtual resource going, so all we're posting now is a copy of our 2007 990-PF. "Your what???" you may ask.
A 990-PF is the rough equivalent of an annual tax return. All non-profits have to file a 990 with the U.S. Treasury (the daddy of the IRS). Foundations like F4DC have to file a special, longer version called the 990-PF (PF stands for private foundation).
By law, non-profits and foundations have to make their 990s available to anyone who wants to see them. That's so the public can figure out where the money is coming from, where it's going to, who is getting paid what kind of bucks, and so on. The theory being that if the public knows this kind of stuff, they can evaluate whether we're doing work that deserves that special tax-free status, and if not, hold us to account.
So here it is – read it and decide for yourself whether we are living up to our billing. This 990-PF is for our first, partial year of existence, when we were just getting off the ground. Lots of start-up costs – mostly legal fees (!) related to getting ourselves incorporated and approved by the Feds as a 501(c)(3). No grants made in 2007 – it took till 2008 before we figured out how to do it in a fair and fun way and hired staff to make sure the process could move forward. Next year's 990-PF is going to be a best-seller, by comparison!
Making our 990-PF form publicly available has to be just the barest starting point of transparency about money. We think the public deserves to know a whole lot more! That's part of the reason we added this new section on our website. In the future, look for our efforts to provide reader-friendly accounts of where the money came from and what it was spent on.
For example – some of our money last year came from an inheritance that included shares of stock in Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil. Who were the folks and what parts of the natural world actually "made" that money – through contributions of sweat, intelligence, and resources? We're working on some new ways of "keeping track" that include these kinds of things – not just the usual balance sheets and profit and loss statements.
In addition to being transparent about F4DC's money, we think the topics of money and philanthropy should be discussed more openly, more often, and by more people. So we hope this Money section will become a source of critical thinking, ideas, and exploration of such questions as:
- Is money inherently bad, good, or neutral?
- How come some people have so much money, and more people have so little?
- Can money that was "made" through exploitation ever be "made good" by spending it on wholesome, healing things?
- What would you do if you won the lottery and received $10,000? $100,000? $1,000,000?
- How sustainable is this whole philanthropy thing anyway?
