Fidelity Charitable, launched in 1991, is currently the largest charitable organization in the U.S. The four funds examined by Sludge do not appear to have effective screening policies, or they do not have policies against providing funds to hate groups at all. SPLC looks for “organizations that demean or debase an entire other group of people based on their inherent characteristics.” Hate groups are those that issue “serious slurs”-for example, claims that Jews are evil or gay men are pedophiles. “There’s no way around it.”īeirich said the SPLC has a high bar for listing organizations as hate groups. “Ultimately, these companies are serving as pass-throughs to hate groups,” Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), told Sludge. These hate groups include 12 anti-LGBT groups, 12 anti-Muslim groups, eight anti-immigrant groups, one white nationalist group, and one radical traditional Catholic group.Īnti-Muslim nonprofits including the David Horowitz Freedom Center ($3 million) and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy ($1.6 million), anti-LGBT organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom ($2.7 million) and the Family Research Council ($548,000), and the white nationalist organization the VDARE Foundation ($46,000) have all received funds from one or more of the donor-advised funds investigated by Sludge.

They also help these donors keep their names secret by eliminating paper trails at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the organizations receiving the funds that could tie them to their donations.Ī Sludge analysis of recent tax filings shows that, from mid-2014 through 2017, these four donor-advised funds combined to give nearly $11 million to 34 groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) considers to be hate groups, according to its 2017 hate map. These kinds of funds allow donors to keep their charitable money in one place and to save on taxes. Several charitable gift funds, including the largest charity in the United States, are helping dozens of hate groups raise millions of dollars by giving their donors a way to keep their identities secret.ĭonors Trust, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Schwab Charitable Fund, and Vanguard Charitable are donor-advised funds that provide individual donors with accounts and contribute their money, attributed to the funds, to the nonprofits of the donors’ choice.

This article is Part 1 of an ongoing Sludge series on donor-advised funds.

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