Not in Our Name posted his name on its website, along with 30,000 others, and claimed that he was a prominent signatory to its Statement of Conscience petition. Although Abdoo denied ever signing anything, his protestations did not dissuade a conservative Milwaukee radio talk show Although Abdoo had his defenders, including a man who told a local reporter host named Charlie Sykes from attacking him on the air. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel followed suit with a vitriolic editorial. Although Abdoo had his defenders, including a man who told a local reporter he had just purchased about $4,400 worth of Wisconsin Energy stock but would not give his name, the utility company received a barrage of irate calls. Abdoo ended up sending an apologetic email to his employees.

The amount of the donation that incurred this wrath? $250.

Perhaps donors should prepare for such a reaction at a time when op-ed pages, radio talk shows and dinner table conversations ignite over clashing policy, economic and political viewpoints. Indeed, in its most recent survey of philanthropic trends, the Foundation Center, a New York-based research organization, discovered that only 2.6 percent of all foundation dollars in the United States went to the potentially explosive category called International Affairs Development, Peace and Human Rights, and 2.9 percent to the equally partisan stratum of reproductive health care. Clearly, charity-minded individuals and the foundations they oversee are steering clear of controversial topics.

Classroom or Woodshed?
The most popular philanthropic category is education, which received 26 percent of all foundation grant money, according to the Foundation Center. However, anyone hoping to escape public acrimony by backing this ostensibly benign cause may want to heed the story of Stuart Sloan.

Sloan, the founder of Egghead Software and former chairman and chief exectutive of the Quality Food Center grocery store chain, became embroiled in controversy when he decided to support a deficit-plagued public school. His funding carried the implicit message that the school itself, its teachers, administrators, students and parents all fell short of some ideal, and the school’s interests resented it.

In 1998, Sloan started giving $1 million a year to T.T. Minor, a public elementary school in an inner-city neighborhood that he glimpsed each day en route to his office. Sloan wanted his money to be spent on pre-kindergarten classes, longer class days, smaller classes and after-school help. But instead of being grateful for the support, a faction of community activists feared that Sloan was attempting to gentrify the neighborhood. When seven teachers and the principal transferred to other schools, rumors circulated that Sloan’s initiatives were to blame. (Whether Sloan had anything to do with their decision to leave remains unclear.) Paul Hill, the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington in Seattle, says, “If you want to do something that the system isn’t doing, then you’re going to run into resistance.”

Since the upheaval, student test scores have improved dramatically, and the new principal ascribes the uptick to the changes that Sloan funded. However, Sloan’s next step drew still more backlash. Assuming that educators could be more successful if they started from scratch, Sloan and his foundation established an entirely new public school dubbed, appropriately, the New School. What did not sit well was the attempt to reduce expenses by moving the New School into an underutilized building occupied by an alternative school instead of constructing a new building.

Students at the alternative school, uncertain whether Sloan’s school would eventually displace them, walked out in protest, and several of them rioted. Stopped in their attempts to storm a Quality Food Center store, the rioters caused a few thousand dollars’ worth of damage to a Rite Aid pharmacy. (Sloan is a Rite Aid board member.) To date, the building has room enough to hold both schools, but the school district has not decided where each will go in the future.

In 1997, President Clinton nominated James Hormel, an attorney and heir to Hormel Foods, as ambassador to Luxembourg. Hormel sailed through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee only to see his appointment languish in the full Senate when it became a lightning rod for family values proponents. In 1992, Hormel had contributed $500,000 to kick off fund-raising for a gay and lesbian research center at the San Francisco Public Library. When Hormel’s nomination came up for debate, the Traditional Values Coalition (TVC), which describes itself as America’s largest nondenominational, grassroots church lobby, sent all the senators a book someone had discovered in the San Francisco research center’s collection: an anatomically correct coloring book. The TVC’s accompanying letter called the research center “wall-to-wall filth.”

Hormel contends the coloring book was an early work of radical feminism mislabeled as gay literature, and claims that the Republicans were more concerned about the symbol of a gay man winning confirmation, which he almost certainly would have done. Hormel believes the senators actually did not fall for the TVC’s stunt; they understood that the book was donated by someone else. Nonetheless, enough senators were already against him to keep his nomination from moving forward.

“It was very disheartening,” he says. “People were saying nasty things about me, and even if you know they are not true, they hurt.” Clinton waited until June 1999, when Congress was on hiatus, to make a recess appointment, meaning Hormel could stay only until the end of the congressional session in December 2000.

His political enemies would roll out the smear campaign once more, when President Bush nominated John Ashcroft, one of the senators who blocked Hormel’s ambassadorial confirmation, to the office of attorney general. Hormel criticized the Missouri Republican during a news conference. The TVC responded by sending copies of the coloring book to freshman senators, arguing that if a person who puts books like that in a library dislikes Ashcroft, then Ashcroft cannot be all that bad.

Hormel could have made his contributions anonymously, of course, while Sloan could have done the same—albeit with less direct control—by donating through a community foundation or a charitable trust. Just as the man who claimed to be throwing his support behind Abdoo by investing in Wisconsin Energy sold his credibility short by refusing to identify himself, though, anonymity can make the philanthropic effort less effective. “You can give anonymously. I used to think that was good. I used to do it myself,” Hormel points out. “But anonymous giving really doesn’t inspire other people to give, and that’s part of why you should give in the first place.”

Boycotts and Backlashes
Boycotts and grassroots campaigns can be devastating to small and medium-size businesses; even industrial titans may wilt under their pressure. Business leaders who openly support their personal political passions while avoiding these repercussions often have a few things in common. The most important are a closely held private company and products that, unlike a cold can of beer or a hot pizza, are not easily boycotted mainstays in consumer households.

Alan Kligerman, the left-leaning creator of Lactaid milk and Beano digestive aid, estimates that he has given $100,000 over the years to Americans for Peace Now, a liberal group advocating negotiations between Arabs and Israel. He has given more than $50,000 to the ACLU Foundation and $20,000 to Corporate Accountability International, an international business watchdog formerly named Infact, which launched a boycott of Nestlé 28 years ago over its marketing of infant formula to poor women in developing countries.

Kligerman, now 74, has been active in politics one way or another for most of his adult life. In the 1990s, when another socially conscious entrepreneur, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, established a group called Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, Kligerman became one of its most visible members, traveling to Washington for press conferences that urged Congress to shift spending from defense to social programs. When the latest Iraq war began to loom, Kligerman emerged as an unofficial spokesman for business figures who opposed it. The first time he ever felt measurable backlash for his views was when he received what he describes as a few hate letters after the New York Times ran a profile of him in April 2003.

He was a bit surprised; his philanthropy is hardly controversial, he maintains. “I see them as causes that make sense: good government, peace where possible,” he says. “The things I want could not be squarer.” Kligerman thinks even executives at public companies should worry less than they do about stirring controversy. “There is the threat of a boycott and the perceived threat of it,” but he is nevertheless relieved that no one has tried to organize a boycott against AkPharma, his privately held company. If someone did, that person would find a moving target because Kligerman tends to sell his product lines off to other corporations as soon as they gain a measure of success.

David Koch may be on the opposite side of the political spectrum, but he also sees himself as a man who supports sensible ideas. “I think less taxation, less onerous regulation will improve the economy and benefit all companies,” says Koch, who, with his older brother, Charles, runs and largely owns the energy conglomerate Koch Industries, founded by their father. Although they broke with the Libertarian Party in 1983 because it was too radical, Charles cofounded the Cato Institute, David sits on Cato’s board and they have given generously to free-market think tanks that oppose deficit spending and support the decriminalization of marijuana—as well as less regulation of the oil industry. They figured prominently in Thomas Frank’s recent best-seller, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, in which the author writes that the Kochs, who live in Wichita, have supported “zany free-market policy recommendations that usually aim to starve or otherwise disable government, while making business ever more profitable.”

Being demonized in the press is nothing new to the Koch brothers. “I just live with it,” David says. But finding themselves castigated in a best-selling book raises the possibility that critics of their giving habits will grow even more vociferous. Even so, the Kochs can weather criticism of their philanthropic efforts with minimal impact on their company’s bottom line: Koch Industries is private, and its products, including gasoline and carpet fibers, are high enough in the supply chain that consumers cannot easily target the company and its products for a boycott.

It was easy, by comparison, for some exercise enthusiasts to hurt Gary Heavin’s business. The founder of the Curves fitness club franchise maintains he was the victim of two highly distorted stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, which claimed he had given large sums of money to extremist pro-life groups that block abortion clinics with grisly photos of bloody fetuses.

While Heavin did donate a total of about $5 million to three health centers that are not exactly pro-choice, none of them had any association with Operation Save America or other confrontational groups, as the articles alleged. The Chronicle quickly published two lengthy corrections, but by the time it did, the popular Web bulletin board Craigslist was swimming with anti-Heavin diatribes. “The owner of Curves is evil” read the headline on one.

A group of club members banded together to form Curvers for Choice, a group that raises money for pro-choice causes. “My Curves workouts are my healthiest habit,” writes the founder of the group, who gives her name only as Teresa on its website. Heavin optimistically estimates that, at most, 400 of Curve’s 4 million members quit the club. Of course, no one can count those who chose not to join in the first place because of the bad publicity spurred by the Chronicle articles.

Additional Information
 The Domino's Effect

Matthew Schuerman, a Brooklyn resident, writes on philanthropy and teaches at New York University. ms189@nyu.edu

Illustration by Max Grafe