Fullerton Collaborative Collaborates on Stall
Yesterday our own tenacious Travis followed up, as promised, with Pam Keller, to find out what the Fullerton Collaborative board had decided about our request to divulge their donors.
Here’s what Travis got back:
Dear Travis,
The Board of the Fullerton Collaborative met today. Your request was included on the agenda. The Board suggested if you are interested in knowing about our financial state you are welcome to look for our 990 forms on http://www2.guidestar.org/. If you would like to know more details about how we are funded, where the funding comes from or how our Collaborative functions Zoot Velasco, Chair of the Board; Barry Ross, Treasurer and I would be glad to sit down with you to go over the information.
Thank you for your interest in the Fullerton Collaborative,
Pam Keller
Executive Director
Hmm. We didn’t get what we wanted, but rather we got a brush off – sort of. While we have nothing against sitting down with these good people, it hardly seems necessary. We don’t need face time with them. They are either going to cooperate or not.
The invitation that we view the Form 990 is really pretty disingenuous: Ms. Keller knows very well that we have already looked at their 2007 version of this document on line – which caused us to start asking our questions in the first place. We posted about it here .
This whole thing is really starting to smell like a stall to us – we’ve been put off for over a month already. Oh well! The truth will out, as they say.
Shad,
I’m glad to see that you have not implied that there was any monkey business going on. Gauging Pam’s response one would assume that they are not trying to hide anything. A delay tactic can only backfire if there is culpability. Then again, suits have nothing better to do than schedule meetings and wait between trough feeds.
This just does not make sense. If the Collaborative is convinced that there is no appearance of a conflict related to its donors, the amounts and timing of the donations and the multiple roles of the Collaborative Director as
1. FSD Employee
2. Fullerton Collaborative Director and
3. City Council Member…
then why not just publish the numbers? I would have to assume that the Fullerton School District receives these numbers annually as they volunteer our publicly funded school district as the sole employer of this organizations Director. They MUST know where that money comes from and confirm the fact that they are not complicit in anything even remotely open to the appearance of conflict? If there was conflict, they would essentially just be acting as money launderers for a City Councilman. Truly they must have this information which would be available to the public.