DETROIT, Mich. — It all started with a flyer in the mail from www.carshelpingvets.org, a car donation charity that, as the name states, helps veterans.
That’s the kind of charity that James Dyson can appreciate. He’s a veteran and volunteers each month at his church feeding homeless veterans. He’s donated cars to veterans groups in the past and would have considered this one, until we told him how little of his money would ever actually make it to a veteran.
“I’d be pretty upset,” Dyson said.
Carshelpingvets.org spends the vast majority of what it takes (on average 83 percent) on running the charity, not on veterans in need.
Sandra Minutti with Charity Navigator says that’s way too much. Good charities usually spend no more than 30 percent on operations. The worst year for carshelpingvets.org was 2012. That’s when tax records show it raked in $4.6 million and gave only 3 percent, or about $182,000, to the groups it says it’s helping.
The next year was better, donating about $1 million of the $4.5 million it took in, or a little more than 20 percent. That’s still far below what most good charities give.
In 2011, the Better Business Bureau of St. Louis issued a warning, saying among other things that the man in charge of the charity, Rick Frazier, used to use the car donating program for the Purple Heart Foundation. The foundation sued him for deception and destroying incriminating documents that they said proved he was cheating them out of money. He sued them over breaking his contract and for defaming him. Both parties settled out of court.
None of it’s comforting for those looking for a good place to donate.
To find out more, FOX 4 Problem Solvers went to Detroit, the home of veterans charity. One challenge: The charity’s address is a post office box at a UPS store.
But 30 minutes away in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Rochester Hills is Charity Funding. That’s the private company paid to run the charity’s day-to-day operations. The man in charge of Charity Funding is Rick Frazier. The same guy the Better Business Bureau mentioned in its warning.
Trying to get answers from anyone at Charity Funding proved tricky. Frazier’s brother Steve asked us to turn off our camera, but when we insisted they needed to be on to hear their side of the debate, he told us to leave or he would call police.
Our next stop was Frazier’s home in an exclusive neighborhood just a few miles away. He didn’t appear to be home when we called, but he did contact us a few hours later by phone.
Frazier said he has no concerns about how little his charity gives to those in need. He said it’s expensive to convert junker cars into cash and he says his charity is more generous than most car-donation charities.
The next time you consider donating your car, you might want to ask: Who’s really benefiting? It may not be who you think.
