Charity Defense Council

Mission: To let them know that low overhead is not the way the world gets changed. That poor executive compensation is not a strategic plan for ending hunger or poverty or curing disease. That inadequate, donated resources are not the path to global transformation.

About: The Charity Defense Council has five functions:

1) Anti Defamation Force: We will respond and rectify inaccurate and sensational reporting on the sector and on individual charities, and will proactively educate the media.

2) Brave and Daring Public Ad Campaigns: The pork industry changed the public's misperception about pork from a fatty, heart-attack-waiting-to-happen meat to "the other white meat" through a determined public ad campaign. The egg and oil industries did the same. If we can change the way the public thinks about pork, eggs, and oil, we can change the way it thinks about charity. But we have to speak up for ourselves in the same way media as the giant consumer brands, and at the same volume and with the same consistency.

3) Legal Defense Fund: We will challenge counterproductive regulations and laws that violate our First Amendment rights. Those rights are violated when we are forced to speak in the language of overhead percentages instead of in the language of impact. Because free speech is as much about having the right not to say the things you don't want to say as it is about being able to say the things you do want to say. We will not be forced to speak about overhead when we want to speak about impact.

4) The National Civil Rights Act for Charity & Social Enterprise: We deserve a thoughtful statutory code designed to help us change the world, not a fragmented set of oppressive laws and regulations that fundamentally work against us and that were designed for another age by people who are no longer living. We'll facilitate a national discussion on what's wanted and needed and we'll draft a National Civil Rights Act for Charity and Social Enterprise. It's time. It's overdue.

5) Organize Ourselves: Our sector does grassroots organizing for every cause but our own--for all issues except those that fundamentally undermine us as a sector. No more. We'll organize the sector on a town-by-town, state-by-state basis.

By doing these five things in a beautiful synchronicity we can change the way the public thinks about charity.

Partner Since: 2016

Founder (year established): Dan Pollata (2012)

Website: http://charitydefensecouncil.org/