Where do you believe the donations made towards a type 1 diabetes cure are going? Why is this knowledge so important?
Yesterday we released our latest report, Utilizing Corporate Governance to Align Agendas, which explains in detail why we believe the major non-profit foundations need to show more transparency. While it is likely that increased transparency and disclosure would come at a monetary cost to the organizations, we feel that the benefits would outweigh the expense.
We believe that the major diabetes non-profits need to release reports which address several topics related to the handling of donations, including: the organization’s financial landscape, their progress on grants/projects funded by donations, changes in allocations among the grants/projects, and the executives and board in charge of utilizing the contributions.
Transparency is so very important, because we believe that donors are similar to stakeholders within a company. They invest their time and money into the foundations and trust that they will get the results they are hoping for through more research focused toward a type 1 diabetes cure.
People who invest in a company would certainly want a progress report to see what is working and what isn’t. In the diabetes field, however, sometimes we as donors feel that we have done our job simply by raising money, which we believe is going toward a type 1 cure, but we do not really follow up and check to see that our intentions are aligned with where the money is really going.
Our report from last week, Review of Expense Categories of the Major Type 1 Non-Profits, shows exactly why we need to be better informed and need to demand more transparency from the major foundations. Unless we unite, urge action and do not rest until changes are made, valuable money that could very well be going toward focused research in the labs for a type 1 diabetes cure will continue going into other sources that are not related to cure research.
– Stoyan
