Rick Santorum's Charity Provided Little Aid to Targeted Beneficiaries

As if there isn't already enough reason to dislike GOP demagogue Rick Santorum, now a story is out that the charity he founded a decade ago to supposedly improve the lives of low-income residents in his home state provided little aid to the intended recipients. Instead, monies went to "administration" and office rental payments to Santorum's political allies. I hate to say it, but Santorum fits the pattern of so many of the "family values" organizations: they talk about family values but focus money on their own salaries and anti-gay and anti-secularism activities and provide little or nothing towards assisting the poor and needy. Hypocrite and modern day Pharisee are terms that once again seem to aptly describe Santorum. Here are highlights from the Washington Post coverage:

[A] decade ago, Rick Santorum, who was then an up-and-coming senator from Pennsylvania, launched a charity he said would improve the lives of low-income residents in his home state. “Wouldn’t it be a great thing to leave something positive behind other than a bunch of parties and a bunch of garbage?” Santorum told a local reporter.

But homeless families and troubled children were not the biggest beneficiaries of “Operation Good Neighbor.” Instead, the foundation spent most of its money to run itself, including hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for fundraising, administration and office rental paid to Santorum’s political allies.

The charity also had significant overlap with the senator’s campaigns and his work on Capitol Hill. Among the leading donors to the foundation were Pennsylvania development and finance firms that had donated to his election efforts and had interests that Santorum had supported in the Senate. . . . in the case of his charity, his efforts ended up mostly helping his cadre of political friends.

Before it folded in 2007, the foundation raised $2.58 million, with 39 percent of that donated directly to groups helping the needy. By industry standards, such philanthropic groups should be donating nearly twice that, from 75 to 85 percent of their funds. “That’s exceptionally poor,” Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a national organization that rates charitable groups, said of the group’s giving. “We would tell donors to run with fear from this organization.”

Robert Bickhart, a Republican political strategist who was Santorum’s campaign finance director, became the charity’s executive director. He served without pay in 2001, and received payments for renting the charity office space in his Conshohocken consulting firm, Capitol Resource Group. Tax records do not specify the amount paid for rent.
Beginning in 2002, he was paid for his part-time job as director, and from 2002 to 2006 he received a total of $97,000 in compensation, plus unspecified amounts in office rent.

Let's face it, in addition to being a vile homophobe, Santorum looks pretty sleazy as well.