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| Emanuel Swedenborg was an interesting character, perhaps the first environmentalist. This graphic is as useful as many of the IRS forms, but some of them - WOW! |
How does one find charitable tax returns, loaded with information? Long ago I signed up for Guidestar.org, free at my level of use.
This is where I found the IRS forms, 2008-10, for Marvin Schwan's Foundation.
This is WELS Lutherans for Life, aka Christian Life Resources.
There is also a Metro Milwaukee version, with another $374,000 of income.
You will notice that organizations started years ago with Lutheran names, then became generic. Christian News was incorporated as Lutheran News, Inc. Here are Herman Otten's IRS forms.
Here is one of many forms (identical?) for WELS Kingdom Workers, about $3 million in income. All the grants are listed by name, although the location is the same building, near The Love Shack. I am only guessing this - the local chapters parcel out the loot, which is considerable in some cases. Twin Cities - $1.5 million, prit-near. In other words, a few people control a lot of money.
WELS Kingdom Workers has a ton of forms, various amounts of income and many listed as zero income.
The Salem Lutheran Foundation (George Skestos) is listed.
Lutheran News aka Christian News is here.
I suggest creating a user name and password, to look around at where millions of dollars are going.
If you have a favorite search tool, send a comment and I will upgrade it to the main post. Thanks.
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bruce-church (http://bruce-church.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Lazy Pastors Do Not Study, Do Not Visit, Do Not Pr...":
Guidestar has a free registration feature like Charity Navigator does. It allows one to see the latest IRS 990 Forms.
Guidestar doesn't really rate the charity using a star system like Charity Navigator does, nor does it really indicate whether it follows good NPO practices, but only gives "tools" to compare NPOs so the user can come to his or her own conclusions. By contrast, Charity Navigator has everything Guidestar lacks, and does everything Guidestar doesn't do, i.e., it actually rates the charities, and even shows all this at the free registration level. It seems Guidestar, even at the premium level, is just an informational database. Nevertheless, Christian Life Resources has shied away from giving either GuideStar or Charity Navigator complete and up-to-date information about itself:
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary&orgid=9509
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http://www.guidestar.org/rxg/analyze-nonprofit-data/index.aspx
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