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Posted by TravelingBear (192.88.135.18) on 22:19:38 06/10/20
In Reply to: YF closing the Yellowstone Institute posted by TravelingBear
Back when I first started supporting YA and taking their classes, the YA Board of Directors had the appearance of people sincerely interested in Yellowstone and the YA Mission of education.
Go on their web site now and read the biographies of the board. They read like the board of any Fortune 500 company, most of them having multiple board memberships and not one of them seeming to have an educational connection.
Look at the 40+ staff members and consider how the bulk of them are in some form of "corporate" and fund raising management and how few have anything to do with the actual operation of the Institute and the stores.
Rather than laying off Institute members, how about ditching one of the two human resources people (do you really need two for a staff that small?) or the "Director of Board Relations"? Clearly that person did a piss poor job of alerting the board of the dire financial straits that were eating away the foundation of the organization starting 4 years ago.
How any non-profit can even have a multi-million dollar line of credit is beyond my comprehension. Then to give millions to the NPS while racking up debt on the line of credit? This all stinks. There seem to have been ZERO financial controls with this group, let alone oversight.
YA had some debt to acquire the Overlook Campus, which, as far as I know, was paid off before the merger. And even that was something like a couple hundred thousand dollars.
I used to make a generous donation each year and even had plans to make a sizeable legacy gift to YA. But they really angered me when they did not put the merger to a vote of the membership. YA WAS a membership organization, unlike YPF.
So they have gotten NOTHING from me since the merger other than the fees for the Institute programs I took under YF.
I think there are a lot of others out there like me who will not donate to the Resiliency Fund to save their sorry but.s. Until the Institute can be re-established as a separate entity, I cannot support an organization with the bloated fund raising staff (Yeah, how did that work out for Missy Heather?) with dis-interested Board that YF became.
So let that overpaid Fortune 500 Board of Directors get out their own checkbooks and bail out YF.
And if you really want to know what I think, just ask!
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