Hershey's Charity for Children: GOD slush Fund

Susan Brannon
21 Oct 2012

According to the Nation, Hershey started a trust fund for a children's school in Hershey, Pennsylvania designed to nurture and educate the children in need and it has done so for 1,800 children.  But there is another side to this story; they transfer some of the charity funds to the Pennsylvania Republicans, along with favors.

• They purchased a failing golf course: a $12 million investment.  The investors turned their losses into a profit anywhere from $15,000 to $100,000 dollars by revamping the course, building a club house...from money donated by the Hershey charity fund.
• It is known that many prominent local Republicans sit on the board of the fund, one is Zimmerman, former state attorney general and later to become the boards chair.  Briskly increased the salaries from from $35,000 to $100,000 and redesigned the charity to become a partisan fund.
• The republicans made millions from the Hershey Trust; and collected over $500,000 annually according to the non-profit (non profit??really?) 
• James Neveles, a Bush a former feder chair of the Federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation made over $580,000
• Tom Ridge, former Pennsylvania governor, pulled $200,000 annually

This is a non profit scandal if there ever was one.  The republicans who sit on the board are all civil leaders.  One can't ask for an investigation on how this non-profit is run.  Who in the state can oversee and investigate the standards?  The solution is if a Democrat wins at the polls this November.  The trust's need to be upheld and be run by their standards.

If the Hershey Company can do this as a non-profit, then what other non-profits shovel their funds around?

An exerpt of a student from the school:

"Even before my time, MHS’s mission had begun to shift away from the most desperate cases. Simultaneously, the charity’s assets, which had grown monumentally with the success of the various Hershey brands, started to be diverted from the school. One case in point was the 1963 construction of a medical school for Pennsylvania State University, which cost $50 million. Next came Founders Hall, a colossal administrative building constructed on MHS property in 1972 at a cost of another $50 million. It boasted the nation’s second-largest unsuspended dome (after the US Capitol) and draws 50,000 visitors annually. Republican Dick Thornburgh held his Pennsylvania gubernatorial inaugural celebration there in 1980, trumpeting how much money he’d saved taxpayers that day. Contributing to the savings, MHS children served as uncompensated waiters, parking lot attendants and the cleanup crew."

For more information please read:  Hershey's Charity for Children:  The Nation