At the core of every large successful partnership project is the support of the NPS.  The Friends groups highlighted are great but where there is success in getting large projects accomplished you find strong NPS support.  NPS resources have been diverted or committed to helping the partnerhsip succeed.  Jefferson Expansion Arch project doesn't happen without tax payer dollars ( project staff) going towards the effort.  Neither does Sperry Chalet.  It is the reality -- and it isn't a negative -- tt just is. 

Espousing the benefits of partnerships needs to be balanced with the reality that where big projects happen, by and large, are where big parks can help make it happen. 

Many friends groups are small and succeed with sweat equity.  They should be saluted as well.  Most NPS units will never have the Friends groups with the sophistication of those highlighted here and most NPS units don't have friends groups who can call the Director and get resources committed to that partnership project.  There are haves and have nots in partnershps in the NPS.  That will not change. 

NPF recently received federal appropriated dollars to support NPS priorities.  I hope that does support NPS priorities with those funds.  It is interesting that NPF now receives funds through the federal appropriations process.   Let's hope those funds are used to support projects or friends groups that aren't well known or dictated by a board member or two.

The author has used the term "friends group"loosely to encompass several categories of supporters of National Parks.  However, typically, a Friends Group iprovide only a small category of support for NPS.  All of those Friend Groups mentioned in this article actually are Cooperating Associations, a special category of tax exempt organizations created by Congressional legislation.  It is the mission of Cooperating Associations to support the National Parks they are associated with.  Almost all Cooperating Associations are a corporation, licensed by some state, and their entire existence is about National Parks.  Each Cooperating Association has a legal charter with one or more specific parks to support them.  Actual Friends Groups usually are not incorporated and do not have legislative support for their existence.  Also, their fund raising is usually small potatoes.  It is the Cooperating Associations that raise the million of dollars.  For example, at the USS Arizona Memorial in Honolulu, the cooperating Association (Pacific Historic Parks) raised over $50 million to rebuild the visitors center.  Not to downplay the importance of Friends Groups, yet it is important to recognize who the real players are.  All major National Parks have at lest one Cooperating association partner who works jointly with the park to interpret the park to the public.  While the support the Cooperating Association provides to the National Park System no where near matches Congressional Budget support, they are the next major fiscal support for the system.  Cooperating Associations are part of a sysemic approach to supporting the National Park mission, their support is not haphazard, it is planned and integral to each National Park.  

This article makes some good points.  First, with the exception of programs that have been twisted into subsidies for exploitive uses, almost all of our public lands programs, including our national parks, are now grossly underfunded, so much so that, whether you call them "Friends Groups" or "Cooperating Associations" or whatever, nonprofit philanthropic organizations often are the "margin of survival" for our parks.  Second, some park superintendents now really are forced to rely on private nonprofits to address vital needs.  And, third, it truly can be disastrous when a nonprofit on which a park depends for critical support fails to meet commitments, as Yellowstone discovered earlier this year when the funds to support Yellowstone's Wolf Project, its Native Fish Conservation Program, and other vital conservation efforts vanished.

Nonprofits can and do fail.  But, I believe, especially given what we have seen in federal, state, and local governments over the past few years, that we have to be prepared to face a darker possibility.  We have to be prepared to ask what happens, how do we recognize, and how do we handle a situation in which a nonprofit has actually gone rogue.  And, I believe the case of Yellowstone Forever (YF), the "official nonprofit partner" of the National Park Service (NPS) in Yellowstone National Park, is a good model for exploring these questions.

Formed through a merger of the old Yellowstone Association (YA) and the more recently created Yellowstone Park Foundation in 2016, YF is a young nonprofit that instantly inherited very old roots.  Through that merger, the newly created YF gained control of the much older Yellowstone Association's already established relationship with the NPS and thus control of the park's visitor center bookstores and educational programs.  This inherited relationship enabled YF to operate retail outlets and collect donations on federal property, in federal facilities, for relatively little or no conventional rent and with relatively little oversight, in a prestigious national park, with annual access to millions of dollars in well-intended public contributions as a result.

The old YA had maintained its financial solvency and worked successfully on behalf of Yellowstone National Park since 1933, successfully running the Yellowstone Institute since 1976.  The old YA was a real conservation group, genuinely dedicated to supporting and protecting Yellowstone, its environment, and its wildlife and it had grown internationally influential, very influential indeed.  Under its guidance and management, the Yellowstone Institute offered both information and training on environmental and wildlife protection, became a gathering and information exchange center for expertise on these topics, was a supportive force behind the reintroduction of wolves, coordinated citizen science research on Yellowstone's Bison, and was raising questions about whether trophy hunting Grizzlies was the right thing given their limited gene pool.  Folks associated with the Yellowstone Institute were also associated with the debate over the Crowne Butte Mine in the New World Mining District, more recently with debates over the Crevice and Emigrant Mining Districts, and even talking about climate change and global warming.  But, not everybody liked that.  No, for some partisans, the old YA and the Yellowstone Institute pushed too much conservation and protection.

Then, along came another group who had different viewpoints and believed they could do a better job.  These philanthropists funneled their money through the Yellowstone Park Foundation, aimed large contributions at some of Yellowstone's most cherished conservation efforts, and convinced conservationists of their intentions.

Being more sophisticated corporate business types, the people associated with the Yellowstone Park Foundation offered an opportunity to bring high levels of business, retail, and fundraising expertise to a new, larger, merged organization, more efficiently manage everything previously operated by YA, and eliminate the wasteful redundancy of two nonprofits supporting Yellowstone in parallel.  By the time of the election of 2016, both the Yellowstone Park Foundation and the old YA had disappeared and Yellowstone Forever was born.

Contrary to the general concept of a merger, most YA stakeholders and members were bitterly opposed to the merger from the beginning and few of the YA Directors made it through the merger.  Almost all were soon gone, which left the YF Board of Directors almost completely dominated by Yellowstone Park Foundation holdovers.  In hindsight, another thing that didn't make it through the merger was much of that higher level of business, retail, and fundraising expertise.  While the stodgy old YA had been operating since 1933, successfully running the Yellowstone Institute without any need to shut it down since 1976, YF has wrecked itself in less than four years.

If you look at the financial data prior to and since the merger, including the Form 990 filings, you see that the YA was holding over $13 million in unencumbered net assets, which made it an attractive target in the first place.  In the merger, those assets were commingled with a much smaller contribution, less than half as much, from the Yellowstone Park Foundation.  Over the several years since the merger, YF has been celebrating larger fundraising revenues than the YA and making higher annual park support contributions; but, those figures have been inflated by borrowing that has resulted in a gradual depletion of the net assets remaining from the merger.  In essence, a variety of financial tricks have been used to siphon net assets derived from past public donations, as well as revenues derived from more recent public donations, into what seem to have been sweetheart compensation packages for connected staff and perhaps also sweetheart contract deals in other areas.  When the outcome of a merger is severely lopsided, it's usually considered a "hostile takeover" and, when that is followed by the siphoning off of net assets, it's generally known as a "corporate raid" in the business world.

At first, I believed the people who were actually behind the merger, as well as behind the scenes, intended YF to be a more or less permanent operation that would embed them in an influential place while also affording them an opportunity to mine sufficient funds for it to pay its own way, which would effectively be getting one of the flagships of the conservation movement to both host and pay for a parasitic anti-conservation lobbying effort embedded in its own life support system.  But, as more information has surfaced, it seems inconceivable that YF's leadership, with their extensive business experience, could be so incompetent as to bungle that plan so badly.

It seems more likely the merger was part of a darker scheme to simply bankrupt the nonprofit, disrupt its influence, discredit the kind of public participation it represents, and thus open the door wider to something worse and it looks like something closer to this sort of scheme actually succeeded.  Millions, literally millions, of dollars of public donations are gone and one of America's great conservation organizations has been mortally wounded.

As I mentioned previously and according to tax filings, the old YA brought a net assets balance of over $13 million into the merger while the Yellowstone Park Foundation, with its superior business acumen, contributed less than half that amount for a total YF starting net assets balance of ~$20.2 million.  YF's net assets have been dropping steadily since the merger.  By February of 2019, less than three years after the merger and the date of the most recent available information, the newly merged nonprofit's net assets had plummeted to less than $15 million under YF's management and as overseen by YF's Board of Directors; that's over $5 million gone in only a few years.

However, with changes in our national political picture potentially on the way, I now fear even more of the assets inherited from the old YA will disappear before the next administration can bring sharper oversight.  As Kurt Repanshek's most recent article on YF reports, the nonprofit has already invited real estate agents to look at some of the properties it inherited from the YA through the merger and has already put a three-bedroom, two-bath, house north of Yellowstone on the market.  That house was apparently used by the old YA to house staff or visiting experts at the now closed Yellowstone Institute.  Of course, YF is trying to make it look like the need to sell such assets is out of their control and they have done their best for the park.

YA gave the park very little of its income and used funds created at a great advantage over other businesses to feather its own nest - not help the park! in addition, YA violated regulations that prevented them from some fundraising... necessitating the need for the merger among other reasons. There is plenty of blame to go around in this mess.