It's been more than a half-century since the Beatles let the world know they get by with a little help from their friends. Certainly, that's true for national parks from coast to coast, which have been able to accomplish much with philanthropic dollars raised by friends groups. But what happens if those dollars vanish?
As the National Park Service budget has struggled in recent decades to meet the National Park System's needs, friends groups have been asked to step up. And not just with small dollar amounts. The Grand Teton National Park Foundation, for example, raised more than $14 million to help its namesake park rehabilitate the Jenny Lake area, while the Yosemite Conservancy contributed $20 million towards the restoration of the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park.
So important has been the money flow from friends groups to parks that former Interior Secretary Sally Jewel would describe that support as the parks' "margin of survival."
As National Parks Traveler pointed out two years ago as part of its multi-part series on the huge maintenance backlog across the park system, reliance by parks on philanthropic sources corralled by park friends groups has twisted the long-held view that these nonprofit organiations provide a “margin of excellence” for the parks they support. These days, more and more park superintendents are turning to friends groups for dollars, millions of dollars in many cases, to address operational needs, such as trail and campground work and historic building restoration.
Though an impressive display of support, there can be an over-reliance on such funding sources, as Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly found out earlier this year when Yellowstone Forever ran into dire fiscal straits and its flow of philanthropic dollars to the park turned into a trickle. Dollars that supported such programs as Yellowstone's Wolf Project, and its Native Fish Conservation Program pretty much vanished.
The nonprofit organization's financial and organizational struggles, which are continuing amid a search for a new CEO, also led to the closure this year of the Yellowstone Institute, a popular program with offerings ranging from citizen science projects to art in the park.
The problem, said Sholly, is that the park had come to rely on Yellowstone Forever's annual grants that amounted to millions of dollars to run programs touching on wildlife research and management, visitor experience, youth education, and sustainability.
"This is a model that's developed over time where they kind of fund employees that are YF employees, funded out of philanthrophy, out of usually restricted philanthrophy, and then those employees are embedded with our teams," explained the superintendent. "One of the biggest irritations I had here in the last couple of months was we have YF employees assigned with our teams and they got furloughed" when Yellowstone Forever reduced its workforce in an effort to get its budget out of the red.
While special donations arrived to restore those positions, said Sholly, the scenario underscored the problem of relying on philanthropic dollars for key programs in the park.
"I don't think that's the best staffing model to go forward with," he said. "This park has become, it is allowing too many critical programs to rely on philanthropy in order to succeed. What I mean by that is if the wolf program gets $450,000 a year from donors through YF, we've got to ensure that the wolf program has enough federal funding in place. We always want the philanthropy and can use it, and so many things get done. ... But what I don't want to have happen is if philanthropy wanes or goes down substantially, that suddenly we're putting critical programs at risk, like native fish or wolves, that kind of thing.
"We shouldn't have those programs in a vulnerable position to other people's generosity," said Sholly.
The National Park Foundation, which raises hundreds of millions of philanthropic dollars for the parks, can at times come to the rescue when local efforts struggle.
“We have a dynamic relationship with both NPS and our local partners and frequently work with each other to fund specific projects. Our purchase of Antelope Flats in Grand Teton is a great example of that," said Will Shafroth, the foundation's president and CEO. "Together with the Grand Teton National Park Foundation, we raised $23 million and the National Park Service contributed $23 million. As I’ve said many times before, supporting the parks is a team sport; in this case it took the three entities to get it done.
"So, it is not unusual at all for us to work with a local partner to help fund a priority of the Park Service," he added. "In the case of the conservation of Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout, NPF is already working with Yellowstone Forever and the Park Service to advance that project. Where a local group may be struggling to raise critical revenues and the Park Service holds as a priority a certain program or project, NPF will endeavor to help where it can.”
Certainly, the situation at Yellowstone Forever is extreme, but it underscores the importance of both ongoing financial scrutiny and planning for the worst-case scenario by the boards of nonprofit organizations.
At Friends of Acadia, which provided more than $2.2 million in support to Acadia National Park last year, the nonprofit's board and finance committee have grown reserves and endowments to ensure that even in a challenging year they would not have to scale back support to the park, said Earl Brechlin, FOA's communications director.
Overall, the organization has roughly $50 million in endowments that it uses to provide support to the park, he said.
"Like any organization, the (coronavirus) pandemic prompted us to look at our budget in light of what may not be needed, what may not manifest in its entirety, or what can't happen for a variety of external reasons," said Brechlin. "It's important when looking at the level of support any group provides to understand that some years could have large fluctuations depending on whether or not monies raised for specific, one-off projects, had been spent. For instance, if you had a campaign to raise $1 million for a new visitor center, the year you expended all or part of that money would show a higher level of spending than the year before or after. Lower amount in subsequent years wouldn't mean a reduction in support, rather, a return to more normal levels."
The pandemic has caused other organizations to re-evaluate their fiscal fitness.
In Montana the Glacier National Park Conservancy has played a key role for Glacier National Park, coming to the rescue when the Sperry Chalet burned to the ground on top of regularly funding a number of key programs in the park.
"Our donors have made it possible for us to provide the park with more than $2 million in grants to support over 50 educational, preservation, and research projects in each of the past three years," said Executive Director Doug Mitchell. "Many of those grants support positions, or parts of positions in various areas of expertise across the park that protect the resource and provide critical services to the public."
Careful budgeting and monitoring of incoming donations has enabled the Conservacy to fully fund 76 projects in the park this year, "and we are working collaboratively with our park partners to set shared expectations and priorities for 2021 and beyond," said Mitchell. "This unprecedented challenge is going to call upon all of us in this community to innovate, adapt, and communicate effectively in order to successfully navigate these uncharted waters. We're fortunate here in Glacier Park and at the Glacier Conservancy to be well situated to do just that."
Mitchell and his team has met with Glacier staff to analyze what is possible under current funding scenarios. Part of that analysis has involved "how the park might innovate/adapt certain needs/budgets, and how we might do the same."
"Given park staffing issues in 2020 (like many parks, Glacier will operate with fewer seasonal employees this year), there may be some funded programs that roll forward to 2021, and that will give us a running start on already funded projects that will help flatten any curve that may result from a reduction in revenue," he said.
Glacier Superintendent Jeff Mow said the Glacier Conservancy has run a "very lean operation" and kept its liabilities low. Still, due to the pandemic, “We’ve sort of held off on a lot of things that could wait a year, because we don’t want to find ourselves next spring with zero fee dollars to do anything," he said. "We don’t want to start with zero dollars in philanthropy to start with things. So we’ve been working with them to ensure that there’s kind of a corpus there next spring, for next year’s spending.
“We have sort of pulled the reins in a little bit and looked carefully at what could wait until next year, what could be deferred, just to make sure that there are some funds there to work with.”
Frank Dean is in a somewhat unique position as president and CEO of the Yosemite Conservancy in that he came to it after 39 years with the National Park Service, many of those years spent as a park superintendent. He fully understands the needs of a park such as Yosemite, and the constraints on a nonprofit organization such as the Yosemite Conservancy.
"We're not really dependent on retail and educational programming for income as much as some of the other nonprofits in parks, so we're primarily philanthropic, raising money that way," he said. "So we just have a really loyal donor base, and the way we base our grants each year, it's based on the previous year's income. So we have sort of a formula that we use, based on the previous three quarters of the year, by the time we meet in the fall (to discuss the coming year's grants), we pretty much have the money in the bank as far as what we're going to commit to in the park in the new year."
Additionally, Yosemite Conservancy in recent years has gotten into the habit of conducting "stress tests" by envisioning scenarios where giving would drop off by various percentages, such as a 5 percent or 10 percent decline, and how might that impact its programs, said Dean.
"When we circled back to the park as things became more clear in the spring (regarding the pandemic), we said, 'What can you pull off if you're going to have less staff that you're hiring, are you going to be able to implement all of your grants? The money's there, but can you do it?'" he said. "After careful consideration back and forth, they (the park) decided they couldn't hire everybody that they wanted, all the seasonal staff."
This year the Conservancy was ready to give the park more than $8 million for programs and support, said Dean, "
In a normal year that funding supports 60 seasonal personnel in the park, positions as wildlife biologists, researchers, interpretive rangers, and trail crews. This year the park had planned to hire 20 biotech positions, but due to housing shortages under Covid-19 rules, they only hired six.
"In the end, they decided to rescind $2.4 million back to us," said Dean. "Obviously, the money is going to be available for them as things calm down."
90 percent reduction in retail, but not that big of a deal.
Funding positinos. "In an ideal world, they should (be funded by Congress). But we've been doing this since the late '80s on the philanthropic side, it's sort of the margin of excellence."
"In an ideal world, philanthropy is a good thing, right, you don't want to rely on it for your core programs," he said. But some park programs, such as interpretive programs, don't benefit from park fee collections, "so that's where we can help with their seasonal staff. ... I can see how there's a hesitation to rely on that, ideally, it's great to have everything you need in the ONPS account from Washington, but I think there's another case that can be made, too, that philanthropy can do things.
"I'm a 39-year veteran of the Park Service, I think partners can be more nimble, and the money is more fluid."
"I think it can make a difference. You don't want to rely on it for your core things like law enforcement and maintenance, but those are inherently government functions anyway. There's been such a great track record over the years with philanthropy in the parks, starting with the Rockefellers and even Stephen Mather. ...
"There are a lot of groups struggling right now, but I think we'll all bounce back, most of us. Some of the bigger ones are trying to figure out how we can support the other ones as well in this moment."
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Comments
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.