Petrelis Files

GMHC's AIDS Walk:
60+% of Revenue Goes to Charity

Earlier this month, I blogged about the San Francisco AIDS Foundation's 2011 AIDS Walk in Golden Gate park and how 58% of revenue went toward expenses. Figures from SFAF and the California Attorney General's office showed that the 2010 edition of the walk saw 52% of money raised go to pay for costs of producing the event.

The longtime producer of the AIDS Walk here, Craig Miller of MZA events, is also the producer of the Gay Men's Health Crisis annual AIDS Walk in New York City, but the expenses are not as high as in San Francisco.

A few weeks ago, I filed a Freedom of Information Law request with New York's state Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman for the closing statements from MZA Events filed on behalf of GMHC for the last two years in which a full fiscal accounting is available. This week, a disc arrived via snail mail containing 95-pages responsive to my FOIL request. I've posted all of the pages here.

In 2009, a robust sixty-two percent of revenue went to GMHC, as the document pictured shows. The walk brought in $5,608,300, expenses totaled $2,170,100 and $3,438,200 was retained by the nonprofit AIDS service organization.

For 2010, the amount received by GMHC was sixty-four percent from the AIDS Walk, reported in the document shown. Revenue came to $5,813,700, costs were listed at $2,196,800 and total figure of what was kept by GMHC was $3,616,900.

Even though the NYC numbers are quite better than for San Francisco, I still wonder if GMHC might be able to reduce costs associated with using MZA Events or if the agency were to organize the AIDS Walk in-house. The objective for all the walks and other fundraisers for AIDS organizations should be to provide as much of the money raised to the services directly helping people with AIDS.