Petrelis Files

IRS 990: Top Corp Sponsors of SF Pride Gave How Much Money?

Let us now praise David Currie, the financial chief for San Francisco Pride, for keeping his promise to me and the community regarding transparency. In my May post I nudged Pride to make three years' worth of IRS 990s available on their site, and then in a follow up post in June praised the group for posting their three most current tax filings.

Currie and Pride made their 2012 filing available on their web site in early September, when I was contending with Bell's palsy (which I've mostly recovered from), and I got around to reading it this week. Looking forward, I hope the new Pride board and paid staff re-imagine their site so it is constantly updated with financial reports, minutes and agendas, and the like, with an area for community discussion and comments.

Let's get to what's of interest in Pride IRS 990 for 2012.

(A) The executive director who was sacked in October 2010, Amy Andre, who had vastly over-stated her skills-set and proved disastrous at leadership of a nonprofit with a major event to produce, received $16,500. Why the hell is Pride paying even a dime more to Andre three years after she was forced to resign?

(B) The top corporate donors were as follows:

Mantagrano / Budweiser
$100,000

Diageo Spirits
$65,000

Toyota
$55,000

AT&T
$40,000

Comcast Financial
$30,000

Barefoot Wines
$29,000

Wells Fargo
$25,000

Zynga
$25,000

Kaiser Health
$25,000

Marketing Werks
$22,000

The amount for corporate donations in 2012 was $433,500.

(C) This is the annual breakdown of such donations:

2007: $602,000
2008: $410,500
2009: $475,000
2010: $314,700
2011: $310,900
2012: $433,500.

(D) These are the top seven corporate sponsors, cumulative amounts lumped together for each business from 2007 through 2012:

(1) Diagego Spirits:               $383,000
(2) Wells Fargo:                    $296,000
(3) Mantagrano/Budweiser:   $280,000
(4) Comcast Financial:          $210,000
(5) AT&T:                            $155,000
(6) SF Chronicle:                  $100,000
(7) Bank of America              $90,000

The argument is made that Pride cannot operate or succeed without such corporate contributions, and I see most of the validity to it. However, there needs to be full transparency regarding the agreements Pride makes with the corporations because it isn't enough to know only the amounts given.

As part of my campaign to look at everything to do with Pride, I continue to advocate for Pride to post all contracts, agreements and MOUs with all businesses on their web site. We all need to see exactly what each side is getting from the partnerships.

Click here to read Pride's new IRS tax filing.