Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Baltimore Ex: 98 HIV+ People Lose Food Service, Executive Director & HRC Leader Not Cutting Pay

On the surface, this Baltimore Examiner story has absolutely nothing to do with the Human Rights Campaign. It's just another story about an HIV/AIDS service organization facing money troubles, and an executive director screaming the sky is falling for his clients, yet, the leader of Moveable Feast is not offering to cut his salary to make sure people with AIDS continue to receive hot food.

According to the latest IRS 990 for Moveable Feast, the executive director, one Mr. Vic Basile, received a total of $103,269 for his services in 2005. Hmmm, if he was making that sum two years ago, what is his current compensation package?

Here's where HRC comes in. Basile served as the organization's chief in the 1980s, he headed up the 2005 search committee that eventually found Joe Solmonese was the best person in America to run the nation's largest gay political force, and Basile presently sits on the HRC Foundation board of directors.

Hey Vic, instead of reducing the number of clients receiving meals, consider a reduction in your salary. What's more important: Keeping you in Guccis, or feeding people with AIDS?

From today's Baltimore Ex:

It could be the unkindest cut of all for those caught in the vicious cycle of sickness-induced poor appetite, physical weakness, isolation and meager means.

Reeling from a reallocation of federal Ryan White Treatment Modernization Act funds allotted the Baltimore area, Moveable Feast, a Baltimore nonprofit that prepares and delivers meals and groceries to area homeless and some 650 homebound sick, has cut delivery to 98 HIV/AIDS Baltimore City patients due to a diversion of $145,000 to other organizations.

“They took away half of our Ryan White funding for people in Baltimore City,” Moveable Feast Executive Director Vic Basile said of the March 1 development, which he said was imposed by the volunteer Greater Baltimore HIV Planning Council. “So we’re scrambling to try to find the money to [reinstate the recipients].”

Only about 50 of the organization’s total recipients — mostly women with breast cancer — are non-HIV/AIDS patients, Basile said. [...]

Basile noted that the $2.2 million per year nonprofit supports its non-HIV/AIDS clients with non-Ryan White funds, obtained from donations and events such as its fifth-annual “Ride for the Feast” charity bike ride, May 19 and 20. [...]

“The council only determines how much a service category gets, not what individual providers get,” countered Greater Baltimore HIV Planning Council Chairman Lennie Green, who said that other organizations actually determine provider allocations and assured him that no HIV/AIDS patients would be affected by a cut.

“The cut came about as a result of law.” [...]

2 comments:

Mike said...

What a wonderful HRC smear... no real correlation, but that really doesn't matter.

Rather than smear the HRC, why not take on the real bad guys?

That would be the HIV establishment that has more investment in continued government funding than prevention or other programs... after all, the GMHC of NY own their own building too.

Come one Petrelis, look at the underlying problem: HIV is a moneymaker for too may people in the GLBT community.

Anonymous said...

the HRC connections seems a bit tenuous here, eh?

i'm happy that nonprofit executive pay is publicly available and applaud organizations that choose to include this information publicly on their websites (like hrc does), but think your attack on vic in gucci is a bit ridiculous. maybe, even as an underpaid nonprofit worker, i'm bought into overpaying executives but ~$100k for the CEO of a nearly $2M organization doesn't seem inflated.

i agree with your previous poster, look at the underlying problem of wealth distribution and skip the attacks on leadership pay.