Charity watch
Months after a Chronicle investigation, the board of San Francisco charity Helpers Community Inc. has finally pushed out its director, Joy Venturini Bianchi.
While Bianchi, a 78-yearold socialite, was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars shopping for luxury clothing to resell at the nonprofit’s boutiques, and raking in an annual compensation package of about $200,000, the nonprofit gave little to nothing to charitable causes for more than a dozen years.
It was past time for Bianchi’s departure.
Helpers will have to do a lot of work to get back in the public’s good graces. Going forward, it needs to focus on grant-making, improving the board’s professionalism and developing oversight procedures — based on the best practices of the industry.
No director should be allowed to use an organization as a personal fiefdom, as Bianchi allegedly did.
This is particularly important for organizations that rely on the public’s trust for their operations, as nonprofits do.
The damaging thing about a story like Helpers is the fact that it erodes the public’s trust in all nonprofit organizations. When the public feels skeptical about the will and ability of nonprofits to do their work of serving good causes and vulnerable people, we all lose.