Moving On | Choose your lifeMoving On | Choose your life
Safe Passage Foundation - Support to youth raised in high demand organizations


Saturday, January 31, 2009    

Home | New Content | Statistics | Games | FAQs

Getting Out : Seeking Justice

Waitt Family Foundation Donated to Charity with Ties to Sex Cult

from Cult Surfer - Tuesday, February 15, 2005
accessed 1411 times

KFMB-TV, CBS San Diego investigation - part four

http://www.kfmb.com/features/special_assignment/story.php?id=5556

Last Updated:
02-14-05 at 6:01PM


An East County charity with close ties to a notorious sex cult has received tens of thousands of dollars from one of La Lolla's most prominent foundations. Records filed with the Internal Revenue Service show the Waitt Family Foundation gave $28,305 to the Family Care Foundation in Dulzura between 2001 and 2003.


Waitt Family Foundation chief administrator Al Panico told LOCAL 8 that he was “shocked and surprised” when he found out about the connection between the Family Care Foundation and a sex cult called The Family that once advocated sex with children.


Panico says the money given by the Waitt foundation was donated through matching grants involving to two former employees who selected the Family Care Foundation as a recipient.


“I was under the impression they were involved in good work,” said Panico, who admitted that background checks on the Family Care Foundation were not stringent. He said he believed the money went to AIDS relief in Africa and environmental projects in the Himalayan Mountains.


According to its web site, the Waitt Family Foundation gives some $7 million annually to nonprofit groups in support of families and communities, especially in programs to reduce violence. In the past, the Waitt foundation has supported the Polinski Center in Kearny Mesa, which houses abused and troubled children.


Panico said he would have to give the Family Care Foundation a “hard look” before donating any more money to the nonprofit. “It’s not one of our normal charities,” he said. “That won’t come up again.”


A recent LOCAL 8 investigation showed that the Family Care Foundation is run by a board of directors who were longtime members of the The Family, an evangelical cult formerly known as the Children of God.


Former cult members say Family Care Foundation president Grant Montgomery and executive director Larry Corley, were both high-ranking members of The Family up until they established the Dulzura charity in 1997. Their current status with The Family currently is unknown, although several former members say both Montgomery and Corley remain active in the cult.


The Children of God sect was founded in the late 1960s and became notorious for preaching open sexuality as an expression of God’s love. The practice led to widespread abuse of children in the cult, according to former members. The group changed its name to The Family of Love in 1978, and then to The Family in 1987.


Current cult leaders deny that child sex abuse was widespread, even though the organization formally banned all sexual contact with minors in 1986 and apologized to the victims.


The Family Care Foundation also is listed as a member of several trade organizations set up to assist nonprofit groups. San Diego Grantmakers – also based in La Jolla – lists the Family Care Foundation as a member on its web site. The group instructs and trains nonprofit foundations in the distribution of grant money.


Grantmaker executive director Julie Holdaway expressed her surprise, after reading articles about the Family Care Foundation on the San Francisco Chronicle web site.


“We are disturbed,” Holdaway said. “If any of this is true, we are concerned about how this makes other local nonprofit foundations look, who are doing good work all over San Diego.”


Holdaway says the membership status of the Family Care Foundation will be “item number one” on the Grantmakers board agenda next month.


Family Care Foundation also is listed as a member of the Council on Foundations in Washington DC, a national organization of nonprofits that will hold its annual convention in San Diego in April.


The Council’s director of media relations Jeff Marin said he, too, was unaware of the Dulzura charity’s ties to the The Family until seeing media reports. He said the Family Care Foundation has been a member since January 2001 and his organization does not do background checks on members, except to review IRS filings that prove nonprofit status.


Other organizations that conduct major fundraising campaigns list the Family Care Foundation on their list of approved charities.


Those organizations include:


- Combined Federal Campaign
- California State Employees Charitable Campaign
- United Way (various local chapters)


The web site of Home Depot, Inc. lists the Family Care Foundation as a recipient of funding from that company in the areas of disaster relief and preparedness.


The Family Care Foundation has denied any financial affiliation with The Family cult. However, many of the independent charities funded by the Family Care Foundation also have close ties to The Family.

Reader's comments on this article

Add a new comment on this article

My Stuff


log in here
to post or update your articles

Community

62 user/s currently online

Web Site User Directory
5047 registered users

log out of chatroom

Happy Birthday to demerit   Benz   tammysoprano  

Weekly Poll

What should the weekly poll be changed to?

 The every so often poll.

 The semi-anual poll.

 Whenever the editor gets to it poll.

 The poll you never heard about because you have never looked at previous polls which really means the polls that never got posted.

 The out dated poll.

 The who really gives a crap poll.

View Poll Results

Poll Submitted by cheeks,
September 16, 2008

See Previous Polls

Online Stores


I think, therefore I left


Check out the Official
Moving On Merchandise
. Send in your product ideas


Free Poster: 100 Reasons Why It's Great to be a Systemite

copyright © 2001 - 2009 MovingOn.org

[terms of use] [privacy policy] [disclaimer] [The Family / Children of God] [contact: admin@movingon.org] [free speech on the Internet blue ribbon] [About the Trailer Park] [Who Links Here]