Judge bars Kars4Kids from broadcasting 'misleading' ads in California
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The pitch K4K has had for most of this time isn't about the good that they do so much as that they're very good at picking up your car conveniently and maximizing the IRS impact of the donation.
(Donating your car is probably not a good deal and you might be better off just having it bought and picked up by a salvager, and then taking the money and donating that.)
I don't really care about the religious aspect, but if you're calling yourself kars4kids, the proceeds really should go to kids. In general, charities should have to be more up front about how their donations are being used. With rules being stricter as they get bigger. That is to say, the local fire department doesn't need to tell me how much of the hoagie sale is going to beer, but once you're buying commercials there should be some transparency.
As far as car donation options the purple heart is still around. I think at one point either the EFF or the FSF used to do it too, but I can't find it anywhere. Does anyone remember that?
I don't think it's a good donation! I wouldn't use it. Like I said, I'd junk the car and donate the proceeds.
When I would go to St. Vincent's as a homeless teenager, the only indication that I wasn't receiving services in some government office was the foot-high cross on the back wall. I don't remember a single mention of religion. Plenty of Protestant churches would make you sit through a service before feeding you.
edit: that's what I get for not reading the article before commenting. This is just fraudulent. It's a charity doing Zionist things for Jewish youth. Most non-Jewish people wouldn't donate to a kids' charity that wouldn't do a thing for their children if their children were needy. The only need it's attending to even in Jewish children is the "need" to love Israel and not enter into interfaith relationships.
How was your luck with that? I often find the website is terribly out-of-date in general, and if the times have changed since the last update...
Sometimes the website links to recent bulletins, which are almost never wrong. If there isn't then I call the office to check; most parish offices have a list of Mass times in their voice-mail message.
I was (the project concludes on Friday) visiting churches on their patronal feasts⁴ and whenever bulletins were available, I would check them to see if there was any deviation from their published schedule because of the patronal feast. Life frequently intervened to make me miss a number of Masses that I would otherwise have attended, not to mention that a number of parishes didn’t have any Mass at all on their patronal feasts, but it’s still ended up being a lot of church visits.
⸻
1. The Renew My Church reorganization of the diocese has resulted in the number of parishes being less than the number of actual churches with a significant number of parishes having two or more worship sites. Some parishes have a new name for the combined entity with the individual churches retaining their name (e.g., Queen of Apostles Parish has two churches: Queen of Angels and St Matthias) while others just name themselves with the two constituent churches (e.g., St Luke/St Bernardine).²
2. One such parish near me had a previously consolidated parish, St Catherine/St Lucy (which only had a single church after consolidation) and became St Catherine/St Lucy and St Giles) until operations costs led to the closing of the St Catherine/St Lucy church building (the school remains open) and while the parish retains the long name, I don’t think anyone other than official documents calls it anything other than St Giles.
3. That being the St Catherine/St Lucy and St Giles of the previous footnote and the other parish in Oak Park, Ascension and St Edmund.
4. https://www.dahosek.com/category/catholic-nerd-pilgrimage/
The main issue is that it's a bunch of kids (~5-8yo) singing "1-877 cars for kids, K-A-R-S Kars 4 Kids, 1-877-KARS-4-Kids, donate your car today". Given its resemblance to preschool-age kids songs, and that it was a bunch of very young kids singing it, and that it played incessantly over California radio stations, many people thought that it was a charity funding local underprivileged kids of preschool/school age, not gap years for 17-18 year old NYC and NJ residents in Israel. They were always up-front on the website about what it is (presumably how they avoid fraud charges), but how many people are going to check the website when they have the 877 number burned in their brain?
If you look at the lawsuits against them, they almost all fit that pattern: someone (often elderly) who heard the kids singing on the radio, had a junk car, and figured they'd go help some underprivileged kids. Sure, always read the fine print, but the judge listened to the jingle and agreed that it was pretty misleading. So did other judges in Pennsylvania and Oregon.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8UV7SAhvG4&list=RDK8UV7SAhv...
If they shifted their operations a bit, they probably could technically answer this criticism, even if in a way which wouldn't satisfy the critics.
Ultra-Orthodox communities such as Lakewood, NJ, contain lots of large families with many children, many of which formally fall beneath the poverty line – even though they generally have a lot of informal social support available to them which isn't reflected in the official poverty statistics. If they adjusted their focus to helping elementary school-aged ultra-Orthodox children from less well-off families, they could call that "helping underprivileged kids" – and a judge would probably agree with them - even if it isn't what many of the donors are thinking of when they hear the phrase "underprivileged kids"
My point was, if they changed their operations a bit, judges would find it much harder to rule against – but that change wouldn't satisfy most of the critics.
You can’t hear the ads + see the billboards, compare it to where the money was going, and say in good faith that people thought that.
Ms. Landau testified that Kars4Kids sends about $45 million a year, 60 percent of the money it raises, to Oorah, its sister organization, which operates out of the same office building in Lakewood, the judge said. Another 30 percent is spent on in-house advertising, and about 6 percent on administrative costs. Oorah has also spent money overseas, the judge wrote, including $16.5 million to buy a building in Israel.If you went online. But people know of them from radio and TV which absolutely do hide it.
What do kids need with an adult dating service?
"Kars4Kids sends about $45 million a year, 60 percent of the money it raises, to Oorah, its sister organization"..."Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service"
The article literally contradicts your statement.
> Instead, Kars4Kids primarily funds a New Jersey-based Jewish organization, Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service, trips to Israel for teens and summer camps in New York, the judge wrote. The only program in California that Kars4Kids sponsored was a promotional giveaway of Kars4Kids-branded backpacks, she found.
I have listened to those commercials on the radio for a decade and never in a million years would I have guessed that’s where the donations are going.
I certainly do!
I'm a paying supporter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, The Satanic Temple (it has nothing to do with satanism), and even the Friendly Atheist Podcast (which is just a podcast, unlike the first two). If I donated thinking I was helping families who couldn't get their kids to school or to after-school events and then found out that there was a religious org behind the commercials, I would be furious.
You can have and practice your religion. But bad actors have been using religion as an excuse for persecution and as a means of control in the USA for decades. I'm outraged to learn that they were manipulating people in this manner.
https://www.friendlyatheist.com/p/california-judge-bans-kars...
If they were only soliciting funds on their website, which made it clear that your donation was being used to send 17 and 18 year olds to Israel, that would be a different story. In reality, the vast majority of their donations come in from people who are totally unaware because they hear the radio jingle, which is sung by little kids, and makes no mention of their religious affiliation or their affiliation with a foreign country. Here in New York I've been hearing these radio ads on a daily basis for literally decades and had no inkling about the true nature of this "charity" until today.
https://www.kars4kidsprograms.org/
=== We empower kids to be great. Kars4Kids provides the foundation kids need for successful, happy and meaningful lives.
…
We’re a national Jewish nonprofit providing mentorship, educational support and nurturing year-round environments together with our sister charity Oorah. Whether it’s tailored care from staff in summer camp, the safe haven of afterschool groups, or a mentor's listening ear, we provide the support youth need to thrive. ===
Sure, they use the word Jewish, but they carefully chose language that suggests a) the money goes to a wide range of underprivileged children, not just Jewish children and b) that their programs are traditional support programs, not trips to Israel.
It reminds me of when they did this giant fundraiser for the palisades fire and all the money went to NGOs that didn't do ANYTHING for the fire victims.
I guess if I knew I might have picked a different charity though. But it’s not something I’d spend a lot of time worrying about.
I guess they were regional and never in the Midwestern areas I’ve lived in.
However I do remember people complaining about it much later online and wondering why they were talking about something so old. I guess it plastered longer in other areas.
one eight hundred cars for kids, for east coast kids to fly to israel on your dime!
also, praise be <diety> that these jingles will soon be off the air.
The adult matchmaking etc, that deviates substantially from their advertising.
> If Kars4Kids resumes advertising, [Judge Apkarian] wrote, its ads must contain “an express, audible disclosure of its religious affiliation and the geographic location of its primary beneficiaries and the age of the beneficiaries, specifying whether they aim for children or families, or both.”
That may have been the judge’s framing, but it seems off from what I typically expect from mainstream US news.
It's clearly deceptive and exploitative.
I'm sure you'd agree that if I was advertising in the name of kids to raise money for a charity, and it happened to be that the particular charity I was raising money for had determines it should give Hamas money to help those kids, that potential donors would prefer to know where exactly their money was going to.
I agree the ads shouldn’t be misleading of course.
Next you’ll tell me that UNICEF isn’t exclusively saving starving orphans in Africa.
Because they are funding young people to visit Israel and this gives it context.
All that matters is very little money is going to the stated goal of helping poor kids.
Religious angles of what they’re doing instead doesn’t seem to have mattered in the ruling.
Please just state directly why you find the inclusion objectionable.
> Kars4Kids primarily funds a New Jersey-based Jewish organization, Oorah, which provides programs, including an adult matchmaking service, trips to Israel for teens and summer camps in New York, the judge wrote. The only program in California that Kars4Kids sponsored was a promotional giveaway of Kars4Kids-branded backpacks, she found.
The charity is giving almost no money to kids. Thats the relevant part.
Doesn’t matter if it Catholic, Jewish, Scientologist, or Zoroastrian.
The law wasn’t faith based. The decision wasn’t faith based.
So why does the faith matter?
No one else made them behave in the way that got them called out. There is no religious persecution going on here. It's not a case of "But why does it matter he's black?". The act was specifically performd by a religious group, specifically for the benefit of that religious group only, under false pretenses of being neutral.
The people you are implying are being prejudged, are in fact the ones who commited the prejudice and discrimination.
I mean if they promise to write your car was worth 50% more than KBB, maybe???
In CharityWatch’s view, the Kars4Kids ads deceive potential donors by failing to inform them that donated cars will benefit a Jewish organization and kids of Jewish faith. Furthermore, the youth programs Kars4Kids supports promote an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, which CharityWatch believes compounds the deception perpetrated by the Kars4Kids ads
https://blog.charitywatch.org/costly-and-continuous-kars4kid...
People have very strong feelings about their money going to religious organizations, especially if the organization doesn't state that they're religious in nature.
Let's do this: What are you implying? Because it seems that you're implying special treatment because this organization is Jewish, and that's not likely the case here in most people's eyes, but explain why you might think that is if that's what you believe.
Its disappointing that when I go to nytimes now, the only HTML delivered is this: <html lang="en"> <head> <title>nytimes.com</title> <style>#cmsg{animation: A 1.5s;}@keyframes A{0%{opacity:0;}99%{opacity:0;}100%{opacity:1;}} </style> </head> <body style="margin:0"> <p id="cmsg">Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker</p> <script data-cfasync="false"> var dd='rt':'i','cid':'AHrlqAAAAAMAYl57GtItBLkAqF0sXA==','hsh':'499AE34129FA4E4FABC31582C3075D','b':2342411,'s':17439,'e':'0dea157ed708067f48ce0d08c7f23713666ae095714e7407aff1749b0c62909cb0558a3d8d1b2427045cad0fda5e06ee','qp':'','host':'geo.captcha-delivery.com','cookie':'hisUIu5NMcItx~Fvd3kG57mGOkaIgUYyUngfRyIhb6XE0N~XjhS58OOHEPPBtFncTBi11h89pGklYInh0kXQiMHeNs5Ck~KD9lhBHxPD6kvHQn5MMeeL7qX_CDvAG2BG'}</script> <script data-cfasync="false" src="https://ct.captcha-delivery.com/i.js"></script> </body> </html>
I wonder what Sir Tim Berners-Lee would have to say about that...
to:
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'Bout damn time.
Spoilers for The Good Place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFQHHor6mT8
I remember being delighted how the scene skewered an unexpected but very deserving target.
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