The Walton family foundation was in news recently as Valerie Strauss published her annual accounting of WFF education donations. Strauss focused on the recent WFF donation to Michelle Rhee, and rightly since her DC readership will always chime in on news about Rhee.
But the Walton’s tenticles go all over the country. So this coverage made me revisit my data.
I am struggling with how to make tumblr do what I want it to do so I had to load this table to google docs as a workaround.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AmQmVjgMAh5EdFJvSU1xT0ptQ0VLNnVUOUNhV0RhSWc&output=html
I’ve added a set of categories to the full database and just labeled the most deforminess groups as EdAdvocacy even though the WFF made another hundred million or so in contributions to other orgs like state “charter school associations.” This subset for EdAdvocacy has 161 contributions totaling $108 million since my data started in 1996.
The exercise we did way in the past was a calculation of the WFF contribution as a percentage of the total revenue for that group in that year (assuming that the reporting years for WFF and the recipient lined up).
To take an example, the Walton Fam Fdn gave the WI outfit “Milwaukee Charter School Advocates” a grant of $235,027 in 2012. Milwaukee Charter School Advocates in its IRS Form 990 in 2011 reported total $150,000 in contribution/grants. Is it fair to say that MCSA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Walton Family Foundation? If one looks at who runs MCAS on its web site - besides the Waltons’ man in Wisconsin Howard Fuller - one sees that Tim Sheehy, President of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, is on the board of directors. Lo and behold, the Walton Fam Fdn has given the “MMAC Community Support Foundaton nearly $10 million since 2001 with $7.6 million alone in 2001.
This is how the Waltons can stay in the shadows while buses carry unknowing parents to rallies on capital steps year after year.
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