A Club By Any Other Name. . .

For those of you who do not understand the significance of our Institute's complaint to the New York State Charities Bureau against the Columbus Citizens Foundation (CCF), let me enlighten you.

The Charities Bureau is part of the Attorney General's Office. It protects the public from, among other things, wayward charities. In short, if a charitable foundation is chartered by the state "to preserve the Italian heritage" then that is its primary function in life. Unfortunately, the businessmen who operate both the Columbus Club and its Foundation came to confuse the Foundation's mission with their Club values. It would be like a foundation that was created to find a cure for cancer instead funds scholarships for cancer patients to study accounting. Sounds nice but it makes no sense.

The Foundation's lawyers now have the embarrassing task of justifying their client's illogical giveaways. Do they argue, for instance, that a Foundation scholarship winner may someday endow a chair in Italian studies? Maybe he will be inspired to fund the now-defunct Italian Advanced Placement tests? Is this the Rube Goldberg strategy of the CCF? Is this Foundation logic or Club logic?

And how does giving away millions of dollars to non-Italian causes like Millennium High School, the Intrepid Museum or the Iraq War Veterans Fund accomplish the "Italian heritage" mission? By showing what good Americans we are? What? After discovering America, building it and dying in all its wars, I didn't know we still had to prove what good Americans we are. Maybe the CCF is a secret chapter of the Kiwanis Club?

If your mission is to preserve the Italian heritage, then supporting Italian language classes like our Aurora Heritage Program, pictured here, is what you should invest in. The Club doesn't see it that way despite all our begging. At the height of our Aurora success we had 14 classes in operation in seven counties. Thanks to visionaries like former Aurora Director Tony De Nonno, all the classes were funded by $45,000 in public grants. We begged the Columbus Foundation for a small donation to cover cash flow problems as we awaited grant payments. We were never refused the money just completely ignored, despite letters and phone calls. We might have had more courtesy from the Kiwanis Club.

So what has the CCF built or created for our community? Look around. A couple a decades ago it repaired the Columbus Circle monument for $400,000. Since then it's been scholarships and general giveaways. It hasn't built one cultural center or museum. It hasn't endowed one chair in Italian studies. It hasn't saved the Italian AP tests. It hasn't established one local youth program. It doesn't send Italian American teenagers to study in Italy. It hasn't produced any films or published any books on heritage. It hasn't funded any traditional Italian American bands. In short, the Foundation could disappear tomorrow and our heritage would be none the worse. Even its headquarters on 69th Street is only a private clubhouse and dining facility.

And what about the Board that supposedly governs the Foundation? It is entirely composed of Club members. There's probably a pecking order to deal with. Every scholarship program initiated by the Foundation was created "at the directive of" a president or chairman, according to its website. The Attorney General will certainly need an explanation of this autocratic method of governance.

The Foundation has locked itself into Catholic, not Italian, school scholarships. It pays the Archdiocese of New Your for multiple years of elementary, middle and high school tuitions. It's a chain of financial commitments without any reciprocal commitment from the Archdiocese to, say, establish Italian language classes. According to Club biggie Larry Auriana, "…education is the single best way to advance our community." Advance to what? Wealth? Assimilation? Intermarriage? Power? That's not the mission his Foundation was created for. Like Lucy Riccardo, Auriana and his Club cronies have lots of 'splainin' to do to the Attorney General's office.

The fuel that propels the Club's "advance" is the annual Columbus Day Parade. This will be the subject of my next editorial.

- Louis Cornaro, The Italic Way Magazine Italic.org