Private donation causes problems for AOL
Howard Lake | 15 December 2000 | News
Writing in Internet World magazine Stuart Lauchlan reports on a charitable gift by America Online’s (AOL) Chief Executive that has caused problems.
AOL’s CEO Steve Case and his wife Jean have made a donation of $8m to a school which is a division of a church that claims to “cure” homosexuals. While Lauchlan accepts that “the Cases have every right to give away their money to anyone they like,” he argues that it is “hypocrisy” for AOL to put its sign-up CD-ROMs “onto the front page of gay publications such as Attitude and Gay Times, in order to encourage members of the high-spending, IT-savvy gay community to sign up and boost its revenues.” Lauchlan notes that “an AOL spokeswoman said [the donation] did not come from the $125m charitable Case Foundation, but was a personal gift from the Cases themselves.”
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.