Campus Crusade
For
Christ
My name is Kara Fiess representing the non-profit college organization of Campus Crusade. We are producing a CD-ROM we intend to distribute for free to 50,000 in-coming freshman on several hundred campuses in the fall. The CD-ROM is a web friendly exploration of the spiritual and paranormal world. We sent you a letter on 7.1.02, requesting permission to archive this page/s:
kfiess@ccci.org
RALPH is published by the Reginald A. Fessenden Educational Fund, Inc., a non-profit, tax-exempt organization which operates on a very very small budget. Most of our work outside of our internet publishing consists of helping prisoners --- both with books and with on-site assistance --- and of giving direct aid to organizations that help disabled children in other countries. All of our employees are volunteers.
The Forms 990 that the Campus Crusade has filed with the IRS for some reason are not available online [it would help if you could tell us where we could locate them] but we were able to track down "The Great Commission Foundation of the Campus Crusade for Christ" in San Clemente which helps fund your CCC International. The form was filed with the IRS in Ogden, Utah on 6 November 2001.
That organization shows gross income for the most recent fiscal year of $3,043,717, along with assets of $3,684,012. Gifts from the last three years total $7,214,682 --- including "gems/jewelry" with a value of $516,667.
In your letter, you state:
There is no pool of profit from which to pay royalty money.
This may be so, but for a minor branch of CCC to show assets of over three-and-a-half-million dollars and gifts of over seven million dollars in a single year shows a prosperity that we here in our small service organization can only dream of.
You say you want to put one of our reviews --- Lost in the Land of Faith, Hope and Venom --- out on a CD-ROM that you're preparing to give more publicity to Campus Crusade. We have a much better idea. We suggest that rather than trying for more publicity, that you donate a portion of that largess to us so we can, in turn, further help the very poor and the very disabled.
For instance, one of our projects is assisting a group that works with disabled children. The Piña Palmera, a service organization in Oaxaca, helps children who have learning or physical disabilities in one of the poorest areas of Mexico. We give some money to them every year --- what little we can spare --- but we also send them orthopaedic equipment, including wheelchairs, braces, crutches, and children's incontinent devices.
Think about it. Instead of creating a CD-ROM to garner more assets for CCC --- you can make it possible for us to help a five-year-old girl with braces on her little legs, a twelve-year-old boy who is spastic and cannot speak in whole sentences, a sixteen-year-old girl with muscular dystrophy who cannot feed herself, a twenty-two-year old man with high-level spinal cord injury --- one who will never be able to walk again, never be able to work again, will never be able to hold his wife and two children in his arms ever again. You and your organization can join with us to help the dozens and dozens of suffering poor who have no family to care for them, who have no one to bind up their wounds, to tend their needs, to give them loving charity.
Consider the half-a-million dollars worth of jewelry owned by your organization through the Great Commission. I suspect you or CCC are in no great need of rings, silverware, tiaras, diamonds, necklaces, and the like. Think of converting this into cash and donating it to us: think of what more than $500,000 could do to help those who could not in a hundred years hope for help from any other source. For as you know, from your study of Corinthians, Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up...And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity...
Charity is not puffed up with diamonds, brooches, and other trinkets, Kara. The greatest love, as you well know, is charity. Help us with these poor, innocent, suffering children --- the ones that will never be able to help themselves. You, and your Lord, and your wonderfully prosperous organization will all be the better for it.
