Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

IT SEEMS (“FYI”) Most (self-appointed) family court reform leaders, whether individual professionals, or leaders of organizations featuring individual professionals active within the family courts, are not, in fact, members of the classes they advocate for.  Because that’s obvious, this leadership needs to maintain a “stable” of mothers, fathers, and/or aged-out kids to tell moving personal narratives, around which each organization’s particular agenda and sound-bytes for system change can be promoted.

The emotionally moving, tragic or disturbing anecdotal, individual-case stories (true or not) are the “hook.” Those telling on them already have been hooked and in effect function as bait — worms wriggling to catch larger fish (systems change for faster-flowing funding streams).

The “protective-parent” “arguing against parental alienation” tactics (a subset of the larger whole) family-court-reform leaders (especially as associated with nonprofits, conferences, or some, even law school clinics) tend to be publicists, practicing (expert witness or other) psychologists, or lawyers, or even ex-judges sometimes involved professionally in the field.   Individual mothers, especially, with custody-fiasco stories should resist being exploited by anyone for press coverage status and hoping that enough of it will produce effective improvements.

The family courts and family law (and/or “fixing” or reforming it) IS a field which MUST be better understood than it has been portrayed in “the press.”  (Whether on-line or print media).  There are economic considerations.  There are court-connected-corporation considerations too, which the average court-reform leadership on a nonprofit board is generally not too eager to encourage investigation into…  Such investigations (even simple “drill-downs” like I’ve been doing year after year) tend to uncover sponsors, backers, and alliances which sometimes reveal conflicts of interest and shed an entirely different light on the agenda (ultimate purposes).  Investigations also may reveal how very small (size of nonprofit) some of the most vocal promoters are, that is, assuming the tax returns are telling the truth.

Individual parents involved in the courts who remain unaware of these issue because no one raised them, and their on-line or other searches haven’t caused a “stumbling across them” yet, cannot be said to have engaged in censorship.  Then again, individuals’ “take-it-on-faith” and “accept-our-interpretation” without considering alternatives (the religious mindset, in a sense) is just unwise.  Following leaders without basic background-checks of AT LEAST (where a nonprofit is involved) the leaders’ nonprofit’s  self-descriptions as given to the IRS and any required Secretary of State (etc.) filings is minimum responsible behavior, even if one is oppressed and distressed by the present ongoing crises or emergencies a typical family law case may involve.

It’s also appropriate to look (I do this!) at friends-of-friends nonprofits speaking the same language.

I ran a printout of FY2015 Forms 990 and sorted them by assets (most billions to about 8.5 billion “Total Assets”).  Top results (Image #1 of 4 taken) included:  Harvard ($73B, billion dollars), Stanford and Yale and Princeton (in that order) and two “Bill and Melinda Gates” entities which, if combined, would’ve been the top of the list.  However, Harvard Management Private Equity Corp. (or so labeled) at $14B also shows up…  Second image:  MIT, Columbia, and so forth (Two thumbnail images shown here; larger ones and the other two, below, with captions).

Notice which types of entities are the largest shown (of those search results displayed). They fall into certain categories which tend to either include institutional endowments of universities, health corporations (benefit, i.e., pension, administrators), insurance companies (people pay up front), credit unions, and probably one donor-advised foundation (I think).  I was surprised that at $12 billion assets, even Ford Foundation wasn’t the largest. This tells us by TYPE of 990 or 990PF, 990-O filer, and generally speaking, where some of the largest (nonprofit only that is) assets are held — excluding of course ALL government entities, which by definition are not even on this database. Government entities are “on” there in the background — supporting scholarships to the universities, distributions for healthcare, federal grants to medical research institutions (etc.) as a sponsor (source of revenue TO nonprofits) and (did you know this?) also as ongoing direct recipients from nonprofits also. But because it’s a directory of charitable trusts (private-sector) naturally no names of government entities will show up as themselves. If you want to see one place they’re both shown together, look for “Bentley 500” (top assets infrastructure owners of the world.  But, that’s only “hard assets.”  I’ve posted it on this blog several times..)

The Forms 990 show this — direct grants to various government agencies to promote, pilot, or evaluate chosen projects. “How the heck” would these ever be consistently tracked?
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