COLUMN ONE : An Army of Parent Peddlers : Raising funds for their children’s causes, moms and dads sell everything from cookies to pizzas to gift wrap. Such moneymakers bring in $1 billion a year.
Oranges, crate upon crate of them, are a nettlesome part of Elizabeth Hoxworth’s life. Grapefruit too.
Each year, she sells them as part of the fund-raising drive for her son’s nursery school. She and her husband are expected to sell 35 crates of citrus fruit, at about $18 each, with the proceeds going into the school’s coffers.
“It’s good stuff, but finding 35 people to buy a crate each is tough,” said Hoxworth, 34, of Altadena.
But that’s just for starters. There was, for instance, the ill-timed candy drive put on by her daughter’s gymnastics school--beginning the week after Halloween. Then there is the annual Girl Scout cookie drive. And there are the others in the neighborhood who come knocking, peddling everything from poinsettias to pizzas.
“If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” she said. “We have a network in which we buy things from other people if they buy things from us, but it gets kind of crazy after a while.”
Hoxworth is part of a huge army of parental peddlers. In the name of doing what’s best for their children, they spend hour upon hour hawking wares for the benefit of schools, athletic programs and other causes.
In the process, they inundate relatives, neighbors and co-workers with all manner of goodies, from Girl Scout cookies (deliveries start this week) to Christmas gift wrap to hundreds of other items.
Such parental fund raising has become a billion-dollar-plus industry that finds its way into millions of households. Although fund raising has been around for as long as causes have needed extra cash, there has been a surfeit of it in recent years. And the target is almost always individual donors, who contribute 80 cents on the dollar of all charitable giving.
Much of the reason for the increase in fund raising by parents--and one that is especially evident in California--is that governments have less money for school and recreational activities.
“There’s just a lot less money out there that’s available,” said Russell Lemieux, executive director of the Atlanta-based Assn. of Fund Raisers and Direct Sellers, whose members provide the products and sales know-how to organizations in need of raising money. Membership in the association has expanded from 75 in 1989 to more than 500 today.
He puts on two trade shows a year to showcase the vast array of items that can be hawked in the name of worthy causes. Lemieux himself has prepared a brochure listing 42 categories of goods that are commonly sold, including such things as frozen entrees and bird food. To hear the fund-raisers tell it, gone are the days when people would simply dip into their wallets and give cash to a good cause.
“People aren’t going to do that,” said Lyne Bailey of Irvine’s Pot-O-Gold Sales, which specializes in putting on fund-raisers. “People want something for their dollar. They are willing to help out, but they want something for their money.”
By far, the most recognizable and successful of this category is the Girl Scout cookie, with millions sold each year by Brownies, Girl Scouts and, of course, their parents.
That venture alone generates $400 million a year. But it also has had its share of controversy of late. The Girl Scout organization has come under fire during the past year for the small percentage of the proceeds that filters down to the troop level--more than half the take is used to support the Scout bureaucracy.
Jane St. George, assistant executive director of the Mt. Wilson Vista Council, said there has been some reaction to the stories, but it was hardly overwhelming.
“We’ve had some of that, but it’s been minimal,” she said. “We’ve also been inundated with calls from people who want to know where they can buy Girl Scout cookies.”
There are all manner of other fund-raisers too, for children’s activities that happen so often it’s hard to keep them straight, particularly those put on by underfunded schools.
“I’ve got four kids in Catholic school and I’m being hit up all the time,” said Frank Cronin, managing partner of the Los Angeles office of Jackson, Lewis, Schnitzler & Krupman law firm.
That kind of solicitation turns up in the oddest of places. New York Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor, one of the toughest men in football, was seen working the locker room last September, selling candy and nuts for his son’s school.
According to newspaper accounts, Taylor approached rookie Tommy Thigpen about buying some cashews. Thigpen demurred, saying he didn’t like them. To which the much-feared Taylor replied, perhaps in jest, “Now you do.” Thigpen bought the cashews.
Taylor was, in effect, selling in his office, which is where most parents head when they have a product that needs to be peddled. It is not unusual in many offices for employees to be selling the same item at the same time, particularly in Girl Scout season. Arguments have been known to arise about territorial boundaries. Interoffice computer messages tell of cookies and candy for sale. The company fax machine often comes into play. Bosses have been known to exert none-too-subtle pressure on underlings in the name of a good cause.
One of those who thinks the fund raising has gone too far is Rob Hallwachs, an employee of the Metropolitan Water District, who said he is hit up about once a week. Last week, for instance, there was an Easter candy sale on his floor.
“I’ve started saying that one day I’m going to have kids and soak all of my co-workers for everything they have taken me for over the years,” he said. “For a single guy, it’s onerous. You wind up buying everything from chocolate to stuffed animals to you name it.”
Sue Adams, who works for AT&T;’s San Francisco office, said it is not so much the fact that so many people are pushing their children’s causes but what is being sold.
“As a person who loves to eat, I hate it that it’s candy they are always trying to foist off on us,” she said.
Such peddling has even found its way into City Hall. Deputy Mayor Robin Kramer was recently observed selling $1 candy bars in her office to benefit her son’s soccer league.
At the Southern California Gas Co., longtime employee Bob Acosta sold about 40 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in a day. He doesn’t see any problems--most of the people who buy from him end up selling to him later.
“It’s all reciprocal,” he said. Besides, he doesn’t want his daughter selling door to door because it is too dangerous. “It’s just what today is all about,” he said.
But there is a catch to office-selling, one that could set employers on edge. Non-union businesses run the risk of helping labor unions through their doors if they let parents sell their wares at work.
Ted Horn, of the Los Angeles office of the National Labor Relations Board, said labor lawyers generally advise non-union companies to ban the sale of all items at work, lest they set a precedent that could allow union organizers to pass out sign-up cards. He said company rules prohibiting sales in the workplace may be all but ignored until there is whispering about a union vote.
“Suddenly, it’s the most important rule they’ve got,” Horn said.
Legal issues aside, there is some serious opposition to the growing number of school-based fund-raisers from a source that might at first seem surprising: the national office of the Parent Teachers Assn. in Chicago. The national PTA says its local chapters should concentrate on being advocacy groups, and that fund raising, even for good causes, makes government less responsible.
Janet Crouse, the chairwoman of the PTA’s education commission, said fund raising can cause governments, over time, to assume that money will always be provided by an alternate source, namely, parents.
“They end up footing the bill forever,” she said. “It becomes a pattern. They say, ‘We don’t have to fund this because the PTA will do it.’ ”
She also said that fund raising causes major disparities in school districts, or even among schools in the same district, when well-to-do parents bankroll projects that others cannot.
“If you’re living in a housing project, you can’t write the check,” she said.
Longtime professional fund-raiser Mark Jones of Grover City, a Central California coastal community, said one basic rule about fund raising is this: Don’t do it if the money can be found elsewhere.
“We tell people that fund raising is work and that you need community support,” he said. “If you don’t really need it, then you shouldn’t do it.”
There are causes that have, in fact, found an alternative to parental peddling. It is the use of scrip purchased from schools and churches that can be used as money at participating stores.
Parents buy scrip from a school, for instance, which can be used to buy food at the local grocery store. The school turns the money over to the store. When the scrip coupons are redeemed, the store gives a percentage--usually 6% or more--of the scrip sales total back to the schools.
Mary McAboy, a spokeswoman for the Vons grocery chain, said the scrip program evolved from the days when gift certificates were offered to large companies at a discount. Schools and churches then asked to be included.
Rina Ngo, the principal of Our Lady of Fatima School in Artesia, said revenues from scrip account for one-sixth of the school’s budget and have allowed them to put a cap on tuition. She said 20 outlets, including Kmart and Toys R Us, participate in the program.
The Arcadia School District also used scrip to raise money. Marilyn Daleo, a spokeswoman for the district, said their promotion of scrip is quite simple.
“They say that everyone has to eat,” she said. “Everyone needs groceries, so why not use scrip?”
