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Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source image: U.S. Treasury via Wikimedia Commons. When the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center in April on controversial fraud charges , the storied civil rights organization faced a major threat to its lifeblood — the flow of donor dollars. Not because it was convicted or because the Internal Revenue Service revoked its tax-exempt status. Not even because individual donors stopped writing checks. Instead, three Wall-Street-affiliated grantmaking giants each made a decision, one they refused to fully explain, to prevent donors from using their platforms to give to the embattled nonprofit. Vanguard Charitable, Fidelity Charitable and Charles Schwab’s DAFgiving360 sponsor donor-advised funds, offering account holders immediate tax deductions on contributions they can later recommend be granted to charities. Once niche, donor-advised fund sponsors controlled more than $327 billion in assets as ...

Ashlee Orndorff played basketball as a teen. In the competitive world of youth sports, few organizations have a reach as vast as the Amateur Athletic Union.  With 760,000 athletes and coaches nationwide, the AAU hosts competitions in dozens of sports across the country. This summer alone, hundreds of thousands of children competed in AAU events for elite young athletes: a staggering 100,000 at the world’s largest volleyball championship in Orlando, Florida; 8,000 at its storied basketball championships at Disney World; more than 15,000 at the Junior Olympics in Iowa.  To the hundreds of thousands of parents whose children play under the red, white and blue AAU badge, the organization offers more than a place to compete. The AAU promises their children will be safe — that its coaches are vetted, monitored and trained; that strict rules govern how adults interact with children; and that it responds effectively to allegations of abuse within its ranks.  ...