Charity Rejects D&D Money - Let's Write Letters!

[Shhalahr Windrider]

Or they don't do that enough for the taste of the even more Taliban-like organisations. (Seriously, how sane are people who claim starving people should be sent bibles rather than food?) Or they caved in to the "Wall Watchers" and changed their practices.

If the CCF is pandering to those people, I doubt the spokesperson would have reiterated its policy of non-proselytization as stated in the Wikipedia article.

For all those who are taking their reply seriously, another bit to consider. Putting their name and logo on credit cards is fine... just not gaming conventions.

Nice. Not only that, but it's a credit card with a reputation as a predatory lender. And that's not diluting the name and logo?

while they had the decency to say at the end that the dont hate us, there is still some... discrepancy is the word i am looking for, i believe. all letters should now be asking "what about gencon would lower your integrity?" to which the answer will probably be "because we were not supporting gencon at all" which should be replied in turn with "are you or representatives involved with every group that gives you money?"

This is exactly what I plan on asking in my letter.

As satsunada pointed out, CCF is a 501(c)(3) organization; this means it gets federal tax exemption, and must follow certain rules in order to keep this exemption. Not too surprisingly, organizations like this tend to be very careful not to violate those rules. It's possible that that could be the reason; it's possible they had a knee-jerk reaction when the words "Dungeons" and "Dragons" got connected by an ampersand; it's possible there's other reasons for this that I'm not aware of; it's possible that it's all of these to some degree.

Given that tax exempt charities have been accepting money from GenCon for the past almost four decades, I can't see how this could be.

A while back a charity for abused children/families that I did extensive reporting about turned down sizeable gifts from licensed casino gaming and adult beverage establishments, on the grounds that they didn't wish to appear to condone practices that went against their mission statement (they're anti-gambling and alcohol, believing these things cause many of the problems their organization tries to fix). Some of the people who worked there weren't happy about it and a few even quit, but the directors thought taking the money that may have been made at the expense of the people they're trying to help would in effect be affirming bad behavior.

That would be fair enough if that were the case. But then you'd have to wonder about their conviction on it if they feel the need to feed us that BS about having no negative opinion of gamers.

In any case, the organization has made a clear effort in the past to be noted as having purely secular goals, despite their name. So the question would become, "Without the ridiculous religious bias, how does tabletop gaming go against their mission?" It's easy to see how gambling and alcohol can go against helping abused familys. Less so how saving an imaginary world from an imaginary monster goes against feeding starving children.

However, we couldn’t lend our name for publication because our policies have specific criteria for endorsements.

I'm rather curious as to exactly what these specific criteria are and in what ways GenCon faild to meet them.