A few words on finances

We’re a bit later than usual — I’m grateful that our volunteers are doing everything they’re doing, and I certainly don’t begrudge the fact that they have private lives! — but our statement of expenditures for the Interpreter Foundation is now up online for your inspection, should you choose to give it a look:

https://interpreterfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/expenses/3rdQtr-2018-Final.pdf

Please permit me to say a few words about it.

We set out to be open, public, and transparent — to a far greater degree than the law obliges us to be — from the very beginning of the Interpreter Foundation.  We didn’t feel that we had any right to seek financial support from others if we were not candid about what we were doing with the monies that were entrusted to us.

Most of the items mentioned are the sorts of things that simply cannot be avoided in doing an online journal.  I would like to explain three of the larger ones, though.

Our support for the “Critical Text Project” is scarcely mysterious.  It goes to furthering Royal Skousen’s quarter-century-long effort to study and nail down the textual history of the Book of Mormon, the founding document of the Restoration, and to tease out the implications of that history.  See here, for example:

“Presentation on The Nature of the Original Language of the Book of Mormon“

The largest of the items mentioned is the “Media Project.”  What is this?  It refers to a very ambitious effort that we’ve launched to produce a film, accompanied by a number of related materials, treating the Witnesses (official and unofficial) to the Book of Mormon:

“Creating a Witness to the Witnesses”

Much smaller is what’s labeled “Publicity — FairMormon.”  We help to support the annual FairMormon conference by giving a relatively small amount to them for in exchange for a bit of publicity and a display table during the meetings.  This is both a collegial gesture to an allied organization and an expression of thanks for the generous help that FairMormon gave to Interpreter when we were first getting started.  I announced the launch of the Interpreter Foundation at the FairMormon conference in 2012.

Our listing of “Time Donations” is an attempt, only roughly adequate and accurate, to give some sense that others beyond our financial donors are giving what they’re able to give in order to further Interpreter’s work.  Many of our volunteers simply don’t answer our monthly requests for an estimation of how much time they’ve given.  And the monetary value that we assign to the hours reported is crudely approximate, at best.  But we try.

We welcome donations of labor, time, and money.  That’s how Interpreter is able to do what it does.  Without them, we could do little or nothing.

***

On a separate but not wholly unrelated matter:

In their obsessive continuing quest to paint me as (among other nasty and disreputable things) mercenary and corrupt, a few of my critics have made insinuations about how much I’m compensated for accompanying tours to Israel, Egypt, and so forth, for Cruise Lady.  It is, they suggest, a lucrative second career for me.

Hardly.

My expenses are covered, as are my wife’s.  (She functions as something of an assistant to me, too.)  We’re paid nothing beyond expenses.

I don’t know how this works for others, or with other companies, but that’s the way it works for us.

Our basic airfare is covered, as well as our food and lodging and any extra excursions.  (The company wants us to go along on them.  That’s part of our responsibility to people on the tours.)

Tips are given to the guides on these trips, but I’m not considered a guide — those are the local professionals, where applicable — and there’s no expectation that I be tipped.

If this is supposed to be a lucrative second career for me, I’m not managing it very well.  We typically end up spending a fair amount of our own money each time.

And, once again, I earn no income at all from my work with the Interpreter Foundation.  I am, in fact, a longtime donor to it.