WHAS Crusade For Children - Where The Money Goes

Where The Money Goes

Throughout the year, various agencies throughout Kentucky and southern Indiana apply for grants from the Crusade. These applications are considered and grants made by the Crusade Advisory Panel, a group of local clergy. This task was originally administered by the panel of The Moral Side of the News, a long-running public affairs program on WHAS-TV and Radio where local clergy discuss current events. (The program remains one of the longest-running continually aired broadcasts of any kind in radio history.) In later years, the panel's Crusade duties grew larger than the program, hence the name change in recent years; additionally, other members outside of the show have been added to the panel, so that the Moral Side panel members are now a subset of the Crusade Advisory Panel.

Grants are made in all 120 Kentucky counties and in 50 Indiana counties. The Crusade returns donations from a certain area to that area — for instance, donations from Hardin County will be assigned to grant requests from that county. This has been Crusade policy since the beginning. All grants are on an annual basis; thus, charities must reapply each year. Grant requests typically total about three times the amount collected.

The Crusade prides itself in the fact that 100% of all donations go directly to grants, a fact particularly emphasized in its 2011 campaign. All overhead costs of the Crusade organization are covered by donations from businesses, and more recently from proceeds of an endowment set up for that purpose. During the years of Bingham family ownership of WHAS, the stations and the family covered many of such costs.

Former Jefferson County Judge-Executive Rebecca Jackson was named the Crusade's executive director in 2005. Jackson was the first Crusade director to come from outside the WHAS corporate organization. She replaced Dan Miller, a longtime WHAS-TV employee who left in 2004 to become vice president at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky. Jackson retired at the end of 2008. Dawn Dison Lee became the new Crusade director in February 2009.