Despite Slump, Nonprofits Still Give Raises
N E W Y O R K, Dec. 3 -- Despite an average 78 percent drop in profits, due largely to lousy performance of investment portfolios, the country's major nonprofits raised the pay of their highest-paid employee — usually the boss — by 8.5 percent.
The data comes from the annual Forbes survey of 200 major charities. While publicly traded companies in the United States must make quarterly financial reports within 45 days of an accounting period's close and an annual report within 90 days, nonprofits need to issue numbers just once a year, and this data can be a year or more out of date. The Forbes survey covered their latest fiscal years, but these periods generally ended sometime during 2001 and, in a few cases, in 2000.
The average top salary was $319,180, up from the previous year's $294,221.
The highest paid person listed was Gail L. Warden, head of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. She reported $2,128,412 in salary and benefits. Next was Floyd D. Loop, the top person at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, at $1,673,752, followed by Michael Hoover, an executive with the Irving, Texas-based Boy Scouts of America, at $1,525,473.
The other $1 million-plus top salaries were Harold Varmus, chief executive of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Center in New York, $1,612,709, and Joseph Volpe, the longtime general manager of the Metropolitan Opera Association, also in New York, $1,057,000.
Funding the Arts
Outside of hospitals, the next top salaries were Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C., $911,989; Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, $854,055; Peter C. Marzio, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, $706,950; and Lawrence Small, head of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., $670,911.
Among the more traditional cause-focused nonprofits, Peter Van Etten, chief executive officer of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International, New York, reported $580,632, and Robert J. Beall, of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Bethesda, Md., $560,619.
