WEEKEND EDITION • OCTOBER 29, 2011 SUN NEWSPAPERS 7A

“Nobody lived it like I did,” she said. “I was the one who begged my board to put Venice back in the name.”

It did, after warn-ing her that the group pushing to get the name change undone still wouldn’t be happy. The public outcry died down but the group, which included then-Gondolier publisher Bob Vedder, kept meeting for another year and a half, she said.

Some of the members of that group, known as The Venice Foundation Founders, are behind a website called Save Our Venice Foundation, www.venicefloridafoundation.com; Vedder has been the spokesman. Hansen said many of its criti-cisms are unfounded or mistaken.

They are wrong in saying no board mem-bers are from the Venice area, she said. Currently six board members live in Sarasota but there are three from Nokomis (including Hansen, who has no vote), one from Venice, one from Engle-wood and one from Boca Grande. Besides, she said, there is no require-ment that board mem-bers live in the Venice area, and geographic representation isn’t a concern.

“What we look for is skill set,” she said.

It’s also not the case that the foundation’s operating expenses are too high, she said. Calculations showing them at 3-4 percent included money put into initiatives. When those numbers are backed out expenses are about

1 percent of total assets, which is within industry averages.

As of its most recent fiscal year salaries are set by a compensation com-mittee made up of board members and are intend-ed to be competitive with the pay at comparable institutions. During the economic slump there have been furloughs and layoffs, she said, though none in FY2011.

“We have always run a lean organization,” she said.

The group’s main gripe is that grants have been made from The Venice Endowment to organiza-tions that don’t serve the residents of the hospi-tal’s service area, from Osprey to Boca Grande. Though the foundation’s current mission state-ment speaks of trans-forming “our region” through philanthropy, the critics are still wrong on several counts, ac-cording to Hansen.

First, she said, noth-ing in the documents that created the founda-tion in 1995 adopts the Osprey to Boca Grande area as the focus. The original articles of incor-poration, under which it still operates, say it will serve “Venice and the surrounding communi-ties,” she pointed out.

Second, she said, money has always gone outside the service area. The foundation’s records show that from 1995-2001, while Vedder was on the board, 45 percent of TVE grants went to Sarasota-based organi-zations, she said. Vedder says that after the first couple of years of grant-making the board began requiring that applicants show a direct benefit to people in the service area, but Hansen said

that’s too limiting.“People here go up

there and benefit from the play, benefit from the music,” she said.

Though there are no geographic boundaries, organizations seeking a TVE grant must still show a benefit to people in the Venice area or they won’t get money, she said.

“When it comes to The Venice Endowment, we stick to that like glue,” she said.

Grants from the more than 500 donor-advised funds the foundation manages don’t have that restriction, which may create some confusion.

“I think they [the Founders group] are remembering the days when it was just the money from The Venice Endowment,” she said.

There was less than $1 million in “other” funds when she was hired in 2002, she said. Foundation statistics show grants from those funds now exceed grants from TVE, which also has a cap on how much it can give. More than $650,000 in grants was announced this week with most of the money identified as coming from TVE, informa-tion that usually hasn’t been included in press releases.

That the foundation has been able to grow, modify its focus and accept outside funds to address the needs of more people is a direct result of the vision of the people who are now criticizing it, Hansen said.

That’s what they set up,” she said. “It’s the brilliance of what they started.”

Email: bmudge@venicegondolier.com

HANSENFROM PAGE 1

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