Children’s Scholarship Fund Philadelphia earned a perfect score from Charity Navigator

Center City-based education nonprofit Children’s Scholarship Fund Philadelphia (CSFP) was one of only 50 organizations to earn a perfect score from Charity Navigator this year.

The nonprofit watchdog rates organizations based on how financially strong, accountable and transparent they are, according to Marketing VP Sandra Miniutti.

To earn a perfect score, nonprofits must include certain information on their profiles, including high program expense percentage, or the “percent of the charity’s total expenses spent on the programs and services it delivers” (CSFP’s is 91.9 percent), and a listing of the CEO’s name and salary (CSFP’s executive director, Ina Lipman, made $164,065 in 2014).

Charity Navigator currently rates over 8,000 charities, putting CSFP’s rating in the top 0.6 percent, Miniutti said. 

Now, we’ve written a bit about overhead — or, more specifically, the “overhead myth” — and know well enough that a nonprofit’s impact is not tied to the ratio of how much it spends on programs compared to operations. Charity Navigator itself contributed to a letter on the topic with two other nonprofit evaluation sites. But it’s worth celebrating that CSFP has apparently embraced the tenet of transparency enough to be honored for it on a national scale.