RENSSELAERVILLE — As the Carey Institute for Global Good weathered the COVID-19 pandemic, it grappled with shut programs and lost income, which had been discussed openly but is visible for the first time after data from its 2020 tax return was made accessible by ProPublica, with some portions raising questions among both detractors of the organization and The Enterprise. 

Most notable is that the 2020 data does not reflect the $2 million-to-$3 million loss that Carey Institute Chief Executive Officer Gareth Crawford reported to The Enterprise in November of 2020 when he was explaining the decision to sell the institute’s storied campus. 

Extracted data shows that total revenue for the Carey Institute decreased from about $2.4 million in 2019 to roughly $2.2 million in 2020. 

Unlike earlier years, the 2020 data is not accompanied by a digital copy of the organization’s 990 or 990-T forms, which are required by the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt organizations. ProPublica notes that the IRS is “substantially delayed” in processing and releasing non-profit filings.

Philip Gitlen, a founding member of the institute's board of trustees and also chairman of its executive committee, told The Enterprise this week that what’s included in the full forms but not, apparently, in ProPublica’s extracted data is “unrelated business income,” which accounts for profit-earning revenues such as what the institute makes from renting space for weddings and other gatherings. 

While revenue of this category — which includes money earned from the on-site brewery — was just $857,478 in 2019, the latest year for which full copies of the Carey Institute’s returns can be seen, Gitlen said he believed that, in 2020, there were around $2 million worth of weddings booked. But that number is just a recollection, he said, because the pandemic necessitated that the institute cancel the bookings and return all the deposits, so the number never made it onto the paper trail. 

When asked how the institute managed to book that much worth of weddings and events after making less than half that in the year prior, Gitlen replied that such bookings were a new and growing portion of the institute’s portfolio. 

These events were not a legacy program handed down by the Rensselaerville Institute, which formerly owned the property until 2014, Gitlen said, and so it took “a period of years to build that up by getting articles published in wedding-planning magazines and the like.” It wasn’t until 2020, he said, that there was a “substantial number of bookings.”

“It isn’t the kind of business where you say, ‘I’m going to hold weddings here,’ and that year you have a full book,” he said. “You start slowly, and you get references, and you have events covered by magazines, and the next year you have a larger business.”

Events and celebrations had, from the outset, been a focus for the Carey Institute, which had a $4.8 million endowment from the heirs of William Polk Carey, plus donated real estate, Gitlen said, but had to figure out a way to remain sustainable once the endowment dried up. 

Crawford told The Enterprise in 2020, “When I started at the end of [2014], we had about three years of operational funds.”

To “make up the gap,” he said then, the institute leveraged the campus into a marketable asset for things like weddings and meetings.

It wasn’t until 2020, the year the pandemic started, ironically enough, with the severe drop in expenses associated with halted programming, that the Carey Institute found itself in the black; albeit only by around $200,000. Between 2015 and 2019, its annual losses ranged from $574,000 to $755,000, with the exception of 2017, when it was down by only around $17,000.

By 2020, the organization had about $4.2 million in net assets, down from about $6.8 million in 2014.

“It’s the cost of running the company,” Crawford said in 2020 of the deficits. “It’s never been able to pay for itself.”

Executive compensation

What caught the eye of Save Rensselaerville — a group or person that would not confirm its human identity for The Enterprise after emailing the paper about the published tax data — was the jump in compensation for Crawford in 2020, when the organization he ran was supposed to be in such dire straits that it nearly abandoned its campus. 

Crawford is listed by ProPublica as earning just under $181,000 in 2020, when in 2019 he earned just under $129,000.

Most of the 2020 pay came from a board decision predating the pandemic, Gitlen told The Enterprise, in which Crawford was granted an increased salary of $170,000.

Although bonuses are allowed by Crawford’s employment contract — to be handed out by the board, excluding Crawford’s in-laws, who are board members — Gitlen said there was no bonus awarded to Crawford in 2020, so he was unsure what made up the roughly $11,000 difference. “It may just have been the timing of payments,” Gitlen said. 

Crawford’s listed compensation has varied considerably since his first full year as CEO, in 2015, earning a pre-2020 high of around $137,000 and a low of just under $115,000.

Moving forward

In 2020, the Carey Institute had listed its 100-acre property for sale for $2.75 million because of the difficulty of sustaining its programming as its revenue sources fell out from under it.

While the Carey Institute has since dropped its attempt to sell the campus, it’s still trying to find its post-pandemic footing, having also lost its two biggest programs: the Center for Learning in Practice (or CLiP), which was started by the institute in 2016 to train teachers, especially those working with refugee populations; and the Logan Nonfiction Program, a retreat for writers from across the globe that was hosted by the Carey Institute but funded and operated by the Logan Foundation. 

The nonfiction program was put on indefinite suspension last year, with the Logan Foundation citing “financial difficulties” it declined to explain to The Enterprise when it reported on the statement at the time. 

Gitlen broke the news around CLiP, telling The Enterprise this week that the institute felt it could not “adequately support” the program and had transferred it “to another entity that specializes in that space.”

The board has also opted not to re-enter the events business, with Gitlen explaining that the work of marketing would have to start from scratch, and took so much effort the first time that doing it all again would “not be worth it.”

So, the institute is currently operating with a skeleton staff and budget, trying to find substitute programs. 

When asked why the board gave up on trying to sell the campus — which had attracted attention from at least one events-oriented entrepreneur, Akiva Reich, to the dismay of some who worried about the impact on the community — Gitlen said that the institute heard those concerns “loud and clear.”

“It seemed better for the community to maintain it in a not-for-profit, and develop programs that were consistent with the original mission, perhaps on a smaller scale, but hopefully a sustainable scale,” he said.