Wyclef Jean gets shut out of George Clooney’s telethon money

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From Gawker:

Yele Haiti, Wyclef Jean’s troubled charity, will get just $1 million, or 2.8%, of the more than $35 million raised so far by the Hope for Haiti Telethon that Jean co-hosted.

As perhaps the most famous Haitian alive, Jean quickly became the human face of the earthquake last month, and he parlayed that celebrity into millions of dollars in text donations to his personal charity, despite persistent reports that Yele Haiti is too poorly run to help and that Jean has a history of using it to divert charitable dollars to his business interests. He also managed to get Yele Haiti included on the list of six charities that George Clooney’s Hope for Haiti Telethon, which raised $66 million in donations and pledges, would benefit—which put his tiny operation in league with the Red Cross and Oxfam and, according to many former Yele Haiti staffers we talked to, threatened to waste millions of dollars that could be better spent by more established organizations.

But while initial reports suggested that the money would be “evenly divided” among Yele Haiti, Partners in Health, Oxfam, the Red Cross, Unicef, and the U.N. World Food Program, Hope for Haiti announced today that Yele Haiti would get just $1 million of the first $35 million being disbursed. While Partners in Health is getting $8 million, for instance, to to “provide emergency medical assistance and supplies, strengthen the public health system, and provide rehabilitation, social support and economic assistance to survivors,” Yele Haiti will get $1 million for the rather vague goal of “promot[ing] community mobilization in major underserved neighborhoods to coordinate aid delivery and support recovery efforts.”

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