Anquan Boldin to launch charity-reform group at Super Bowl after Republic investigation

Anquan Boldin will introduce his new organization, Sport For Impact, and its mission to “redefine sports philanthropy as we know it” during a reception on Saturday in the NFL Legends Lounge at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, a day before Super Bowl 58 at Allegiant Stadium.

Nearly 200 current and former players, athlete reps, brands and teams are expected to attend.

The former Arizona Cardinals star, his wife Dionne Boldin and the nonprofit management professionals behind the Players Coalition recently co-founded Sport For Impact as a direct result of The Arizona Republic’s 2023 investigation, “Mismanagement of the Year,” which exposed systemic waste and mismanagement among nonprofits founded by Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award winners.

The Republic’s groundbreaking five-part series revealed some esteemed players’ nonprofits, like Russell Wilson’s Why Not You Foundation, spend less than 50 cents of every dollar on charity — and more on salaries — with minimal vetting or guidance from the NFL or NFL Players Association, and a cottage industry of sports charity management companies often geared toward profit and optics over impact. It also cited notable success stories, outlined nonprofit best practices and presented solutions to longstanding issues.

The report, which went viral on social media, was based on thousands of pages of state and federal tax returns and other public records, as well as in-depth interviews with more than a dozen Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award winners and nominees, their families and representatives, nonprofit legal and accounting experts and the NFL and NFLPA.

It published a year ago, before the NFL Honors awards show in Phoenix and Super Bowl 57 in Glendale, igniting Boldin’s crusade for sports charity reform.

“Anquan is so all-in,” said Angela LaChica, the managing director of Players Coalition and fellow co-founder of Sport For Impact. “We’ll be sitting on calls and he tells people, ‘I’m doing this full-time. I’m committed to this.’ Imagine someone of his stature saying that about this organization. It’s really, really special.”

What is Sport For Impact?

Sport For Impact has applied for 501(c)(3) designation from the IRS and plans to educate athletes and their families about the nonprofit sector; provide tax-exempt status and oversight for players’ foundations, ensuring they remain legal and efficient; and connect like-minded athletes for maximum effect toward common goals, using the Players Coalition, which is geared toward social justice initiatives, as a model.

It aims to address health equity, food insecurity, climate justice and more.

Sport For Impact will also serve as a fiscal sponsor for players’ individual charitable efforts, allowing athletes to create their own foundations as affiliated LLCs, or limited liability companies.

These legal entities offer autonomy and brand identity and are easier to manage than 501(c)(3)s, according to tax experts, while Sport For Impact, as the parent corporation, ensures efficiency and compliance with nonprofit law.

Troy Vincent, NFL Foundation, NFL Legends lend support

Sport For Impact has already garnered support from Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president, former NFLPA president and 2002 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year, as well as from the NFL Foundation, NFL Legends Community and the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund, a venture capital group that supports organizations committed to Black wealth generation.

“When Q and Angela first shared the vision about what Sport For Impact could do, immediately what came to mind was a necessary service for our peer group, because of your investigation, what you found,” Vincent told The Republic.

“Each of our organizations — that’s the clubs independently, the Players Association and league office — we can share, ‘Here’s a resource that you should look into,’ because if you’re in Q’s arm, we believe in what he’s done. His body of work speaks for itself.”

Jaguars give $10k, first team to embrace Sport For Impact

The Jacksonville Jaguars are the first team to support Sport For Impact, contributing a $10,000 grant.

T-Neisha Tate, the Jaguars’ vice president of social responsibility and impact, said Boldin and LaChica first reached out with the Players Coalition when she was promoted into the role and have supported their community since the racially-motivated 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery outside Brunswick, Georgia, which is part of their market.

Tate said every rookie wants to start a nonprofit, she has discouraged players from starting standalone 501(c)(3)s and that she intends to have Boldin and LaChica visit the locker room to speak with their players about Sport For Impact.

“When they started talking to us about what the Sport For Impact program would look like, we knew we wanted to be the first team,” Tate said. “They work with all of the teams in and out of football, but we knew this was something significant and that could do so much. And we wanted to make sure that we were a part of that rookie class of funders that would be a part of this greater story, eventually.”

CharityWatch praises Sport For Impact, implores transparency

Laurie Styron, the executive director of CharityWatch, an independent nonprofit watchdog group that assisted The Republic’s investigation, called the launch of Sport For Impact “wonderful news.”

“This is a positive change that, if executed properly and consistently monitored, can potentially close some of the accountability gaps that created so much waste in players past charitable efforts,” Styron said.

“A fiscal sponsor like Sports for Impact can eliminate duplicative overhead and provide a centralized, higher level of expertise to guide athletes in their charitable efforts. This can help athletes avoid mistakes that come with inexperience or lack of knowledge about how to effectively run a charity.”

Styron also cautioned that a major downside of fiscal sponsors is a lack of public transparency, because such organizations generally report financial activities in aggregate on tax returns.

“The public won’t have access to how much each athlete is raising and spending through their LLC unless the fiscal sponsor willingly discloses that information in an audit note or elsewhere,” Styron said.  “I strongly urge Sports for Impact to commit to providing itemized public disclosures of the charitable activities conducted through each player’s LLC in a consolidating statement of activities in its audited financial statements. …

“Doing so would create little additional work for the fiscal sponsor given that it will already need to maintain separate internal funds for each player’s LLC in order to properly maintain its own accounting records.”

Anquan Boldin: ‘How can I help this kid maximize their platform?’

The NFL announced this season’s 32 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award nominees, one from each team, in early December and will reveal the winner Thursday night during the nationally televised NFL Honors awards show in Las Vegas.

The winner receives the Gladiator statue — a gleaming bronze trophy of a football player wearing a cape — a special patch to wear on his jersey for the rest of his career and a $250,000 donation from the NFL Foundation and Nationwide, a corporate sponsor. The other 31 nominees, one from each team, each receive up to $55,000.

The players will also be honored on the field on Super Bowl Sunday.

Twenty-four of the past 27 winners have founded a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization since the award was named in honor of Payton, the 1977 recipient, after his death in 1999.

But the NFL and NFLPA offer little guidance for players considering whether to start a nonprofit.

The NFL sends a four-page nonprofit tip sheet created by the NFL Foundation to all 32 teams, along with a grant application. Teams have forwarded the email to players’ agents and publicists. But the league does not require teams to distribute the document to players. The second paragraph, in bold, reads: “not every NFL player should start a 501(c)(3) foundation.”

The NFLPA similarly gives a $100,000 donation to the recipient of its annual Alan Page Community Award, but offers active players no formal nonprofit education.

Many players entrust family, friends or associates who are inexperienced and ineffective at running a nonprofit. Or they turn to agents or publicists for advice and are directed to hire a management company like Prolanthropy, which has run the nonprofits of two Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award winners and more than 30 nominees, as well as those for NBA and Major League Baseball players. But its business practices have often left far less than 50 cents of every dollar for charitable activities, according to tax records and contracts obtained by The Republic.

Efficient nonprofits generally spend at least 65 to 75 cents of every dollar on charitable activities, according to charity watchdog groups. The best spend far more. A nonprofit’s efficiency is often more important than the amount it fundraises, experts said.

“Athletes have this platform, and if used right, you can create a lot of change,” Boldin told The Republic. “And for us, that’s always been our heart, to create as much change as possible. Unfortunately, like you said, because of this system, guys get put into the hands of people who don’t have the same heart that they do, and for them, it’s more about, ‘What can I get out of it?’ As opposed to, ‘How can I help this kid maximize their platform?’”

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Players Coalition: Collective impact creates systemic change

Boldin’s first nonprofit, The Q81 Foundation, spent only about a quarter of every dollar on charity during its first several years of existence in Arizona before the couple started paying closer attention to the business side and cleaned house.

Under the guidance of Dionne, it eventually spent better than 90 cents of every dollar on charity.

Boldin was named the Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year in 2015, the same year his cousin was shot dead by a plain clothes police officer after his van broke down on an I-95 off-ramp. He retired from football in 2016 and co-founded The Players Coalition with then-Philadelphia Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins to support racial equity and social justice initiatives in 2017.

The Players Coalition now works with nearly 1,500 athletes, coaches and owners across a dozen professional sports leagues and three dozen universities, leveraging their collective impact to create systemic change. It cites nearly 30 legislative and policy wins and $50 million in cumulative grants and contributions since 2018.

“I think for us to be really impactful in a space, we have to start partnering,” Boldin told a crowd in October during his initial presentation about Sport For Impact at the Global Sports Business Forum at UCLA. “We have to start joining. Because there may be resources that you have available at your fingertips that I don’t have and vice versa. But I think when we join those together, our impact will be even that much greater.”

Powerful storytelling, framing inspires action

By concentrating on nonprofits founded by Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year award winners — athletes celebrated as the best philanthropists in the most popular sport in America — The Republic’s investigation was able to highlight and distill an important and complicated topic by weaving untold and jarring stories into a unique narrative that inspired action.

“When that first article came out, that went around like wildfire,” LaChica said. “I must have had four or five players alone texting me that first article.”

The journalism held athletes accountable to the public, including their donors and beneficiaries, their most invested and vulnerable fans.

It held the NFL and NFLPA accountable for fostering an environment where hype can often appear to supersede substance.

And as its impact grows, so does attention and praise, including from Julia C. Patrick, the CEO and founder of the American Nonprofit Academy, who called the reporting “fabulous … brilliant and so very important.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Anquan Boldin to launch charity-reform group at Super Bowl