people should read this post at gawker
http://bit.ly/8JON8N

as well as this one
http://bit.ly/7zRH6L

Explains a lot more. Also look at Yele’s website. does it look like a legitimate charity?

seems like a lot of people that got duped into giving money to yele instead of legit charities with actual operational and financial expertise that didn’t bother to even basic due diligence on him before giving money to them are acting like apologists for him.

Kind of like justifying and rationalizing their initial bad decision and throwing good money after bad.

It’s not just financial problems/fraud?. doesn’t look like any professional operational experience. look at the website,
http://www.yele.org/

no evidence of it. his main skill is getting attention which celebrities are good at. but it’s a shame he’s takeing money from other local and international charities that could use it more effectively and same more lives and help more people.

There are charity review sites that actually analyze charities that are operating in Haiti for effectiveness and financial responsibility ie charity navigator like previously mentioned
http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1004

but they don’t mention yele on their lists.

The people of Haiti deserve better.

http://www.reddit.com/tb/aqegg

The source familiar with Yele Haiti’s operations says the most outrageous expenditure—$250,000 in 2006 to purchase airtime on the Haitian television network Telemax, which Jean and his business partner own a controlling interest in—is even more troubling than it seems. Jean actually used Yele Haiti’s money to initially purchase Telemax, and came up with the idea of the donated airtime after the fact to explain the expense. “That money was taken out of Yele,” the source says, “and the story was concocted afterward. Hugh Locke looked at the balance sheet and saw $250,000 missing. Wyclef said he’d already spent it on Telemax. Locke said, ‘We can’t do that. This can’t be fraud—we have to get something in return.’ The only thing they could get back from Telemax was the airtime, which they did.”

That said – if he owns the studio, why not just give them the space? Why does he want them to pay him at all? If the money for the benefit concert went to other musicians, it should’ve been paid to them – not to Wyclef.

This may well be a perception problem and the management issues may well be reasonable, but they’ve done a terrible job of employing arms length practices. I don’t doubt that they produced 100′s of hours of TV promotions – but why did they need that? What did they accomplish with that 250K investment and why did they have to use a company partially owned by Wyclef?

This is the kind of thing that puts people off charities altogether. It’s unfortunate, but people will question anything and everything. It behooves the leadership of these organizations to ensure that nothing occurs which might be perceived the wrong way. They failed to do that here.