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Dec. 21 - The Worst Charities In America, Part 1

According to Charity Navigator, a non-profit working to make charities more transparent and accountable, Americans gave more than 350-billion dollars to charitable causes in 2014.  Seventy-five percent of those donations came from individuals. KSFR’s Mary Lou Cooper spoke with Kendall Taggart, co-author of “America’s Worst Charities” to learn more about the good and bad of charitable giving in the U.S.  Kendall is now an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed.  When she researched charities, she reported for The Center for Investigative Reporting. 

Mary Lou Cooper reports on consumer issues for KSFR as well as on politics and elder affairs. She has worked for the U.S. Congress as well as for the Nevada and Tennessee legislatures, and remains a political junkie. She worked many years for an association of Western state legislatures and was a contributor to “Capitol Ideas,” a national magazine about state government. In 2016 Cooper received a public service award from the New Mexico Broadcasting Association for her KSFR story on Internet romance scams. She has received journalism awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and from the National Federation of Press Women. She grew up in Oak Ridge, TN and received her BA from Emory University in Atlanta and her MA from the University of Texas Austin. She also holds fiction and screenwriting certificates from the University of Washington.