When Condoleezza Rice headlined a 2009 fundraising luncheon for the Boys and Girls Club of Long Beach, she collected a $60,000 speaking fee, then donated almost all of it back to the club, according to multiple sources familiar with the club’s finances.

Hillary Clinton was not so generous to the small charity, which provides after-school programs to underprivileged children across the Southern California city. Clinton collected $200,000 to speak at the same event five years later, but she donated nothing back to the club, which raised less than half as much from Clinton’s appearance as from Rice’s, according to the sources and tax filings.


Instead, Clinton steered her speaking fee to her family’s own sprawling $2 billion charity.

The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which has come under scrutiny for its fundraising and fiscal management, has taken in as much as $11.7 million in payments from other nonprofit groups. The money was paid for speeches given by Hillary Clinton; her husband, the former president; and their daughter, Chelsea Clinton, since the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency in 2001, according to a POLITICO analysis of a list of speeches voluntarily released last month by the foundation.

The groups range from smaller charities like Long Beach’s Boys and Girls Club and an AIDS service provider, Chicago House, to public policy advocacy groups, large universities and trade associations.

The cash, according to Clinton Foundation spokesman Craig Minassian, allowed the foundation “to effectively and efficiently use our resources to implement programs that are fighting HIV/AIDS and childhood obesity, increasing opportunity for women and girls, lifting people out of poverty and combating climate change.”

Few of the groups talked publicly about their payments for Clinton speeches, citing concerns about angering the family or violating provisions in the speaking arrangements.

But fundraising experts and people affiliated with some nonprofits on the list — including the Boys and Girls Club — grumbled that the hefty price tag for securing a Clinton speech is a significant drain on small charities’ fundraising and that community-based nonprofits could put the money to better use.

It’s not uncommon for charities to build fundraising events around speakers with “star power” to sell tickets, even if the strategy doesn’t always pay dividends, said Marc A. Pitman, a nonprofit fundraising coach. Such speakers are often expected to return some portion of the speaking fee as a “gift to the club or sponsorship of an event or underwriter for some outreach.” It’s less common, he said, for “a bigger nonprofit to raise funds by speaking to smaller nonprofits. I don’t know of any other foundation that collects speaking fees.”

A Boys and Girls Club volunteer who helped plan Hillary Clinton’s appearance said the arrangement “felt more like a pay-to-play type thing.”

As Hillary Clinton positions herself as a champion for everyday Americans during her presidential campaign, scrutiny has been directed at the $139 million in speaking fees she and her husband have collected since leaving the White House — including millions of dollars from nonprofit groups. Bill Clinton collected millions in personal income from speeches to hospitals and synagogues, as well as $100,000 from the British nonprofit National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and even $150,000 from the Long Beach Boys and Girls Club, the same group that sought out Hillary Clinton in 2014. She earned $12 million on the speaking circuit from the beginning of last year through March, when she stopped giving paid speeches as she prepared to launch her presidential campaign.

In their defense, the Clintons say they have donated other speaking fees to their own charity, which has balanced domestic efforts like fighting childhood obesity and heart disease with far-flung international efforts like increasing access to HIV/AIDS medication, ivory poaching in Africa and earthquake recovery in Haiti.

Bill Clinton, asked last week if he would continue giving paid speeches should his wife be elected president, suggested he would not. But he also aggressively defended their speaking forays, which have yielded at least $139 million in speaking fees for the couple — not including fees paid directly to the foundation.

“I give 10 percent of my paid speeches, a little more actually, have gone directly to the foundation,” he said, adding “and Hillary gave even more of her paid speeches to the foundation.”

Leaders of several nonprofits that paid speaking fees to the Clintons said fundraising tickets sold quickly after the announcement of a Clinton appearance. Others questioned whether financing six-figure speaking fees adhered to charity best practices, which dictate that costs should be less than one-third the amount brought in by the events.

That doesn’t appear to have been the case when Hillary Clinton addressed a University of Nevada-Las Vegas fundraiser last year, an event university spokesman Tony Allen called “a tremendous success.” The university’s accounting shows the event netted $110,000 for the school’s foundation after paying off expenses including Clinton’s $225,000 speaking fee.

Allen told POLITICO the event also raised an additional $237,000 in scholarship donations. But student leaders had called on Clinton to donate some or all of the speaking fee — which one called “a little outrageous” — back to the school to “enrich thousands of students and faculty on campus.” She instead steered the cash to her family’s foundation.

And a small charity called the Happy Hearts Fund, which rebuilds schools destroyed by natural disasters, donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation in conjunction with a Bill Clinton speech at its 2014 gala, only after trying unsuccessfully to get him to appear for free. It reportedly was told by the Clinton Foundation that “they don’t look at these things unless money is offered, and it has to be $500,000.” The gala at which Clinton spoke brought in $1 million less than its previous gala in 2012, a Happy Hearts Fund spokesperson told POLITICO. Praising Clinton for raising awareness “about the need for sustained response in countries impacted by natural disasters,” the spokesperson suggested the fundraising decline was unrelated to the former president. “Differences in amounts between years result from a myriad of factors including donor interest, the time of year events are held and how much other fundraising we do in a given year,” said the spokesperson.

Representatives from several other charities that paid Bill and Hillary Clinton for speeches said they typically do not pay speaking fees — only expenses — but they made exceptions to land the Clintons.

Bill Clinton has, in fact, delivered some free speeches to nonprofits, including one to the gay rights group GLAAD, which gave him an award at its April 2013 gala in Los Angeles. It paid only Clinton’s travel expenses to the ceremony, where he memorably spoke out against the Defense of Marriage Act — a bill he signed into law as president that recognized marriage as between a man and a woman, which was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2013.

And last week, he said: “I have done more appearances for other people than I have given paid speeches.”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign did not respond to questions. The Clinton Foundation and a spokesman for Bill Clinton referred questions to the Harry Walker Agency, which arranges the Clintons’ speeches but did not respond to a request for comment.

Some charities that donated to secure Clinton speeches said the deal was a bargain.

“The fee that we paid was greatly reduced from what his asking fee was at the time,” said Mark Fowler, the acting executive director of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding. It donated $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation to get him to give a speech accepting a 2006 award. Judging by the group’s tax filings that year, it appears to have made more than $230,000 from the gala, but Fowler suggested that calculation was secondary. “We don’t just look for people who can raise money for us. We look for people who are uniquely aligned to our mission, and Clinton was, and his speech is still remembered by many people.”

The Clinton Foundation is not only aligned with the Boys and Girls Club, but the two organizations also formed a partnership to provide healthy eating and exercise opportunities to kids outside of school. Announcing it in January 2014 — 10 months before Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Long Beach chapter — at a Clinton Foundation conference, Bill Clinton noted that he was a former Boys and Girls Club member and praised the organization for working to “create a culture of wellness to sustain healthier environments for young people most in need.”

Bill Clinton was the featured speaker at the Long Beach Boys and Girls Club’s March 2007 corporate luncheon — the event his wife and Rice would later headline. Held on the top-floor office of a donor’s downtown suite, it’s considered “ a must-attend” for the city’s movers and shakers and has drawn appearances from Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, Rudy Giuliani and former Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush.

Bill Clinton charged the group $150,000, which was reported as personal income — not a donation to the Clinton Foundation — on his wife’s federal financial disclosure form.

A Boys and Girls Club supporter said that, comparatively, Hillary Clinton’s speaking fee was “a little less offensive” than “writing a check to them and having them profit from it.”

But Hillary Clinton’s $200,000 speaking fee was the largest paid to any speaker, according to sources familiar with club finances. Partly as a result, her appearance was among the least profitable for the group of any event in the 25-year-old series, netting only $106,000 for the club, they said.

By contrast, the Condoleezza Rice luncheon five years earlier raised nearly $258,000 after expenses and Rice’s give-back of her speaking fee were tallied, according to sources and the organization’s tax filing.

An extra $150,000 — the difference between the yields at Rice’s speech vs. Clinton’s — can go a long way at an organization that, like the Boys and Girls Club, has an annual budget of less than $3 million.

Neither Rice nor the club responded to questions, and the tax filing detailing the finances of Clinton’s appearance has yet to be filed.

But Boys and Girls Club sources told POLITICO that another reason Clinton’s speech yielded less for the club was that her representatives requested more complimentary seats for her entourage than previous speakers had sought. As a result, there were fewer tickets for sale at prices ranging from $1,500 for individual tickets to $50,000 for a platinum table sponsorship.

That irritated some supporters, who also noted disapprovingly that Clinton gave her speech (which was billed as closed to the press), then took off without visiting any of the club’s facilities to meet the children who benefit from its services.

By contrast, Rice spent the morning before her speech (which was open to the media) touring a club facility and talking with its children about the importance of staying in school and chasing their dreams, according to an account in the Long Beach Press-Telegram.

“With Hillary, it was more businesslike,” said a volunteer involved in the planning. “She did acknowledge what we do for the community, but it felt like a little bit of hypocrisy because her speaking fee was higher than anyone we’ve ever had, and she didn’t donate anything back.”

Matt Yurus contributed to this report.