Lending Company Tells Food Banks to Quit Advocacy Group — or Lose Donation
May 1, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Officials at America’s Second Harvest and its Ohio affiliates were told by executives at Rent-a-Center, a company in Plano, Tex., that the company would halt all charitable contributions to hunger programs in Ohio unless local food banks quit their association with the Ohio Coalition for Responsible Lending, The Wall Street Journal reports. That coalition has advocated a crackdown on payday loans, which Rent-a-Center offers.
This week the Ohio House passed a bill to cap annualized interest rates on payday loans at 28 percent and limit borrowers to four loans of $500 annually.
Rent-a-Center charges interest rates on one-week payday loans that are equivalent to a yearly rate of up to 782 percent, the newspaper said. The company last year made its first $125,000 payment on a four-year, $500,000 pledge to America’s Second Harvest.
Anne Goodman, chairman of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks, told the newspaper that her group should not have joined the coalition in the first place. “Nobody has put any pressure on us,” she said. The Ohio Association of Foodbanks “would never support anything that isn’t directly hunger related.”
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