Bar Harbor, Maine – The Jackson Laboratory’s sound fiscal management practices and commitment to accountability and transparency have earned the nonprofit organization a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, America’s largest independent charity evaluator.
This is the fourth consecutive year that the Laboratory has earned this top distinction. Just 7 percent of charities evaluated by Charity Navigator have received this highest possible rating on four or more consecutive evaluations, placing The Jackson Laboratory among the nation’s most highly-rated charities for good governance and responsible stewardship of philanthropic support.
“The Jackson Laboratory’s coveted 4-star rating puts it in a very select group of high-performing charities,” says Ken Berger, President and CEO, Charity Navigator. “Out of the thousands of nonprofits Charity Navigator evaluates, only one out of four earns 4 stars—a rating that, now, with our new Accountability and Transparency metrics, demands even greater rigor, responsibility and commitment to openness. The Jackson Laboratory’s supporters should feel much more confident that their hard-earned dollars are being used efficiently and responsibly when it acquires such a high rating.”
“Our 4-star Charity Navigator rating demonstrates to our supporters that we take our fiduciary and governance responsibilities very seriously,” says Jackson Laboratory President and CEO Edison Liu, M.D. “They can feel secure that they are truly contributing to our mission of finding precise genomic solutions for disease and empowering the global biomedical community in the shared quest to improve human health.”
Since 2002, using data-driven analysis, Charity Navigator has awarded only the most fiscally responsible organizations a 4-star rating. In 2011, Charity Navigator added a second dimension of Accountability and Transparency (A&T) to its rating methodology, and now reviews 17 governance and ethical practices as well as measures of openness, providing information on its web site for each of the charities it evaluates. The A&T metrics, which account for 50 percent of a charity’s overall rating, reveal which charities have “best practices” that minimize the chance of unethical activities and whether they freely share basic information about their organization with their donors and other stakeholders.
The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution and National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center based in Bar Harbor, Maine, with a facility in Sacramento, Calif., and a new genomic medicine institute in Farmington, Conn. It employs a total staff of more than 1,600.