By Grant Williams

Feed the Children, one of the nation’s biggest antipoverty charities, enters the crucial holiday fund-raising season with a fund-raising situation perhaps more challenging than the bad economy: It is embroiled in a high-profile legal dispute after it fired its founder and most prominent fund raiser, Larry Jones.

Feed the Children, a charity in Oklahoma City, provides food, clothing, medicine, books, and other supplies to needy children and families in the United States and overseas. It raised more than $1-billion last year in cash and donated goods, placing it at No. 5 on the most recent Philanthropy 400, The Chronicle’s list of the charities that raise the most each year from private sources.

Mr. Jones on Tuesday sued Feed the Children and five of its board members to demand his job back. The lawsuit says he was “wrongfully terminated” from his job about 1 p.m. on Friday “for reasons of personal malice and spite.”

Feed the Children had no comment about Mr. Jones’s allegations. A court hearing has been scheduled for next week.

The firing came three months after members of the board had reached an agreement with Mr. Jones that he give up management powers and focus on raising money and serving as a spokesman. In recent days, Mr. Jones tried to stop board members from using charity money to pay legal fees that were incurred over the past year as the organization fought internal battles. He also acknowledged that he had sought to record his conversations with top charity executives last spring.

Fund-Raising Restriction

In his lawsuit, Mr. Jones said that after he was fired, he instructed each of the charity’s board members that his name, likeness, and voice could no longer be used in any way “in connection with any activities of Feed the Children.”

Despite that instruction, Mr. Jones alleged in his suit that the charity mailed a fund-raising appeal on Friday afternoon containing a letter with Mr. Jones’s signature to a list of about 2,000 major donors. He said the charity also “has continued television and other media advertising” that uses his name, voice, and likeness.

Such use without his consent is “a fraud upon prospective donors and contributors to the organization, who would be misled into believing that Mr. Jones is still associated with the organization,” the lawsuit said.

While officials of Feed the Children had no comment, The Oklahoman newspaper today quotes the charity’s lawyers as saying there was no need for Mr. Jones to seek to stop the organization from using his name and likeness. “We are doing everything possible to get his name and photo off of anything to do with Feed the Children,” the lawyers said. “We are as interested in getting his name off as he is.”

Mark Hammons, a lawyer for Mr. Jones, said in an interview that Mr. Jones was shocked that he was fired, especially at this time of year because the charity depends heavily on its holiday fund-raising season.

“He had activities scheduled that were designed to raise substantial amounts of money that to a large extent centered around his personal participation and appearance,” Mr. Hammons said.

Without Mr. Jones, Mr. Hammons said, the charity will have trouble raising as much money.

“You have to anticipate that it’s going to hurt the fund-raising activity,” he said. “Larry Jones has been the face of Feed the Children for many, many years. He’s the one who founded the organization and dedicated his life to it. It isn’t the same organization without him. And I don’t think it would be viewed the same way by the people who have an attachment to the organization if he isn’t there. So it’s not something that is going to be good for the organization.”

Bruce Flessner, a fund-raising consultant in Minneapolis who has no ties to Feed the Children, said there was no question about the bad timing of Mr. Jones’s firing. “From Labor Day to New Year’s Eve is probably the sweet spot of the whole year for most fund raising,” he said. “This would be a tougher time than having it happen at any other time of year.”

Added Mr. Flessner: “It’s enormously difficult to have any leader in this situation, but when you have a founder on top of it, closely identified with the organization, it’s even more so. You are not talking about a wonderful but anonymous, bureaucratic leader that you often have at places. You are talking about somebody who is the face of the place.”

If the organization has to rework mail and television appeals planned far in advance, it would add to the challenge, Mr. Flessner said. “Anytime you’d have a change with that, it would be really, really difficult.”

Board Dispute Settled in August

In August four members of the Feed the Children board and Mr. Jones, who had run the organization as president, together announced a settlement in their battle for control of Feed the Children that began last December. (See this article from “The Chronicle’s“ archive to learn more about the controversy.) The August agreement stated that Mr. Jones would “relinquish operational controls” over the organization to give him more time to act as a spokesman “with responsibilities for generating support for the organization.”

Rick England, a member of the charity’s board, said at the time that “the settlement and the new arrangement will provide Feed the Children with stability and the confidence to continue to carry on its mission.”

The charity’s board issued a short statement Friday announcing simply that the board had fired Mr. Jones, named an interim president (Travis Arnold, the chief operating officer), and formed a search committee to study how to seek a permanent successor.

Mr. Hammons said that Mr. Jones was concerned about the stresses and strains of the past year on the organization. “He has made efforts to compromise and to resolve these issues and has always been hopeful that they would be resolved,” Mr. Hammons said. “But it’s not shaping up in that fashion. Obviously, the conflict isn’t good for the organization. That’s the reason why he attempted to do the resolution in the first place.”

Mr. Jones believes that the chief reason he was fired was “basically a consequence of the power struggle,” said Mr. Hammons, “some people who want to take away the organization from Larry Jones and manage it the way they see fit.”

Mr. Hammons said the “most immediate issue” that led to the firing was probably Mr. Jones’s decision last week to ask a court to stop board members from using Feed the Children’s money to pay their legal fees incurred over the past year.

Mr. Hammons said another reason behind the firing was probably Mr. Jones’s effort to record conversations with top executives earlier this year using hidden microphones placed in the executives’ offices. Mr. Hammons said the effort, which failed, was legal and intended to “generate an honest account of what’s going on.”

— Grant Williams