Back on November 25th, Jamie McCourt made a huge splash when she announced the Dodgers in conjunction with the Friedman Charitable Foundation would add 42 Dreamfields . The Friedman Charitable Foundation had pleged $5 Million dollars to the program after having pledged $10Million to help complete the Children's Museum of Los Angeles.
With less fanfare it was announced today that the Childrens Museum of Los Angeles will be forced into bankruptcy because their biggest donor was doing something that has become all to common in this decade of financial manipulation. On March 6th, Bruce Friedman was charged with securites fraud and the assets have been frozen. Buried at the back end of the story was this little nugget of information:
In addition to its donation to the museum, the Friedman foundation had pledged $5 million to the Dodgers Dream Foundation to help build youth baseball fields throughout Southern California.
Dodgers officials said Friedman never paid any of the money and is no longer part of the project.
I find it interesting how much media attention was given to the original pledge of 42 new dreamfields financed in a large part by the Friedman foundation, but how zero media attention was given to the fact that the pledged money never happened, and now that the relationship has been severed, will never happen. Maybe the Dodgers have already found someone to replace the $5 Million but since we haven't had a media day about it, I doubt it.
Everyday at TrueBlue we are sent a plethora of Dodger publicity announcements and we choose to publish some and ignore others. We didn't get any announcement about this development so I expect it is being brushed under the carpet. I wonder if we will ever hear about the goal to build 50 dreamfields again? It was a noble goal but as the Children's Museum has found, it is not easy to find funding in these tough times.