The Jackson Laboratory earns top rating from Charity Navigator

Bar Harbor, Maine - The Jackson Laboratory’s sound fiscal management practices and commitment to accountability and transparency have earned the nonprofit organization a four-star rating from Charity Navigator, America’s largest independent charity evaluator. This is the fifth consecutive year that the Laboratory has earned this top distinction.

“The Jackson Laboratory’s coveted four-star rating puts it in a very select group of high-performing charities,” says Ken Berger, president and CEO of Charity Navigator. “Out of the thousands of nonprofits Charity Navigator evaluates, only one out of four earns four 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 donors should feel confident that their donations are being used efficiently and responsibly when it acquires such a high rating.”

“Our 4-star Charity Navigator rating demonstrates our deep commitment to our fiduciary, governance and stewardship responsibilities,” says Jackson Laboratory Vice President for Development and Communications Kristen Rozansky. “When giving to The Jackson Laboratory, donors are helping to accelerate the pace of discovery and 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 1,700.