The Black Lives Matter (BLM) foundation invested $32 million of its donations in stock, and paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to its co-founder’s brother and the father of her child for ‘creative services,’ and security, new tax filings show. The filings are the first public accounting of its finances since incorporating in 2017.
The non-profit was not required to publicly disclose its finances until it became an independent, 501(c)(3) non-profit in December 2020. Prior to that, it was under the fiscal-sponsorship of a well-established charity. While the racial justice movement received a staggering $90 million in donations sparked by the 2020 protests triggered by the muder of George Floyd, its tax filings suggest it is still finding its footing: it currently has no executive director or in-house staff despite enormous funding.
The filing reveals it ended its last fiscal year – from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021 – with nearly $42 million in net assets.
The charity has been at the centre of accusations of impropriety since it came to prominence. In April, BLM was plunged into controversy when a report revealed it used donations to buy a 6,500-square-foot lavish California home for nearly $6 million. Prior to that, in 2021, BLM Canada bought a three-story $6.3 million Victorian mansion in Toronto.
Also in 2021, Cullors purchased a $1.4 million home in an exclusive Los Angeles neighbourhood of Topanga Canyon; those expenses also raised eyebrows amid claims Cullors was using donations to build a ‘property empire’.
The charity is now ripe for more accusations of corruption, critics say, following new findings which reveal it gave lucrative contracts to friends and associates, and invested millions in stocks.
Among those who were paid huge sums of money was BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullor’s brother, Paul Cullors, whose security firm was paid $840,000. Trap Heals LLC, a company founded by Damon Turner, the father of Ms Cullors’s child, received almost $970,000.
The filings also revealed that more than $2.1 million was paid to Bowers Consulting. Shalomyah Bowers, the company’s founder, was recently named a board member of the BLM foundation. Mr Bowers has insisted the contract with his firm was approved before he was a board member.
“It comes across as an early startup nonprofit, without substantial governance structure in place, that got a huge windfall,” said Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor who focuses on nonprofit organisations.
“People are going to be quick to assume that mismatch reflects intent,” he added.
Mr Mittendorf said that BLM had “set themselves up” for criticism and accusations of impropriety.
The foundation spent over $37 million on property, grants, consultants, and other expenses, according to the tax documents filed with the IRS. The 63-page report also shows it invested $32 million in stocks from the $90 million it received in donations, which it says is intended to become an endowment to fund its future work. Some are not so convinced, with black conservative commentator Candace Owens, one of the organisation’s harshest critics, describing the investment in stocks as ‘unreal’.
“Please spare me with the ridiculous “the movement is different from the organization”. The movement is the free marketing firm for the organization. You wear a BLM t-shirt of sticker and people donate to a corrupt organization,” Owens said in her Instagram story on Tuesday.
Ms Cullors, who led the organisation for almost six years, resigned last May over controversy about the four homes she owned and amid accusations of corruption.
In a recent interview with Associated Press, she acknowledged that BLM was ill-prepared to handle the groundswell of support for the movement and the mammoth windfall of donations which followed Mr Floyd’s high-profile killing in 2020.
The BLM foundation’s board secretary, Shalomyah Bowers, defended the charity, and said its tax filing revealed it to be “the largest Black abolitionist non-profit organisation that has ever existed in the nation’s history. What we’re doing has never been done before”.
He also said the foundation will launch a “transparency and accountability center” on its website to make its financial documents available for public inspection amid growing public scrutiny.