Black Lives Matter spent millions on luxury properties in LA and Toronto

Black Lives Matter spent millions on luxury properties in Los Angeles and in Toronto – including a $6.3 million 10,000-square-foot property in Canada that was purchased as part of a $8M ‘out of country grant.’

The Toronto property was bought with grant money that was meant for ‘activities to educate and support black communities, and to purchase and renovate property for charitable use.’ The group had said it was planning to use the property as main headquarters in Canada. It’s unclear what the property is now used for.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation on Tuesday released a 63-page Form 990, covering the fiscal year from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021, at which point the group had $42 million in net assets. 

This is BLM foundation’s first public accounting of its finances since incorporating in 2017. 

The tax filing shows that nearly $6 million was spent on a Los Angeles-area compound. The Studio City property, which includes a home with six bedrooms and bathrooms, a swimming pool, a soundstage and office space, was intended as a campus for a black artists fellowship and is currently used for that purpose, the board member said. 

Last year, the New York Post reported that Cullors was also ‘eyeing property at the ultra-exclusive Albany resort outside Nassau in the Bahamas where Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods have homes.’ The publication didn’t cite sources for its information. 

Former co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who resigned last year after it was revealed she amassed a $3 million property portfolio, has used the property twice for personal reasons – once for a Biden inauguration party, and another time for her son’s birthday. 

The filings also show that Cullors used charity funds to pay her friends and family large sums for various ‘consulting’ services, as well as charter a private flight.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation is still worth tens of millions of dollars, despite spending more than $37 million on grants, real estate, consultants, and other expenses, according to tax documents filed with the IRS.

That investment is expected to become an endowment to ensure the foundation’s work continues in the future, organizers say. 

The BLM movement first emerged in 2013, after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. 

But it was the 2014 death of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, that made the slogan ‘Black lives matter’ a rallying cry for progressives and a favorite target of derision for conservatives.

The foundation ended its last fiscal year – from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021 – with nearly $42 million in net assets. It had an operating budget of about $4 million, according to a board member.

As a fledgling nonprofit, it had been under the fiscal sponsorship of a well-established charity, and wasn´t required to publicly disclose its financials until it became an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit in December 2020.

The tax filing suggests the organization is still finding its footing: It currently has no executive director or in-house staff. 

Nonprofit experts told the AP that the BLM foundation seems to be operating like a scrappy organization with far fewer resources, although some say black-led charities face unfair scrutiny in an overwhelmingly white and wealthy philanthropic landscape.

Still, its governance structure makes it difficult to disprove allegations of impropriety, financial mismanagement and deviation from mission that have dogged the BLM foundation for years, one expert said.

‘It comes across as an early startup nonprofit, without substantial governance structure in place, that got a huge windfall,’ said Brian Mittendorf, a professor of accounting at Ohio State University who focuses on nonprofit organizations and their financial statements.

‘People are going to be quick to assume that mismatch reflects intent,’ he added. ‘Whether there´s anything improper here, that is another question. But whether they set themselves up for being criticized, I think that certainly is the case because they didn´t plug a bunch of those gaps.’

BLM co-founders – Cullors, Alicia Garza and Ay Tometi – had pledged to build a decentralized organization governed by the consensus of BLM chapters. But just three years into existence, Cullors was the only movement founder involved in the organization.

And in 2020, a tidal wave of contributions in the aftermath of protests over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police meant the BLM organization needed much more infrastructure.

The tax filings released on Tuesday – and first seen by Associated Press on Monday – revealed that BLM paid a company owned by Damon Turner, the father of Cullors’ child, nearly $970,000 to help ‘produce live events’ and provide other ‘creative services.’

The co-founder’s brother, Paul Cullors, received more than $840,000 for providing security services to the foundation. 

Leaders have attempted to justify the expense by saying the foundation’s protection could not be entrusted to former police professionals who typically run security firms because the BLM movement is known for vehemently protesting law enforcement organizations.

Last year, when Cullors revealed the windfall of donations last year, local chapter organizers and families of police brutality victims reacted angrily. 

Until then, the foundation had not been transparent with the most devoted BLM organizers, many of whom accused Cullors of shutting them out of decisions about how financial resources would be allocated.

YahNé Ndgo, an activist and former organizer with the BLM chapter in Philadelphia, said Cullors reneged on a promise to hand over control of the foundation’s resources to grassroots organizers.

‘When resources came in, when opportunities came in, (the foundation) alone would be the ones to decide who was going to take advantage of them, without having to take any consideration of the other organizers whose work was giving them the access to these resources and opportunities in the first place,’ said Ndgo, who organized a group of chapters that confronted the foundation over issues of transparency and accountability.

In 2020, the foundation did spin off its network of chapters as a sister collective called BLM Grassroots. It has a fiscal sponsor managing money granted by the foundation. 

Melina Abdullah, cofounder of BLM’s first chapter in Los Angeles, also directs the grassroots collective and said its organizers continue to have direct impact in communities across the country.

‘We’ll never stop doing that,’ Abdullah said. ‘That’s the work we were born out of.’

In a recent interview with the AP, Cullors acknowledged the foundation was ill-prepared to handle the moment. The tax filing lists Cullors as an uncompensated founder and executive director. She resigned last year. The foundation also paid nearly $140,000 in severance to a former managing director who had been at odds with local BLM chapter organizers, prior to Cullors´s tenure as director.

The filing shows Cullors reimbursed the organization $73,523 for a charter flight for foundation-related travel, which the organization says she took in 2021 out of concern for COVID-19 and security threats. She also paid the foundation $390 over her uses of the Studio City property for two private events.

During the last fiscal year, Cullors was the foundation board´’s sole voting director and held no board meetings, according to the filing. Although that is permissible under Delaware law, where the foundation is incorporated, that governance structure gives the appearance that Cullors alone decided who to hire and how to spend donations. That was never the truth, current board members said.

For all the questions raised about its oversight, the BLM foundation´s tax filing shows its stewards haven´t squandered donations. Instead, it granted tens of millions of dollars to BLM chapters, Black-led grassroots organizations and families of police brutality victims, whose names rallied the larger movement.

‘This 990 reveals that (the BLM foundation) is the largest Black abolitionist nonprofit organization that has ever existed in the nation´s history. What we’re doing has never been done before,’ said Shalomyah Bowers, who serves as the foundation´s board secretary.

‘We needed to get dollars out to grassroots organizations doing the work of abolition, doing the work that would shift the moral tide of this world towards one that does not have or believe in police, prisons, jails or violence,’ he said.

Earlier this month, the foundation announced Bowers as one of three members of its board of directors. He serves with board chair Cicley Gay, a communications professional with more than 20 years of experience in nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, and D´Zhane Parker, a member of BLM´s Los Angeles chapter whose work focuses on the impact of mass incarceration on families.

‘We are decolonizing philanthropy,’ Gay said. ‘We, as a board, are charged with disrupting traditional standards of what grant making in philanthropy looks like. It means investing in Black communities, trusting them with their dollars.’

The foundation will launch a ‘transparency and accountability center’ on its website to make its financial documents available for public inspection, Bowers said.

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