by WorldTribune Staff, May 25, 2023
Individuals in the upper echelons of the Black Lives Matter hierarchy continue to live large, raking in millions of dollars as the organization heads for insolvency due to a huge decrease in donations and some really bad stock picks, a report said.
Financial disclosures from the most recent tax year show that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation ran an $8.5 million deficit and saw the value of its investment accounts drop nearly $10 million, the Washington Free Beacon reported on May 23.
BLM raised $9.3 million in its 2022 fiscal year, down 88 percent from the year prior.
“The group has blown through two-thirds of the $90 million it raised in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020,” the Free Beacon noted.
BLM also reported a $961,000 loss on a securities sale of $172,000, suggesting the charity took a staggering 85 percent loss on the transaction.
These financial woes “didn’t stop BLM from doling out seven-figure contracts to friends and family of its former executive director Patrisse Cullors,” the report said.
Cullors, the BLM leader who once described herself as a “trained Marxist,” stepped down from the helm of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation in May 2021 amid anger at the group’s financial decisions and perceived lack of transparency.
A year later, in May 2022, it was revealed Black Lives Matter spent more than $12 million 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 an $8 million “out of country grant.”
Despite its sinking financial profile, Cullors’ family and friends continue to be paid millions out of BLM coffers, the Free Beacon report said.
Cullors’s brother, Paul Cullors, a graffiti artist with no prior experience as a bodyguard, and his two companies took in $1.6 million for providing “professional security services” for Black Lives Matter in 2022. Paul Cullors was also one of BLM’s only two paid employees during the year, collecting a $126,000 salary as “head of security” on top of his consulting fees.
Black Lives Matter disclosed last May it had paid Paul Cullors $841,000 to protect the charity’s swanky $6 million Los Angeles mansion in its 2021 tax year, which Patrisse Cullors used to film herself baking peach cobblers. The charity told the Associated Press it could not entrust its security to the former police officers that staff typical private protection firms.
“While Patrisse Cullors was forced to resign due to charges of using BLM’s funds for her personal use, it looks like she’s still keeping it all in the family,” said Paul Kamenar, an attorney for the National Legal and Policy Center watchdog group.
The consulting company of Shalomyah Bowers, the close friend of Patrisse Cullors who is her successor as the group’s leader, was paid $1.7 million by BLM for management and consulting services.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots, a former sister organization of Black Lives Matter, accused Bowers of “blazing a path of irreparable harm to BLM” by treating the charity as his personal piggy bank.
The sister of former Black Lives Matter board member Raymond Howard brought in a seven-figure consulting fee as well. BLM paid Danielle Edwards’s firm, New Impact Partners, $1.1 million for consulting services in 2022.
The Free Beacon noted that it is “unclear if Black Lives Matter paid out lucrative contracting fees to Cullors’s friends and family past June 2022. The charity brought on a new board of directors last summer led by nonprofit adviser Cicley Gay, who has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy three times since 2005.”
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