Philly poured $22M into an anti-violence grant program. It picked some groups unable to deliver on their proposals.

The tiny nonprofit had no paid staff, no operating budget, no board of directors, and no office.

But the group, called Put It Down, did have an ambitious pitch for a violence-interruption program drafted by an outside consultant, and was able to land a city grant in late 2021 worth $730,000.

Within months, though, a more established nonprofit that had agreed to manage finances for Put It Down backed out. In an email to city administrators, this sponsor organization lamented that the leaders of Put It Down had embroiled the project in personnel disputes and poor management decisions.

It concluded: “The possibilities of this project being successful are near zero.” The fledgling nonprofit’s antiviolence proposal quickly collapsed.

Put it Down was just one of 31 organizations together awarded $13.5 million from Philadelphia’s Community Expansion Grant (CEG) program, launched in 2021 to curb record levels of gun violence.

City officials have touted the CEG program as a signature effort to improve public safety by investing millions into community organizations, instead of into law enforcement. More than 4,500 teens and young adults have received services, whether at single events or in months-long therapy, education and jobs programs, according to the city. Some of the community groups described the new money as “transformative,” enabling them to rapidly expand their programs.

“What we did as a city is begin to set an example on how you can invest in community-based, community-serving organizations run predominantly by people of color,” said Erica Atwood, who oversaw the grant awards as senior director of the Office of Strategy for Criminal Justice and Public Safety, in an interview earlier this year.

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But the city’s grant program (with administrative costs it totaled $22 million) was also marked by a politicized selection process that flushed millions of dollars into nascent nonprofits unprepared to manage the money — resulting in millions of dollars left unspent and tens of thousands unaccounted for, an Inquirer investigation has found.

Records show that the city awarded grants to groups with no board of directors or paid employees — despite its guidelines stating that “start-up organizations are not eligible.”

And of the 31 recipients, one-third received amounts larger than their previous year’s operating budgets. Some had reported no previous operating funds at all. One in four did not supply audited financial statements, while others provided only outdated tax forms.

Experts say grant programs can be an effective way to support community-based antiviolence efforts. But without detailed financial statements, funders can’t adequately assess a group’s capacity to execute on a given proposal, said Theodore Arapis, a Villanova University professor of public administration. He called the arrangement the “Philly special.”

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“It’s quite problematic to provide a grant that actually exceeds the operating budget of the organization,” he said. “You add the pressure to these organizations to do more than what they typically would be doing. … That sets the whole process up for failure.”

One grant, for a youth boxing program, was suspended last fall after an Inquirer investigation revealed $80,000 was improperly paid to police officers or their children.

Two other groups, including Put It Down, dropped out of the grant program due to lack of capacity.

For others, internal communications show administrators coaching organizations on basic financial controls, seeking to connect them with accountants, or expressing concern over grant recipients that failed to submit invoices for months on end.

These snags led to $4.5 million of the $13.5 million sitting unspent by the end of February, while 20 of the 29 remaining grantees received extensions permitting them to continue spending down the money.

Nevertheless, the city is moving ahead with a new round of grants — applications close May 1 — even though it has not made public reports from outside evaluators, who received a $2.1 million contract to assess the first round.

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Atwood’s office emphasized that these struggles were a kind of growing pain. She said a flexible approach was necessary to invest in under-resourced organizations and get them “up to par” to be able to apply for other funding.

But interviews and public records The Inquirer obtained through Right to Know requests show gaps in oversight of the grants. A monitoring group for the CEG program has not met since November, said City Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, a member of the group.

“‘Monitoring’ would suggest we had some kind of oversight role or planning role, and it just wasn’t that,” she said.

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The Urban Affairs Coalition, a large nonprofit that provides fiscal sponsorship and consulting for 80 smaller nonprofits, was paid $1.1 million to disburse the CEG grant funds, but monitoring the nonfiscal aspects of the programs was not part of that contract.

Even so, emails between Urban Affairs and the city show administrators’ mounting frustration with groups that had not even submitted invoices months into their grants.

One grant recipient, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation, said it got almost “no feedback” from the city — in contrast to its experience with traditional foundation grants that came with clear goals and measures for success.

“It’s just been silent,” the person said. “There was no oversight. I feel like we could have done whatever [with the money].”

Some community groups, selected out of a pool of 212 applicants, found the grants to be a boost that enabled them to significantly expand promising initiatives.

With $677,000, PowerCorps put 100 young people through an urban farming program that combines on-the-job training, paid work, and therapy.

Every Murder Is Real used a nearly $1 million infusion to hire 12 counselors — enabling it to provide therapy to several hundred people, cofounder Chantay Love said, and even to enroll people from other victim-support groups’ wait lists.

And Beyond the Bars spent $106,500 to build eight recording studios used by an estimated 800 young people — and trained 18 as student music teachers. The funding, said co-executive director Matthew Kerr, “was a transformational, really incredible opportunity for us to build that ecosystem.”

Yet the city’s philosophy of trying to support less-established groups with fresh ideas seems to have led to hazy standards for what, exactly, qualifies as antiviolence spending. The city initially specified that after-school sports and arts programs and workforce programs were not eligible for funding, yet such initiatives came to represent the core of at least a third of successful applicants.

Other groups’ proposals aligned more closely with the grant guidelines — but some of them appear to have abandoned major components of their proposed programs.

Men Who Care of Germantown proposed expanding its Real Talk student mentorship program. The nonprofit said it would add a workforce development program, quarterly job fairs, and biweekly community events offering employment and expungement resources.

The nonprofit was awarded $328,000, but ended up walking away from about half of that money. While it did hold one job fair, executive director Clayton Justice said, it did not operate the other workforce programs.

“That wasn’t part of our proposal,” he said. “Our program is primarily a mentorship program.” He could not explain why the group’s application suggested otherwise.

Kenneth Kriz, a professor of public administration at the University of Illinois-Springfield, said sacrificing program efficiency is a predictable outcome when grant makers relax their criteria in favor of funneling funds to grassroots groups.

It’s a trade-off, he said: “You’re reducing the likelihood that there’s going to be accountability and efficiency, not because these are bad people but because they have no experience doing that type of thing.”

But Atwood and her team encouraged Urban Affairs to push out funding advances despite unresolved concerns over some nonprofits’ financial stability, emails show. She rejected Urban Affairs’ proposal to prioritize “benchmark” payments to groups that were able to get their programs off the ground quickly, adding that the suggestion made her question Urban Affairs’ fitness to manage the contract.

“The recommendation for payment disbursement is not equitable. It is actually an example of how privilege plays out in real life,” she wrote.

One of the groups that had been slower to launch was Black Muslim Men United for a Better Philadelphia (BMMUBP).

Though the five imams who founded it are longtime community leaders, BMMUBP had no employees or budget before it received a $502,000 grant to provide intensive “individualized mentoring” for 50 young men.

By the end of the one-year grant, the group’s leaders dropped key aspects of the proposal, such as opening a second office and providing individualized mentoring.

Imam Suetwedien Muhammad, who headed the program, said he decided instead to focus on running real estate and entrepreneurship classes — which he personally taught — as well as credit-repair classes.

Muhammad said he and the other imams also meet daily at the Masjid Muhammad to listen to police scanners inside a small alcove near the lobby of the mosque.

“This is our little police station,” he said, adding that the imams then go out “on the beat,” on bikes or on foot, intervening when they see issues.

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One wall of the small office is covered with handwritten forms, each with a sentence or two documenting an “intervention” — ranging from apparently serious altercations to minor domestic disputes. One report states that an imam was approached by a man asking for directions because he was “considering committing crimes” — but after 20 minutes of counseling, “he promised to avoid crimes and attend the masjid.”

Of the grant funds that the email spent, about $222,000 as of February, most went to the imams or to rent space at the mosque. Muhammad said he will continue his efforts, even if it’s as a volunteer. “This is my life’s work,” he said.

Arapis, the Villanova professor, said there were more effective ways to structure a grant program designed to make nonprofits more self-sustaining — for instance, by requiring them to match public funds with other revenue streams.

“Given Philadelphia’s issues with violence, crime, gun violence,” he said, “I would hope that the city would like to see a much more sustainable effort from organizations — not just a onetime thing where money is provided and if the city doesn’t provide more money then the programs disappear. That’s not how change will be made.”

Almost half of those who received grants had one thing in common: letters of support from city or state lawmakers.

Mary Horstmann, a deputy managing director, said the city had “a very robust selection process,” including panel interviews and score sheets. “There was no room for politics in that.”

But one recipient, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing future funding, said the message was clear: Proposals without political support from City Council members were less likely to be approved.

And one grant applicant, a group called Unity in the Community, proved remarkably successful even though its proposed 20% administrative costs were double what was allowed in grant guidelines. The application also lacked required documents such as internal financial statements; nonprofit tax statements; or bank account information.

The organization listed a single full-time employee: Democratic 48th Ward leader Anton Moore. Its application included letters of recommendation from City Councilmember Isaiah Thomas and State Sen. Anthony Williams.

Unity’s $258,000 proposal was to expand a youth carpentry training program then serving 13 teenagers in Moore’s ward. Only $20,000 of that was earmarked to pay a carpentry instructor, while $76,000 would go to Unity’s fiscal sponsor, a tiny nonprofit called Soul Food CDC.

The grant was approved for $417,900 — 60% above Unity’s request.

Joshu Harris, interim director of the city’s Office of Strategy for Criminal Justice, said Unity is a “very well established and highly regarded organization.” In an interview, Moore said his record of community work — not his political connections — got him the funding.

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Yet internal emails show administrators at Urban Affairs Coalition had questions about Unity almost immediately, and at one point sought — unsuccessfully — to meet with Moore to address issues with his fiscal sponsor.

The city paid Unity a 20% advance anyway: $83,580.

Five months after that, a staffer from Urban Affairs Coalition had grown “very concerned,” he wrote in an email.

“Unity has not submitted ANY invoices,” Urban Affairs’ Jeff Turi added. To date, Unity has submitted invoices for $8,358, records show, leaving $75,000 in taxpayer funds unaccounted for.

Moore attributed the invoicing issue to “some confusion” between the city and Urban Affairs Coalition.

“Initially, they thought they were giving us the whole grant up front,” he said, “but then it was mentioned that we have to invoice them.”

Moore said he plans to do so. In the interim, he said, private donations and foundation grants have sustained the carpentry program, which now serves 15 young people — about the same number as before the grant.

The layers of grant monitoring were “overwhelming,” the ward leader said. “Every second, you got people looking over your shoulder.”

A city spokesperson said that the city is now “in conversation” with Unity to address the missing receipts.

The city still invited Moore to reapply for a second round of grant funding in April. He said he’s considering it.

By the end of 2022, gun violence and homicides in Philadelphia remained near record levels.

The stated goal of the grant program — the “expansion” of community-based antiviolence efforts — was more difficult to measure.

For Chantay Love, of EMIR, the city grant did allow her to expand services — temporarily.

“The disappointing thing was that it ended. You have a chance to reapply, but that messes with our trauma-informed approach. The continuity of the service stops, but the violence doesn’t stop,” she said. “We need a level of funding that’s three to five years, that’s not this stop-start process.”

Other groups struggled to grow, and funds for stipends or incentives went unspent — an indication of flagging efforts to recruit program participants.

ManUpPHL, which proposed to serve 240 mentees with a $242,000 grant, ended up with only 79. Most of the $70,000 budgeted for stipends for those who completed the program was unspent by the end of the grant’s first year.

Solomon Jones, a contributing columnist for The Inquirer and WURD Radio host, runs the organization. He acknowledged recruiting challenges but said those who had gone through the program had thrived, connecting with good jobs and mental health care.

Evaluating the success of such programs is complex, said Duerward “Woody” Beale, whose organization, Youth Outreach Adolescent Community Awareness Program (YO-ACAP), was awarded a $504,000 grant to train 30 barbers to refer 10 at-risk young people each week for resources, case management and work readiness programs.

His organization did not come near to hitting those goals.

But Beale said YO-ACAP pivoted to an even more valuable focus: targeting the hardest-to-reach young people, many of whom were out of school, illiterate, and involved in crime. In some cases, it took weeks of phone calls just to get a client to an intake interview. And placing them in jobs was a steep challenge.

The flexible city grant funds enabled YO-ACAP to provide the extras that helped get participants on track: GED classes, driving lessons, vital documents, transportation and more.

“A lot of the grants won’t allow us to work with this population,” Beale said. “They expect us to work with someone more polished. This population falls through the cracks a lot of the time.”