Jeff Brown’s ShopRite received $1.5 million from a nonprofit he founded that provides formerly incarcerated people with jobs

Supermarket owner turned mayoral hopeful Jeff Brown has long presided over an annual golf fundraiser at the Whitemarsh Valley Country Club in Lafayette Hill. The event was advertised as being hosted by Brown’s ShopRite to benefit Uplift Solutions — a nonprofit Brown founded that today helps formerly incarcerated people find jobs.

In fact, Uplift managed the event, according to the nonprofit’s executive director, Atif Bostic. But, in 2020, most of the net proceeds — $92,000 — did not go toward Uplift’s programs. Instead, the nonprofit used these funds to reimburse Brown’s supermarket chain for scores of food donations and small grants to community groups, according to Bostic.

“It was basically a business transaction, for us to manage the golf outing for a fee,” Bostic said. Its proceeds also covered the $70,000 or so it cost to put on the event each year. “Uplift was making ten grand off it.”

Uplift — and the funds that flowed from the nonprofit to Brown’s Super Stores and out to community groups and charities — also served to burnish Brown’s campaign-ready image as a charitable businessman.

Bostic described the close relationship with Brown’s as a “net positive” for Uplift. But it also benefited Brown’s supermarkets in little known ways: Between 2016 and 2020, while Brown chaired the nonprofit’s board, Bostic said, more than $1.5 million flowed through Uplift to Brown’s Super Stores, which operates ShopRite and Fresh Grocer supermarkets, to lease office space, buy food, or reimburse the corporation for its donations to other community groups.

The company did not directly respond to questions about why the nonprofit was reimbursing the company’s charitable donations to community groups. Brown, who left the board in 2021, declined to be interviewed. He transferred control of Brown’s Super Stores to his son in advance of his run for mayor.

» READ MORE: Jeff Brown’s grocery stores gave ex-offenders a ‘first chance.’ Now it’s a key to his mayoral campaign.

Brown has acknowledged in the past that the company benefited from Uplift’s recruitment and training of hundreds of low-wage workers — but said any transactions with his company supported Uplift. For instance, he said Brown’s handled the nonprofit’s $800,000 or so payroll at no administrative cost.

A lawyer for the company declined to answer specific questions, but said in a statement that the company had never “in any way profited from its charitable efforts or its relationship with Uplift.”

“Brown’s consistently provided resources and support to the nonprofit, often at great expense to Brown’s, for the sole purpose of ensuring Uplift’s long-term success,” said lawyer Matt Haverstick.

In some years, Uplift operated in the red even as it paid tens of thousands of dollars for leased offices in Brown’s New Jersey headquarters — space one former staffer said Uplift infrequently used, as its main workforce training center is in North Philadelphia.

For instance, in 2019, Uplift reported $1.5 million in revenue, but also a $233,000 deficit on a financial disclosure form. That year, it turned over $145,000 in golf outing proceeds to Brown’s Super Stores for what was described in an audited financial statement as “donated items reimbursement.” Uplift also listed $64,000 in “office rent” expenses to Brown’s, and $26,000 more in lunches for trainees purchased from Brown’s stores, the documents show.

Bostic emphasized that Uplift benefited from its partnerships with Brown’s Super Stores, and there is no indication these transactions were illicit.

Laura Otten, a nonprofit consultant and former director of the Nonprofit Center at La Salle University, said that certain financial arrangements between Brown’s and Uplift raised concerns.

“There’s a difference between whether it’s legal and whether it’s ethical. And nonprofits have to be held to a higher ethical standard,” she said. “It makes zero sense to say you’re raising money for a nonprofit only for that nonprofit to give it to a for-profit company for its own philanthropic efforts.”

Brown received positive press for his work with Uplift and for opening grocery stores in underserved communities — both of which have been key features of his campaign for mayor. The Inquirer previously reported that his company received $18 million in public subsidies to open those supermarkets.

In 2021, after Brown resigned from Uplift’s board, his wife took his place as chair and their son joined the board. About that time, the nonprofit moved off of Brown’s Super Stores’ payroll and ended its lease arrangements with the company.

Although Uplift continued to manage the golf outing in 2021 and 2022, Bostic said he sought and obtained board approval to retain more of the funds raised. In 2021, Bostic said, Uplift got about $100,000. About $188,000 also flowed to Brown’s for its “community giving initiative program,” records show.

The nonprofit has also continued to make purchases from Brown’s stores.

In 2021, for example, when Uplift won a $150,000 antiviolence grant from the city of Philadelphia to expand its workforce program, it purchased $18,400 worth of lunches from Brown’s stores for program participants with grant funds, city records show.

Brown, who spoke about Uplift’s founding last month, said he and his wife created the nonprofit in 2009 at the urging of then-U. S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

As Brown tells it, Vilsack praised him for opening stores in underserved areas: “He said, ‘Jeff, I think what you did is brilliant, and your heart is bigger than anyone I ever met. … Can you build some sort of apparatus to make what you know available to the rest of the world?’”

Brown explained that it was more efficient, at first, for his company to lease offices to Uplift and to manage its payroll.

“A little scrappy nonprofit with like a $100,000 payroll, there’s no economic way to run a payroll. … And so the company said they’d help them out,” Brown told an Inquirer reporter last month.

» READ MORE: Mayoral candidate Jeff Brown got $18.7 million in taxpayer support to open ShopRite stores in ‘food deserts’

Initially, Uplift described its mission as seeking to “eradicate food deserts” — in practice, by serving as a conduit for federal tax credit programs.

Uplift aided in the tax credit financing of at least two ShopRite stores owned by other members of Wakefern, the $18.6 billion retailers’ cooperative that supplies food to ShopRite and Fresh Grocer stores.

Later, Uplink branched into supporting health centers in underserved communities, and earned revenue by helping manage the construction and subleasing of two federally subsidized clinics run by outside operators, both located in Brown’s ShopRite stores.

Bostic, a former banking executive, was hired to lead the nonprofit in 2015. As President Barack Obama left the White House, he said, “the outlook was not positive” for federal supermarket funding.

Uplift’s shift toward workforce development started in 2017. That year, Uplift opened a training center at Enon Tabernacle Baptist Church in West Oak Lane, with private foundation funding and a United Way grant.

The center contained four mock supermarket checkout lines, and shelves of paper towels, cereal, and other consumer goods, some bearing ShopRite branding. In its first year, every graduate wound up at Brown’s locations.

Brown, in a 2017 interview, acknowledged the benefit of free recruitment and training. The grocer said it was a fair exchange because the company guarantees jobs for people who struggle to find work, such as convicted sex offenders.

“We were surprised that some of the people we hired have fairly good business skills,” he added. “The drug trade is a business.”

Of 890 total Uplift graduates, nearly 60% went on to work for Brown’s, according to the nonprofit. In a recent interview, Brown said “not a lot” of Uplift graduates now land at his stores. Formerly incarcerated people comprise 20% of Brown’s workforce today.

The shift to workforce programs drew positive press, as trainees spoke highly of the nonprofit’s workforce training program and later job opportunities offered by Brown’s.

“They’re more than just talkers — they’re walkers. I’m a prime example,” said Wayne Garrett, a ShopRite manager, Uplift graduate, and board member. “I have multiple felonies to where I went places and people slammed the door in my face. … They give you a chance.”

By 2021, Bostic said, the group began a strategic realignment meant to show the organization “was focused squarely on our justice impacted work.”

It shuttered its supermarket development and health care arms. (One supermarket clinic continues to lease space directly from Brown’s, Bostic said.) Uplift moved out of Brown’s offices and into a new headquarters in Philadelphia, and contracted its own payroll processor.

It also diversified its job training, adding HVAC and commercial driver’s license programs, and sought new employment partners. This year, it will not host the golf outing.

Bostic said that these changes were “not contentious” and that the grocery company’s past support “allowed us to become the independent organization we are today.”

Otten, the nonprofit consultant, said there were benefits to a nonprofit distancing itself from a for-profit partner.

“If they’re leasing office space from ShopRite in New Jersey but their work is in Pennsylvania, I’m going to start asking, ‘What’s going on there? Is that the best use of their money?’” she said. “And savvy donors are going to start asking questions.”

Inquirer staff writers Sean Collins Walsh and Layla Jones contributed to this article.