Courtesy photo
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Contributing Writer
I was shocked almost beyond belief. Shocked that long time, beloved Watts community icon Sweet Alice Harris was named as one of the alleged culprits in money grabbing for personal gain from the now defunct Food Bank of Southern California.
The nonprofit received millions from state and federal funds through the years for the express purpose of providing free and nutritious food for the needy. Many of them are in Watts.
I, like so many community activists, have long held Sweet Alice on a personal pantheon of those who do selfless work to aid the poor. And nowhere is the plight of poverty and need greater than in Watts and South L.A.
Sweet Alice has always been the one name that when one talks of aiding the poor she is the one whom I and many others instantly think of.
Sweet Alice denied any improprieties. The usual standard innocent until absolutely proven guilty will be the watchword for me and hopefully others in judging Sweet Alice.
But there’s a bigger question and issue that the sorry drama embroiling the Food Bank of Southern California again casts an ugly glare on.
Are long established nonprofits that provide aid and services to the poor and receive millions in state and federal funding actually fulfilling that mission? And just how much of the money goes for those programs and not into the pockets of officers and board members of the nonprofit?
There’s no easy answer to that question. The Long Beach-based food bank, by all accounts, did provide considerable aid and, in many cases, life-saving food aid to the poor. There are many testimonials from grateful recipients to that. Many of them specifically name Sweet Alice as a guiding force and a moving spirit behind the food bank’s work in the community.
But the facts are not just stubborn things. In this case they are potentially indicting things. In the case of the Department of Social Services which conducted the investigation of the Food Bank of Southern California, its members, including Sweet Alice, were accused of misusing money for such things as a car purchase, home renovations, poor record keeping and reporting, and zero transparency in its activities. The issue at the core was accountability. There was little to none.
There have been numerous allegations, investigations and reports on alleged fund theft and misuse abuses by nonprofits that claim to serve the poor. In a website report, Civic Reinvention, a group that works with many nonprofits, cited specific “red flags” that point to embezzlement and fraud by officers and board members in nonprofits.
They include outright theft, sloppy or nonexistent record keeping, lax or absent reporting on how monies are spent, and failed or flawed oversight of fund allocations.
Those were the same red flags that the Social Services Department in its investigation cited about the food bank. The inside profiteering and flat-out rip-off by those who run nonprofits for personal gain is not a small matter.
In a 2020 global fraud study, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners found that nonprofits lose a considerable amount of dollars annually to fraud. But it’s not just the dollar amount lost to misuse and theft.
The public revelations of fraud damage the reputation of the nonprofit and its administrators and cast a permanent shadow over the operations of other nonprofits, especially those that claim as its mandate the noble aim of providing desperately needed resources and aid for the poor. Food obviously ranks right at the top of the list.
There’s more that makes the demise of and the taint on the Food Bank of Southern California even sadder. It comes at almost the very moment that the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it was slashing more than $1 billion in funding for the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement and the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement programs for 2025. That is yet another of the legion of cost-cutting measures mandated by the Trump administration in its crusade against alleged government waste.
The massive fund slash can mean only one thing. There will be a lot of poor, needy food recipients that potentially will go hungry. This will put further strain on increasingly strapped local and state resources to provide food provision for the needy.
Again, I do not pass judgement on Sweet Alice and other officers and board members of the food bank. It’s an ongoing case and probe as it should be.
The saddest thing for me is that it again underscores the absolute crucial need for full accountability and transparency by every agency, and that certainly includes nonprofits, that receive taxpayer dollars to aid the poor and needy. When some of their top brass scam money, it’s not just the poor’s who lose. Everybody loses.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His latest book is A Tale of Two Los Angeles Wildfires—Separate and Unequal (Middle Passage Press). He also is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Facebook Livestreamed.
