Steph Curry’s Donation Among Funds Stolen in Larger Theft, Nonprofit Leader Claims

The former head of an East Oakland youth boxing program stole significantly more money than the roughly $100,000 that prosecutors accused him of embezzling, according to its acting director.

“It’s substantially more than that. Substantially,” said Dawna Williams, the interim executive director of the East Oakland Boxing Association.

Williams, who declined to provide the exact amount, said the EBOA reported the theft to the Internal Revenue Service more than two years ago and that the $100,000 figure cited in the complaint was based on the most direct evidence of impropriety.

Solomon Howard, who served as the EOBA’s executive director from 2017-2021, is accused of using the East Oakland Boxing Association’s debit cards to make personal Amazon purchases — including a queen-size bed and a memory foam mattress — and falsely reporting them as “program supplies” and other generic descriptions, according to charges filed in February in an Oakland federal court.

Howard pleaded not guilty last week in Oakland federal court to mail fraud and tax evasion, following accusations that he embezzled funds from the organization — including a $50,000 donation that Stephen and Ayesha Curry presented to him in 2019 on an episode Ellen DeGeneres’ show, “Ellen’s Greatest Night of Giveaways.”

Williams was on the organization’s board of directors in 2021 when she said board members began noticing numerous accounting irregularities. When the board questioned Howard, he was suspiciously evasive, she said.

“We were met with lots of excuses and things like that,” she said, noting that he “had the gift of gab.” “And that was just like, ‘Oh no, something’s not right here. Something is really off.’”

As the board continued questioning Howard, he abruptly laid off his entire staff of about nine people and then resigned, Williams, who became interim director in March 2024, said.

“He terminated everyone to kind of cover his tracks, I think,” she said. “We hired an independent accounting expert to come in and review our books because he had also terminated the bookkeeper.”

“It was like a DOGE moment here,” she added, referring to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The evidence became irrefutable, Williams said.

“I knew that we could not allow somebody to do this to the kids and do this to the people who trusted us with this funding,” she said, noting that the IRS ultimately referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “We knew that we had to find justice here. However long it took, whatever it took, we had to find justice.”

Prosecutors also allege that Howard used the organization’s funds to pay for a vacation rental, reporting it as business expense, and to purchase a Ford Explorer, which he later traded in for a Cadillac Escalade and registered in his own name.

“It’s all greed-related,” Williams said. “Literally, the things that he spent money on, he could have done those same things with the salary that he made, but he chose not to.”

Howard’s attorney declined KQED’s multiple requests for comment.

Founded in 1987, the East Oakland nonprofit offers boxing lessons to children and young adults, as well as a range of other youth development programming, including gardening and academic support. Most participants come from low-income backgrounds.

“The kids that come to this program, they already don’t have much,” Williams said. That makes it that much harder to understand how “somebody [could] take it from them, what somebody entrusted us with.”

In the 2019 episode of DeGeneres’ show, Howard described the organization as an after-school program “focused on keeping young folks off the streets and engaged in more holistic wellness activity.” He said it serves kids in “essentially kind of the forgotten part of Oakland, where a lot of poverty, crime, violence and negative activities happen.”

At the end of the episode, the Currys delivered a box-truck full of supplies and revealed a surprise $50,000 donation from the show.

“Hopefully, it goes a long way, man,” Steph Curry told Howard as the two men hugged.

Prosecutors allege that Howard subsequently deposited that entire donation into his own personal account without the knowledge of EOBA staff or its board members.

If convicted of the charges, Howard faces up to 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, as well as restitution.

“He needs to have his day in court. And hopefully, he makes some level of restitution,” said Williams, who predicts there will be a plea deal. “I don’t think he’s remorseful at all.”

Williams said EOBA has since taken aggressive steps to ensure this will never happen again, including using an external bookkeeper and requiring multiple signatures on all checks.

“The small mom-and-pop nonprofits, they do need to have someone who is professionally there to manage their books and have some level of oversight,” she said, noting that this kind of theft is probably more common than most people realize. “I’m happy for us to have that oversight.
That just keeps us on our Ps and Qs, [so] this will never happen again for us.”