SF Parks Alliance to Shut Down Amid Misspending Scandal, Leaving Partners in the Lurch

The San Francisco Parks Alliance, a prominent nonprofit that has supported the city’s public spaces for more than 50 years, is reportedly preparing to shut down amid revelations that it misspent millions of dollars.

The group’s board members voted last week to begin shuttering operations and laying off staff, leaving dozens of partner organizations scrambling for funding alternatives, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Standard reported on Monday, based on information both outlets said they received from an anonymous source familiar with the situation.

Employees who work with at least some of the local groups that the Parks Alliance supports have already received layoff notices.

The implosion of the organization comes as its leaders recently admitted to misspending at least $3.8 million in restricted funds to cover its operating costs, prompting the city to launch civil and criminal investigations of the group and the mayor to suspend its city funding.

The Parks Alliance has long been a critical player in supporting San Francisco’s many open-space projects, serving as a fiscal sponsor for about 80 community organizations across the city that don’t have their own tax-exempt status and use the nonprofit as a bank to hold and distribute their funds.

Among those groups is Sutro Stewards, which performs habitat restoration and trail maintenance on Mount Sutro and, until this week, had eight staff members, all of whom are technically employed by the Parks Alliance.

“I was laid off yesterday, as was all my staff,” Ildiko Polony, the group’s executive director, told KQED. She said all of her employees received a notice on Monday afternoon from the Parks Alliance, sent to their personal emails, with separation paperwork.

“Due to significant financial challenges, the San Francisco Parks Alliance had to make a difficult decision to lay off employees effective May 30th,” the email stated, according to Polony, who said she had a feeling this was coming after her entire staff on Friday received vacation payouts on their paychecks.

“So that’s how we found out,” she said, noting that the email doesn’t explicitly state the alliance is shutting down. “The communication was horrible. And this is incredibly detrimental to our work.”

After reports of the Parks Alliance’s financial mismanagement began emerging in late April, Polony formed a coalition of the many community groups that receive fiscal sponsorship from the alliance, in an effort to keep it afloat.

“We all came together to try to work with the board of directors, the board of trustees of SFPA, to right the ship,” she said.

Most of the fiscally sponsored groups are volunteer-led, using the alliance to park their individual donations, although at least two others have employees who were also laid off on Monday, Polony said.

The groups involved operate in every part of the city, performing an array of open-space improvement projects, she said, including litter cleanup in parks and maintaining public water fountains and stairways.

“What I really want people to understand is that while what’s happened with SFPA is unjust, egregious, unfair, possibly criminal and horribly negligent, they’ve [also] basically stolen our money,” added Polony, who said the Parks Alliance is still holding about $175,000 in funds raised by her organization that may now be gone.

“That’s why they had access to spend money that my group, as well as most of these other partner groups, had entrusted with them,” she said.

In a leaked email last month sent to a Parks Alliance donor and obtained by the Chronicle, the alliance’s board chair, Louise Mozingo, admitted to misspending those restricted funds and likened the organization’s financial situation to “a dumpster fire.”

In the email, Mozingo said the board was preparing for the possibility of shutting down the organization and had already contacted a firm specializing in “non-profit liquidation.” She also acknowledged that the board was “very conscious” that doing so would “substantially hurt many small businesses and organizations that will realize a significant loss, causing real hardship in already uncertain times,” according to the Chronicle.

The Parks Alliance did not respond to KQED’s request for comment.

The downfall of the alliance, which Supervisor Jackie Fielder described to KQED as “a magnet and a who’s who in the city for very powerful people,” follows a series of scandals involving multiple city-funded nonprofits accused of misusing city funds or unfairly awarding grants based on personal connections. Last year, the executive director of the now-defunct nonprofit SF SAFE was arrested for allegedly stealing and misusing more than $700,000 in public funds and donations.

It’s also not the first time the Parks Alliance, which operates independently from the parks department but is closely linked to it, has been mired in scandal. In 2020, Mohammed Nuru, the city’s former chief of public works, funneled nearly $1 million in donations from various city contractors into a Parks Alliance account that he used as his personal slush fund.

Two years later, Nuru was convicted of fraud and sentenced to seven years in federal prison.

Following news of the alliance’s imminent closure, the Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit and Oversight Committee, co-led by Fielder, announced it would hold a hearing on Friday addressing allegations of financial mismanagement directed against the organization, while also introducing a motion to initiate an audit of the Recreation and Parks Department.

The offices of the city attorney and controller, which had already been reviewing the Parks Alliance’s finances, said in a statement on Tuesday that they sought to make sure that any closure or liquidation process “takes into account the needs of the City and the community.”

“The financial mismanagement at the Parks Alliance has done real harm to San Francisco, which is why we are working on a joint public integrity review of the matter,” the statement said.

Polony said that while the alliance has always been disorganized, it served a critical role in enabling groups like hers to do public service work that directly benefits the city and its residents. And she said it’s incumbent on the city to now step in and fix the mess.

“The city hasn’t been able to raise the revenue via taxes to support our public space,” she said. “And so, the function that SFPA provided needs to continue.”

Like other groups in her coalition, Polony is now rushing to find a new fiscal sponsor to access her funds so she can rehire her staff and continue the work.

“Had this been done smoothly, had the city worked with the Alliance to create a transition for all of these community partners, this could have been done with a lot less harm,” she said. “Their going under makes a bad problem even worse for us because now we’re left in the lurch with no one to catch us.”