How a Trusted SF Nonprofit Unraveled — and Took Millions With It

Within a month of starting her new job as the programs director at the San Francisco Parks Alliance in 2017, Amanda Montez began noticing major financial red flags.

Montez quickly discovered the organization had been making off-the-books microloans “with poor accounting and no proper reconciliation” to the dozens of community partners it fiscally sponsored. And while cleaning out the desk of a former staff member, she found over $400,000 worth of receipts from a city grant program that had never been submitted for reimbursement.

“The city owed the San Francisco Parks Alliance hundreds of thousands of dollars, and no one was managing that or tracking that,” Montez, who left the organization in 2019, told KQED.

Perhaps most alarmingly, she found evidence suggesting that funds raised by community partners and reserved explicitly for their use were being “inappropriately mixed” with the organization’s general funds and used as collateral for loans, she said.

Montez raised her concerns with then-CEO Drew Becher and other organization leaders, but said they “weren’t taken seriously.”

When she learned last week that the prominent nonprofit had officially folded after admitting to misspending millions of dollars of restricted funds to cover its operating costs — including funds raised by its many community partners — Montez said she was “utterly heartbroken,” but hardly surprised.

“Anybody who was working there in senior management would have seen it coming,” she said. “The financial practices I warned about have now led to exactly the kind of crisis that has harmed dozens of community organizations.”

The sudden downfall of the Parks Alliance, which has played a critical role in supporting an array of open-space projects throughout San Francisco for more than 50 years, prompted the city to recently launch civil and criminal investigations. And last week, the Board of Supervisors’ Government Audit & Oversight Committee subpoenaed three of the group’s former leaders, including Becher.

“Both the CEO and Board of Directors were fully aware of these financial management problems that are now part of the criminal investigation,” Montez said.

Neither Becher nor Robert Ogilvie, the organization’s most recent CEO, responded to KQED’s requests for comment.

In the nearly three years Montez worked for the Parks Alliance, she and a small team of mostly fledgling staff members tried to create a new system to more accurately track the organization’s expenses and manage its partner accounts — even as her bosses and the board increasingly prioritized big-donor projects with lots of “glitz and glam” over serving “the underlying needs of the community.”

“Board members were more interested in galas and ribbon cuttings than the mission-driven work that the park partners were deeply engaged in,” she said. “Because it’s a lot more exciting to have a fancy gala than it is to tile over a walkway. But the walkway is what matters. And that’s what they seem to have missed out on.”

Another former Parks Alliance employee who worked closely with Montez corroborated her account of financial mismanagement. The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous due to pending investigations, told KQED there had been signs of trouble for at least a decade, despite repeated efforts by staff to refocus the organization on its original mission of supporting neighborhood parks and other public-space projects.

After Montez’s departure, the Park Alliance’s total assets nosedived from nearly $30 million in 2019 to just over $8 million in 2023, even though its expenses that year were nearly twice that amount, according to the most recent available tax filings.

As of last month, the organization had about $4.6 million in outstanding obligations and just $1.6 million in remaining assets, according to an email from former Board Chair Louise Mozingo to a donor. In the email obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, Mozingo admitted to misspending restricted funds and likened the organization’s financial situation to “a dumpster fire.”

Of the missing funds, the Parks Alliance owes more than a million dollars to the city’s Recreation and Parks Department, which it partnered closely with to raise private money for projects, including the development of Crane Cove Park and India Basin Waterfront Park, both on the city’s eastern shoreline.

Nicola Miner, a local philanthropist who serves on the board of the Baker Street Foundation, donated about $3 million to the Parks Alliance to help pay for new playgrounds and a dog run at Crane Cove Park. Two weeks ago, the foundation received a letter from the organization saying it “misappropriated funds and spent it on general operating expenses,” Miner told KQED’s Forum this week.

“They actively tried to raise money from us for general operating expenses, not telling us they’d already misappropriated our funds,” she said, noting that her foundation agreed to the funding in 2020 and then allocated it incrementally.

“There’s a lot of trust involved when you donate to an organization, that they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do,” Miner said. “I don’t know what happened over the past five years.”

It’s not the first time the Parks Alliance 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.

The collapse of the Parks Alliance is perhaps most devastating for the more than 80 mostly volunteer-run community groups that relied on the organization to hold and distribute funds for open-space beautification projects.

Those groups say the organization collectively misappropriated more than $1.7 million that it had raised, mostly through individual donations. Dozens of group representatives lined up to speak at last week’s oversight committee hearing, urging supervisors to hold the defunct nonprofit’s leaders accountable and “solve this mess.”

“We put our money that we raised under very difficult circumstances, with trust into San Francisco Parks Alliance. And we’re wondering where that trust has gone and what can be done about it,” said Devi Joseph, who founded Friends of Cabrillo Playground in 2007 to fix up the long-neglected park in the Outer Richmond District that she had played in as a child.

“The whole neighborhood worked on the project,” she told the committee. “It brought us all together as friends. And we feel very disappointed right now.”

Montez said the protocols and record-keeping requirements that her team instituted in 2017 were meant to “ensure that exactly these types of things wouldn’t happen.”

“I don’t know where that went,” she said. “This feels like history repeating itself. But this time, there weren’t any staff in the leadership team willing to stop it.”