Local money for homeless goes to maintain high lifestyle of local VOA officials

It feels good to support causes that are important to you – the ones that pull at your heart or your conscience, and cause you to want to make a difference somehow.
This is a tremendous human brotherly impulse. Whether we personally reach out and help someone nearby, or send a check to a project, we are tapping into this very basic human facility – good will.
Many fine people in my town give money, food and clothing to the Volunteers of America Sheridan Community Homeless Shelter.
Most people don’t require that their donation go to a particular thing – like computers, or children’s toys, or new pillows. They just cheerfully give and assume that their charitable donation will be used to support the homeless.
I am afraid that the cheerful, generous giving of my townspeople would not be so cheerful and not so generous if they new the abuses of their donations.
As I mentioned in January, truckloads of physical donations (clothes, dishes, furniture) were taken to the city landfill. Ever single pair of jeans and every plate and every stuffed animal was donated by the great people in my town.
Not only by the truckload, but sometimes an armload of stuff is brought to the shelter. The nice people are thanked. After they leave, the staff joke about the “crap” people bring, and take the stuff across the street to a conveniently-placed dumpster.
On paper, the donation is written down as an “in kind” donation, which means the monetary value of whatever the items were can be used to match grant funds. In effect, the shelter converts physical donations to cash, and then toss the donation in the landfill.
It is legal, but it is hardly ethical, and lacks the character that one would expect from a religious organization that relies on its neighbors for support.
Sometimes, the shelter receives good old hard cold cash. They get $40,000 a year from some great people who operate a foundation.
Thing is, VOA pays itself $60,000 per year from shelter funds. The local VOA office skims $5,000 per month from income for the shelter. This money is “administrative costs” – not the shelter’s, but the officers of the local VOA. This particular $60,000 does not even pay the salary of one of the top five officers in the local VOA office.
It is my informed opinion that once the top five fill out their expense vouchers for travel and food, there is much more than half a million dollars of the organizational budget.
There is enough financial smoke and mirrors in the organization that it should give anyone pause before they grant thousands of dollars, or take a used pair of shoes to the shelter.