The District government is largely to blame for millions of unaccounted-for dollars in grant money given to a nonprofit group that has worked to reduce gang violence, city lawmakers said Monday. At a D.C. Council committee hearing that examined a recent audit of Peaceoholics, Ward 1 Councilman Jim Graham said that the city agencies that doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money should have acted more responsibly. The audit, released in August, concluded that the organization was not guilty of any wrongdoing or misuse of funds.
The organization has been granted more than $13.7 million over the past five years from seven city agencies, but those agencies had not held the nonprofit accountable for how those funds were spent, the audit said.
“I’m left wondering why there wasn’t an active effort by the D.C. government to assist this organization,” said Graham, chairman of the Committee on Human Services. “Clearly, $13.7 million is a lot of money and to find this much lacking in terms of procedures, I think more could have been done to assist this organization.”
Peaceoholics isn’t “without its problems,” Graham noted. The audit, which was requested last year by Ward 7 Councilwoman Yvette Alexander, also criticized the nonprofit’s bookkeeping, noting that some grant funds were combined into one account. That violates city law and makes it impossible to track spending from those grants, D.C. Auditor Yolanda Branche said Monday.
Peaceoholics founder Ron Moten is running against Alexander for the Ward 7 council seat.
Moten had ties to former Mayor Adrian Fenty, and Peaceoholics’ city funding was cut after Fenty lost his re-election bid last year.
Those who have benefited from the group say some of what Peaceoholics does can’t be measured. Sharece Crawford, a 2005 graduate of Ballou Senior High School, said Peaceoholics swooped in to help immediately after 17-year-old James Richardson was shot to death by another student on school grounds.
Crawford, considered an “at-risk youth,” said Peaceoholics helped her pay for college.
Not every expenditure fits into a neat category, and “it’s not easy to determine where and when resources will be needed,” she said.
