Inspired by a recent story regarding Oregon Health Authority distributing $145,000 to Snack Bloc - a van that distributed food to protesters/rioters, I thought I would mention some of the other local groups cashing in on the covid hysteria.
Capaces Leadership Institute, an organization that doesn't even have a website, received the most most money from OHA. 5 million dollars, which they gave to another group who says they used it to buy and distribute PPE to farm workers...so they can walk out in the sunny wide open fields and wear masks drenched with sweat while breathing hard. $5 million is 10x as much money as Oregon Food Bank, who supplies food to 1400 food pantries, received. And it was spent on masks that probably don't work to prevent covid19, and to the extent that they do, mostly serve to socially disconnect people, stress them out, and slow down herd immunity.
Next we have PDX Mutal Aid, a group that sprung up during covid19, ostensibly to distribute money and other resources to people in need and raised over $100,000. They said that they were collaborating with a nonprofit that I regularly volunteer at, which I quickly found out to be a lie. They said they would give part of the remaining money to this org, which has never happened. There has been talk of taking the mutual aid group to court, but the nonprofit they lied to/about is busy actually-helping the community, so we haven't found the time.
The other groups on mutual aid list of collaborators seem to be equally made up, with some having nothing but dead Facebook pages. Montavilla Warming Shelter, one of the listed 'collaborators', belongs to the main organizer of the scam I mean group. The shelter is a registered 501c3 that consists of Sophie Lord going down the street to open a church up if it gets below freezing. (Update 12/21/2020: it appears that the shelter was dissolved on 10/27/2020 - just in time for winter.)
PDX Mutual Aid also said they collaborated with Rep. Earl Blumenauer, but super-rich "progressive" Earl, who owns a lot of big pharm and oil stock, imposes "free trade" on the 3rd world, and whose wealth has gone up roughly 500% between 2008-2018, never got back to the local news investigator that I contacted about the claim. Probably busy making money.
Black Resilience Fund has received over $2 million, with no clear evidence of any of the money being distributed that I have seen. They released a list of supposed donations, but the only people saying they have received money that I was able to find in a search of several social media platforms was nameless testimonies on BRF's Twitter account.
I met BRF's main organizer, Cameron Whitten, in person during the height of the covid panic. He stopped in at St Johns Food Share to volunteer for a bit and take some selfies of him volunteering for his political campaign. He said he would come back and never did (and never told anyone he wasn't coming like he promised.)
BRF is now hiring for several positions, which will probably be filled by people that Cameron knows or people who know someone that he knows. This may seem cynical, but consider that Cameron is affiliated with Brownhope.org, which is founded by Gregory McKelvey.
Greg, who recently ran the nearly-successful campaign for the "antifa mayor" Sarah Iannarone, has a long, shady history - including strangling an ex-girlfriend, or more specifically "fourth-degree assault, first-degree domestic kidnapping, strangulation and harassment" which got him a $132,500 bail until the charges mysteriously went away, surely not do to his elitist parents, including his lawyer mom. He raised $55,000 on GoFundMe after he helped start a riot and only has evidence of distributing a small part of the money. Gregory co-founded Portland Resistance (a group that seemed to specialize in getting high schoolers to not trust the police and riot) with serial-sexual predator Micah Rhodes (who antifa raised over $4000 to help keep him in Portland after getting out of prison, but somehow the GoFundMe now shows no money raised) and has never apologized for this.
The only way I can think of to see if BRF has really distributed money to black Portlanders is to do a street survey, which I may do soon. The social media search alone was pretty damning, in my opinion, but perhaps not enough.
Their impact reports have stopped since November. Their most recent report says "As of October 31 we’ve funded $1,472,969.81 in immediate support for 4,800 Black Portlanders." That is about 1/7 of black Portland receiving $300 on average.
It also states they helped promote Kevin Peterson Jr. who was killed by the police after flashing a gun. About $60,000 has been raised for Kevin's family. As someone who has sent an expensive law book to a black man in jail for shooting a cop, this actually infuriates me. There are so many real examples of people who have been abused by the police, like Marvin Louis Guy, who I sent the book to.
The cops here are overall so professional that antifa has to contrive outrage over someone who pulled a gun on cops and was shot because these antifa kids don't want to support people outside of their region - like black people in the south, where seriously racist, murderous cops reside and routinely arrest people for small amounts of marijuana and other petty crimes that Portlanders are shielded from. I call that PNW privilege.