Troubled charity faces audit
Nonprofit makes improvements, but state seeks financial and organizational data
The California attorney general’s office has begun investigating a San Francisco charity that claimed to serve the developmentally disabled, after a Chronicle exposé that found the nonprofit veered from its mission for years, doing little more than funding its director’s high-society lifestyle.
The rare audit by the state’s top legal office is the most significant review of Helpers Community Inc.’s finances. It comes as the once-celebrated nonprofit is launching new efforts to house and train adults with developmental disabilities, including plans to reopen three former group homes that have been shuttered for 15 years.
In August, the $6 million charity fired its longtime director, San Francisco socialite Joy Venturini Bianchi, and hired a replacement amid a flurry of new grant-making.
“We are now trying to get back into direct care and our original mission,” said the interim director, Jan Cohen, a consultant who has spent her career working with Bay Area nonprofits that serve individuals with disabilities.
Cohen said the attorney general’s office requested financial and organizational materials from Helpers in October and that the nonprofit immediately
complied. Those materials include 31 items, among them a list of people who have served on the group’s board of directors, governance policies, conflict-of-interest rules, credit card statements and canceled checks.
She said the charity expects to submit all the requested information by the end of November, adding that, based on all the documents she has seen, “I don’t believe the attorney general will find anything terrible.”
The attorney general’s office declined to comment.
Nearly 200,000 taxexempt organizations operate in California, according to state officials. More than 123 audit investigations were opened from 2014 to 2016 involving excess compensation, selfdealing transactions, illegal loans to directors, losses or threatened losses to charitable assets, and fundraising abuses.
“Whenever an attorney general’s office looks into a nonprofit, it is serious,” said Laura Otten, a professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia, who has advised the nonprofit industry for 30 years and reviewed Helpers’ financial information. “There has to be grave concern for any (attorney general) to single one nonprofit out from all in her or his state.”
Helpers Community Inc. — known as Helpers of the Mentally Retarded until 2015 — long housed people with developmental disabilities in Richmond District homes that the nonprofit owns. But since ending its residential services in 2002, it had done little charitable work, while amassing millions of dollars in assets and donations and handsomely compensating Bianchi as she traveled to numerous redcarpet affairs.
Despite its stated mission of collecting donations for groups housing adults with developmental disabilities, Helpers gave nothing to residential programs for 13 years. From 2003 to 2008, the group spent nothing on any charitable cause, financial records showed. All the while, Helpers’ IRS filings show, Bianchi’s annual compensation package was larger than the group’s total charitable giving in every year since the homes were closed.
After The Chronicle’s investigation appeared, Helpers awarded $1 million in grants in July to several Bay Area nonprofits serving the elderly and disabled, its largest-ever annual disbursement of funds.
Audits by the attorney general can take anywhere from six months to several years, depending on the complexity of the complaint. If an audit uncovers problems, state regulators can demand corrective actions, take the charity to court, or revoke its registration status in California. Only the IRS can rescind an organization’s nonprofit status.
Helpers board President Peggy Bachecki acknowledged in a recent interview that the charity strayed from its original mission but said she believes “nothing illegal was done.”
But some former Helpers employees said the attorney general’s audit is overdue.
“It is finally going to be thoroughly looked into,” said Roberto Rosas Mariscal, an administrative assistant who worked at Helpers for three years. “I hope that justice will be served, because a lot of people have been hurt and disappointed.”
Founded in 1963, Helpers originally housed adults with developmental disabilities in a collection of homes on Fulton Street along Golden Gate Park. In 2002, under Bianchi’s leadership, the charity began selling donated high-end fashion pieces, the proceeds of which it claimed to be using to support other groups providing residential care for people living with disabilities.
Bianchi’s annual compensation of roughly $200,000 far exceeded that of CEOs at San Francisco human services nonprofits of similar size. At the same time, internal accounting records shared with The Chronicle show that during the past 15 years, Bianchi spent more than half a million dollars on such things as luxury clothing and accessories to resell at a pair of boutiques operated by Helpers; maintaining her Jaguar; domestic and foreign travel; and a “public relations” campaign that included buying symphony, orchestra and ballet tickets and dining at upscale restaurants.
In contrast to Helpers’ assertions that it donated the money it raised, Helpers granted paltry funds to other charities.
Several Helpers donors said they were concerned that their contributions were being misused, while former employees recounted that Bianchi personally benefited from her position, in possible violation of nonprofit rules.
Three of Bianchi’s former administrative assistants said she routinely asked them to perform personal tasks they found inappropriate and outside the scope of their duties, including housekeeping, cooking and yard work at her private residence.
Bianchi, 79, said in a text message that she did not know why the attorney general would be investigating Helpers, and directed questions to the organization’s board, stating: “The Board had final responsibility in all matters.”
Bianchi, however, served on the Helpers board from 2002 until she was removed in December 2016. She has previously insisted that she served the nonprofit well and that the charity struggled to find worthy recipients for its funds.
Since her departure, Helpers has shifted its focus away from highfashion resales and toward more front-line assistance.
Helpers House of Couture on Fulton Street, the charity’s signature property, has been closed, and a liquidation sale of its inventory is planned next year. Cohen has given other clothing to Goodwill in San Francisco, and thousands of pieces of costume jewelry and other accessories collected by Bianchi are on consignment with Goodwill of Silicon Valley. Helpers’ online store, which sold antiques, jewelry and clothing, also has been shut down.
Within a year, Helpers plans to partner with the Pomeroy Recreation & Rehabilitation Center to open a state-licensed respite home to provide temporary care for up to seven adults. Bachecki said Helpers hopes its other two properties, planned as permanent residences for about a dozen adults, will open within five years.
Its most significant recent achievement is a job-training program at the Helpers Bazaar boutique in Ghirardelli Square, a glass-encased shop featuring holiday ornaments and used knickknacks. Helpers says it hopes to increase its stock of items created by people with developmental disabilities, including hand-loomed textiles, jewelry and candleholders, to a third of the store’s inventory.
Three trainees are now working at the resale shop for the first time, the result of a new partnership with the Arc San Francisco and the Pomeroy center.
Clients from those organizations are opening and closing the boutique, working the cash register and greeting customers. Among them is Connie Chu, who along with other trainees has been earning $14 an hour since last month.
Chu, dressed in a button-up cardigan and blue-checked blouse, arrived 15 minutes early to work on Wednesday. A poet and science fiction writer, she said she gets the most pleasure from work directing customers to the used books section and hopes one day to donate her own selfpublished work.
Previously, the boutique’s sales raised money for Helpers but did not employ adults with disabilities, despite having long received a tax exemption granted to agencies that provide such direct services.
Chu, who at age 40 has just moved out of her parents’ home into her own studio apartment, takes Muni to her new job at Helpers. She had one word for her newfound independence: “freedom.”