Criminal charges just came down on a former SF homelessness nonprofit CEO accused of buying a Tesla with public money, among a slew of other financial improprieties, and she’s facing nine felony charges.<\/p>\n
We know that San Francisco has had a number of nonprofit spending scandals<\/a> over the last several years and it is quite difficult to keep track of them all. But one involving the former CEO of a Bayview homelessness nonprofit called United Council of Human Services<\/a> (UCHS) goes absolutely beyond the pale. That CEO is the now-ousted Gwendolyn Westbrook, who was fired in 2023<\/a> after the Chronicle reported on a lawsuit<\/a> that alleged Westbrook had doubled her own salary, and that “current and former employees were aware of her buying a new Tesla, giving her Infiniti sport utility vehicle to her niece, buying vehicles for a close family friend and her cousins and vacationing in Aruba.” <\/p>\n For good measure, per the Chron, the same lawsuit alleged that Westbrook “was paying for relatives\u2019 weddings and flaunting a trunk full of high-priced jewelry,” while submitting financial statements that vaguely described hundreds of thousands in spending simply as “other expenses.”<\/p>\n None of those allegations have been specifically proven or disproven, but it sure seems like something untoward was happening with UCHS’s bookkeeping under Gwendolyn Westbrook. Today, the Chronicle reports that SF District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’s office has charged Westbook with nine felonies<\/a>, largely around the misuse of public funds. A statement from Jenkins’s office does not specifically detail the improprieties, just that they add up to about $1.2 million. <\/p>\n “According to court documents, Ms. Westbrook misappropriated more than $1.2 million in public funds from UCHS accounts to herself through a combination of undocumented cash withdrawals and self-issued payments, and that additional large sums withdrawn from UCHS accounts remain unaccounted for,” Jenkins’s office announced Monday. “Prosecutors allege that between 2019 and 2023, Ms. Westbrook engaged in unauthorized self-payments, improper cash withdrawals, and fraudulent reimbursement practices that diverted public funds for personal use.”<\/p>\n UCHS was originally a mobile soup kitchen known as Mother Brown\u2019s Dining Room<\/a>, and transitioned into becoming a larger homeless shelter organization. According the the Chronicle, Westbrook “led the nonprofit for nearly two decades before her dismissal in 2023.”<\/p>\n Westbrook was reportedly booked into SF County Jail on Friday, but has since been released. She’s scheduled to be arraigned on Tuesday.<\/p>\n Related: SF\u2019s 10 Wildest Nonprofit Spending Scandals of the Last Five Years, Ranked [SFist]<\/a><\/p>\n