How many homeless did they help? Well, themselves for sure

Protest Sapped of Cash

Occupy Wall Street Freezes Spending on New Projects as Donations Dry Up

Occupy Wall Street—the movement built on protesting corporate greed and income inequality—is running out of money.

After raising more than $700,000 last fall, protesters who keep track of money for Occupy Wall Street reported this week that the group has about $170,000 in its bank account. Very few donations are coming in, they said.

"If we keep spending at the rate at which we have been doing, we will probably go broke in a month," said Haywood Carey, 28 years old, a member of the movement's accounting group.

Occupy Wall Street voted to freeze all spending on new projects at a Saturday meeting of its main government body, the General Assembly, but will continue spending on basics such as housing at several churches, food, clothing and transportation.

The money woes highlight how Occupy Wall Street has struggled to maintain momentum since it was evicted from a Lower Manhattan park on Nov. 15. During the two months protesters camped out in Zuccotti Park, donations poured in from around the nation and world as media attention focused on the round-the-clock demonstration.

But many activists said they quickly became fed up with the group's spending habits. General Assembly meetings turned into long debates over how to distribute funds to keep Zuccotti Park running.

"With such an influx of donations, we'd begun to rely on economic capital," said Jason Ahmadi, 27, an Occupy Wall Street activist who has called for the movement to return its focus to what drew others at the very beginning in mid-September: "human and social capital."

Mr. Ahmadi, who was among the first protesters to set up camp in Zuccotti Park, spearheaded the General Assembly effort to curb spending on Saturday. He diagnosed the group's money issue as the "nonprofit industrial complex."

"There's a trap that the mission becomes more about sustaining the organization than its message," he said.

To be sure, most of the funding went to necessary tasks, organizers said: transporting hundreds of pounds of dirty laundry in a rented U-Haul truck, keeping the Zuccotti Park clean, and feeding thousands of people.

But in November, after a document tracking expenses was posted online, some expenditures have been questioned.

There was a receipt for $1,101.07 to purchase herbs for homeopathic medicine as well as a few hundred dollars used to purchase rolling paper and tobacco for the "Nic at Night" cigarette station at the park.

"There were a lot of people who were poor and really wanted a cigarette," Mr. Carey said. "You may not like it, but it was voted on by the General Assembly."

Mr. Carey said funding decisions of more than $100 were voted on by the General Assembly, a protocol that continues.

But with the group no longer centralized at Zuccotti Park, day-to-day operations have changed and become more expensive. The group wrote a check last week for $2,700 from its Amalgamated Bank account to pay for two weeks of housing at two churches, Mr. Carey said.

The money crunch has opened a debate: Should protesters begin actively soliciting donations again as they try to push the movement forward? Occupy Wall Street donations are tax-deductible under its affiliation with Washington nonprofit, Alliance for Global Justice.

Demonstrators such as Mr. Ahmadi say the movement should stay out of the fund-raising business.

But Michael Levitin, 35, who helped raise a separate reserve of $75,000 to fund the Occupied Wall Street Journal, the group's newspaper, said: "That money is there. Many people with money believe in this movement. I think we would be wise to tap into it."