A Maine charity diverted shooting victim funds to shady, often Somali NGOs
The average IQ in Somalia is 68. People will be diagnosed with an intellectual disability if their IQ falls below 70. But the IQ test really measures only linguistic and reasoning intelligence. There are other types of intelligence, such as musical, bodily-kinesthetic (athletes, dancers, etc.), artistic, emotional, etc.
Now, it’s beginning to look as if the Somalis have their own “other” intelligence: getting unearned money. That’s why it wasn’t surprising at all to learn that, when people donated to victims of the 2023 bowling alley shooting in Lewiston, Maine, some of that money apparently ended up funding NGOs with strong Somali ties, but no ties to the shooting.
Image created using AI.
The Maine Wire presents the facts in detail. If you’re interested in the whole sordid story, take the time to read it. For now, I’ll give you just the skinny.
The shooting, carried out by a violent, brain-damaged man, left 18 dead and 13 wounded. Afterwards, Maine’s governor, Janet Mills (whom you remember for refusing to protect young women from mentally-ill men), encouraged people who wanted to donate to the victims to send their money to the Maine Community Foundation (“MCF”), which she promised was a trustworthy vehicle. The Chairman of the MCF Board of Directors is Adilah Muhammad. The steering committee also included the heads of four NGOS, whom I’ll get to in a moment.
People opened their hearts and their wallets, ultimately contributing $6.6 million to the MCF. They thought the money was earmarked for the shooting victims and their families. Instead, per the Maine Wire,
The Maine Wire presents the facts in detail. If you’re interested in the whole sordid story, take the time to read it. For now, I’ll give you just the skinny.
The shooting, carried out by a violent, brain-damaged man, left 18 dead and 13 wounded. Afterwards, Maine’s governor, Janet Mills (whom you remember for refusing to protect young women from mentally-ill men), encouraged people who wanted to donate to the victims to send their money to the Maine Community Foundation (“MCF”), which she promised was a trustworthy vehicle. The Chairman of the MCF Board of Directors is Adilah Muhammad. The steering committee also included the heads of four NGOS, whom I’ll get to in a moment.
People opened their hearts and their wallets, ultimately contributing $6.6 million to the MCF. They thought the money was earmarked for the shooting victims and their families. Instead, per the Maine Wire,
T]he MCF distributed just $4.7 million to those individuals.
The remaining $1.9 million went to NGOs, many of them politically connected, and many of them involved in the nebulous world of “migrant services.”
Most of those nonprofits have no connections to the victims’ families or the survivors. Few of them can point to anything done with the money for the benefit of the victims’ families or the survivors.
That’s bad, but what’s worse is this part:
However, several of the nonprofits had directors who were on the MCF steering committee — the committee that allocated the donations.
In other words, roughly one third of the money raised in the names of Lewiston shooting victims was under the control of NGOs that saw no conflict or ethical concern with steering that money into their own bank accounts.
This approach violated the best practices for community foundations handling disaster funds. Those practices require that the funds go to the donors’ intended beneficiaries and that the foundation scrupulously avoids diverting funds and conflicts of interest. Transparency, of course, is the key to ensuring integrity.
It gets even worse when you learn where some of those funds ended up. First, remember those four NGO heads I mentioned above? They received a bountiful largesse from the donor funds:
According to the MCF’s website, the steering committee included the following non-profit heads: Joleen Bedard, United Way of Androscoggin County, Nathan Davis, Gateway Community Services Maine, Muhidin Libah, Somali Bantu Community Association, and Julia Sleeper, Tree Street Youth. Bedard, Davis, Libah, and Sleeper’s NGOs all received $65,000 from the Lewiston shooting fundraising money — far more than the majority of victims received, including Maine residents who were shot. These NGO heads also appear to have steered donation money into groups with which they have prior affiliations, share office space, or have partnered with for prior activities. (Emphasis in original.)
When it took the $65,000, Gateway Community Services, run by Abdullahi Ali, a Somali-American, already possessed $5 million in government grants. He’s no longer in the US, though:
Ali’s taxpayer-funded migrant services business has made national headlines in recent weeks, in part because he received millions of taxpayer dollars before fleeing to Africa to lead a militia against Jubbaland President Ahmed Madobe.
https://youtu.be/TgBLlM4EySc
And then there’s the Somali Bantu Community Association, another NGO with no ties to the shooting victims. Employees and recipients are family members. “Most recently,” writes the Maine Wire, “the organization was awarded more than $31k to support Liberation Farms, a taxpayer-funded halal farm, and to recruit Maine residents to apply for EBT cards.”
The AK Collaborative, which seems to be another Somali organization connected to the Maine government but not the shooting, also got $65,000. So did Generational Noor, started by a Somali immigrant as a substance abuse charity, although it seemingly never did anything to help with substance abuse. Empowered Immigrant Women United, chaired by Choukri Mahamoud, also got $65,000. Of its $172,289 in total receipts in 2024, nearly all funds went to salaries.
One of the problems with mass immigration is that you get a lot of chaff with the wheat. Yes, there are good, hard-working, honest people who are Somalis. But when a substantial cohort of the population is dedicated to financial crimes that rip off taxpayers and charitable donor, and when the community seems incapable of policing itself, you have to ask if the burden of the chaff outweighs any benefit from the wheat.
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