After the devastating Memorial Day Tornadoes of 2019, the Greater Dayton Disaster Relief Fund was collected by neighbors, for neighbors in order to fund disaster recovery efforts.
Maybe you were a donor. Maybe you were a tornado victim. Maybe you’re a concerned citizen.
If you’re reading this, I think you should know that the $1.1 million dollars left in its balance — 38% of the total collected, we think, as The Dayton Foundation has been non-transparent —is about to be distributed to purposes not dedicated to Disaster Recovery. The money is going to be quietly funelled away.
We must not let it happen.
Those in charge of the Fund have decided that the recovery efforts are completed. You only have to take a walk around the townships affected to see that the work is far from over. All of the photos attached to this campaign were taken today.
The Fund states that “one hundred percent of donations to the fund will be distributed to vetted nonprofit organizations.” This is demonstrably false.
How do I know this? I work for a local housing nonprofit that has been assisting Dayton residents with home repairs for over 26 years. I can tell you firsthand that I received over 84 rejections when I applied on behalf of our clients for additional funding. Though we are the nonprofit organization who has completed the most disaster recovery home repair projects in the area, we won't receive any of the $1.1 million to continue Disaster Recovery efforts. Our most recent request was met with a 2-sentence rejection on behalf of three deserving homeowners with verified tornado damage.
The group in charge of managing the Disaster Recovery efforts is the Long Term Recovery Operations Group. They are not supposed to control the nonprofit organizations who are assisting in tornado recovery efforts, but rather come alongside and support us, providing resources and additional funding. Instead, they are withholding funding, rejecting deserving people, and wasting over a million dollars.
The Group is composed of people with no experience in home repair and rebuild efforts, with a loaned executive at its head. Instead of letting us do our job and do it well, the Group has actively prevented nonprofit organizations from assisting people. The Group was meant to serve the community, not take control. Instead, they quickly changed their own by-laws to prevent changes of "elected" leadership and solidified their control over the process. They set an arbitrary deadline for assistance of August of 2020, when assistance was actually available until December 2021, and they had no plans of dissolving until October 2021.
Perhaps that is why — as they sent us rejection after rejection — they were unable to spend down the majority of the Fund, or use the donated materials. They have refused various organizations access to any of those donated materials — pallets and pallets of shingles, siding, and supplies — that are currently wasting away in a warehouse. Instead, they focused on building brand new homes for renters impacted by the tornadoes rather than repairing the over ⅓ of properties that are still damaged.As an organization, we began personally began cold-calling homeowners ourselves, and found over 51 people who we were able to assist in the last 5 months alone. As you can probably guess, we were told to stop reaching out to people.
In response to this Petition, the Group will tell you that they have “closed out” all eligible cases — meaning that they’ve already helped anyone impacted by the Memorial Day Tornadoes.
What they will not tell you is that they rejected hundreds of people due to “deferred maintenance” — meaning that if there was already a leak in a garage roof before the tornadoes struck, which was made infinitely worse, they received no help at all. This is a practice that has been long since abandoned by FEMA and is widely believed to be discriminatory.In addition, when you call in, they might tell you that the funding is still for tornado relief. But they won't give it out to us.We have contacted state and local representatives, the news media, and other nonprofits and for-profit organizations, but we’re screaming into the wind. No one will report our story, while the wealthy and well-connected in our community dictate who gets help and who doesn't.
The people in charge have more connections than we do. That’s why we need your help. We have to show them that this is something Dayton residents — and our friends across the country — truly care about.
If you were a donor to the fund, impacted by the Memorial Day Tornadoes, or simply want to bring this matter to attention, please sign our petition to STOP the dissolution of the Fund immediately and open an inquiry into its improper use.
