This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.
When a devastating fire ripped through the Twin Parks apartment complex in the Bronx three years ago, leaving 17 dead and dozens injured and homeless, the Bronx Community Foundation sprang into action.
By the end of the day, the organization, which was founded in 2017 to support social services nonprofits in the Bronx, had started a fundraising drive for the fire’s victims. The foundation said it was “working with community members, partners and local elected officials to mobilize resources as quickly as possible.” Both Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul’s offices promoted the foundation’s effort, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Twin Parks Bronx development where a fatal fire killed 17 tenants still had boarded up windows nine months after the blaze, Sept. 26, 2022. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Two years later, internal financial audits show, almost all of that money was still sitting in the bank. The foundation had spent only a small fraction actually helping the fire’s victims: In 2022, it sent $30,120 to two charities supporting Gambian immigrants, who made up most of the fire’s victims; the next year, the foundation spent an additional $26,340 on fire relief — though it’s not clear what specifically those funds went to.
At the end of 2023, more than $389,000 in fire relief funding remained unspent. The foundation declined to say whether they had spent money to support fire victims in 2024, and Henry Robins, a foundation spokesperson, declined to comment or make any representatives of the foundation available for an interview.
Meisha Porter, who served as president and CEO of the foundation from 2022 to 2024, said that she was “not aware of anywhere near $400,000 that was raised to support the Twin Parks fire” victims. She said she’d seen the foundation’s internal audit of its finances in 2022, but assumed the $415,352 line item — labeled “fire relief” — was for “our ongoing relief lines that we were working on ensuring that we had.”
New York Focus sought comment from multiple politicians representing the area where the fire took place: Representative Ritchie Torres, Borough President Vanessa Gibson, state Senator Luis Sepúlveda, state Assemblymember Yudelka Tapia, and City Councilmember Oswald Feliz.
Only a spokesperson for Torres responded, saying the Congressman “has no legal authority to administer or oversee any funds for any non-for-profit anywhere in the country. … If we receive reports of impropriety, we immediately refer the matter to the proper authorities.”
As New York Focus reported last month, the nonprofit has recently faced accusations of fiscal mismanagement, and several of its board members have resigned in recent months, charging that the foundation is failing its mission of getting help to Bronxites in need.
Last year, the board fired Porter, who joined the foundation after a stint as chancellor of the New York City public school system. The interim CEO, June Jimenez, recently left her job after a tenure of several months.
Getting money to the fire’s victims doesn’t seem to have been a problem for other groups involved in the relief effort.
The Gambian Youth Organization, one of the charities that received cash from the foundation, raised over $1 million in the week after the fire. By the end of the year, it had spent nearly $680,000 on aid for fire victims. A New York City fire relief fund spent $900,000 on food, funerals, flights, and direct cash relief in the months following the disaster.
Earlier this month, another fire in a Bronx apartment building rendered hundreds homeless, almost three years to the day after the blaze at Twin Parks. Meanwhile, the Bronx Community Foundation is still accepting donations for its 2022 “Bronx Fire Community Relief Effort.
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
The post After a Catastrophic Fire in The Bronx, Nearly $400,000 in Donations Remains Unspent appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
