The executive director of a nonprofit linked to the latest City Hall corruption scandal saw his salary increase nearly 25 percent, from 119,000 to $148,000, after the Human Rights Commission began sending the group a total of $1.5 million in grants, federal income tax reports show.
It’s not unusual for an executive director to get a salary bump as a group expands, and Collective Impact, the nonprofit, grew from a $2.8 million organization when James Spingola joined in 2020 to a budget of $7.4 million last year.
And $148,000 a year is by no means out of line for the director of a nonprofit with more than $7 million in revenue.
But it raises an important question: Did Sheryl Davis, the HRC director who signed off on the contracts, personally benefit as the income of the person who shares her house and her car took home an additional $29,000 a year as she approved significant city funding for his organization?
As the SF Standard has reported, Davis signed off on the $1.5 million in contracts to Collective Impact without disclosing that the director and her appear to share a household.
Davis and Spingola share the deed to a house and a car.
After that story, and another in the Chronicle questioning expenditures by Davis, she has resigned from her $221,000-a-year job.
After Breed launched the Dreamkeeper initiative and Collective Impact became one of the groups the program supported, it grew rapidly. Revenue more than doubled from about $2.8 million a year to more than $7.4 million, documents filed with the IRS show.
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So did net assets. Every year since 2019, the organization has spent less than it takes in, which would be called a profit if this wasn’t a nonprofit. Again: Not unusual for small nonprofits to keep a healthy reserve.
In this case, Collective Impact has kept about $1 million a year of its revenue, and now has $5.7 million in assets.
The only issue is that city grants come with a timeline and are supposed to be spent; if the organization that gets a city grant doesn’t spend all the money, it’s supposed to be returned.
Not all of Collective Impact’s money is city grants, and much of it, the documents show, has no donor restrictions.
I have heard no indications that the group does anything other than exceptional work in the community. This is part of the tragedy of these scandals: Many of the organizations that get money from the Dreamkeeper initiative are making real change and helping people. This climate of persistent corruption under the Breed Administration is undermining the important work that so many of the city’s nonprofits, including the ones funded by Dreamkeeper, are doing.
And it would have been so easy to avoid: Davis could simply have recused herself from any dealings with Collective Impact, and could have been transparent about the Martha’s Vineyard rental, and the important work that so many recipients of this money get would not be in question.
By allowing this to happen, Breed has undermined one of the better programs her administration launched. It’s so sad.
