Black Lives Matter lost a lot of money in 2022, according to tax documents.

Black Lives Matter Bleeds Cash and Suffers Investment Losses

According to a copy of its tax return obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, Black Lives Matter suffered blistering investment losses and bled cash in 2022.

Financial Woes

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation ran an $8.5 million deficit and saw the value of its investment accounts plummet by nearly $10 million in the most recent tax year, financial disclosures show. The group logged a $961,000 loss on a securities sale of $172,000, suggesting the charity weathered a staggering 85 percent loss on the transaction.

Excesses and Missteps

Despite these troubles, Black Lives Matter continued to dole out seven-figure contracts to friends and family of its former executive director Patrisse Cullors, who once said charity financial disclosures were “triggering” and “deeply unsafe.”

The financial losses come after a year of missteps and setbacks for the embattled charity. BLM raised just $9.3 million in its 2022 fiscal year, down 88 percent from its haul the year prior. Black Lives Matter was forced to shut off its online fundraising streams in February 2022 due to compliance and transparency issues in several liberal states. The group has blown through two-thirds of the $90 million it raised in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020.

Profligacy and Nepotism

BLM spent about $12 million of those funds on luxury homes in Los Angeles and Toronto. That profligacy did not abate in the 2022 fiscal year, when the charity dropped more than $10.5 million on contractors, much of which went to companies linked to Cullors’s friends and family.

Cullors’s brother, Paul Cullors, made out especially well. A graffiti artist with no prior experience as a bodyguard, Paul Cullors and his two companies raked in $1.6 million providing “professional security services” for Black Lives Matter in 2022. Paul Cullors was also one of BLM’s only two paid employees during the year, collecting a $126,000 salary as “head of security” on top of his consulting fees.

Bowers, the Black Lives Matter board member and close friend of Cullors, hauled in a hefty bounty during the charity’s 2022 tax year. Black Lives Matter paid his company, Bowers Consulting, $1.7 million for management and consulting services.

The sister of former Black Lives Matter board member Raymond Howard brought in a seven-figure consulting fee as well. BLM paid Danielle Edwards’s firm, New Impact Partners, $1.1 million for consulting services in 2022.

Legal Troubles

Bowers’s management of Black Lives Matter earned him few friends in the movement. Black Lives Matter Grassroots, a former sister organization of Black Lives Matter, accused Bowers of “blazing a path of irreparable harm to BLM” by treating the charity as his personal piggy bank.

Black Lives Matter also agreed to pay an additional $600,000 to an unidentified former board member’s consulting firm “in connection with a contract dispute,” the charity disclosed in its audited financial statements.

Uncertain Future

It’s unclear if Black Lives Matter paid out lucrative contracting fees to Cullors’s friends and family past June 2022. The charity brought on a new board of directors last summer led by nonprofit adviser Cicley Gay, who has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy three times since 2005.

Black Lives Matter is on the fast track to financial insolvency, and the excesses of Cullors’s tenure have not abated under her chosen successor, Shalomyah Bowers.

“While Patrisse Cullors was forced to resign due to charges of using BLM’s funds for her personal use, it looks like she’s still keeping it all in the family,” said Paul Kamenar, an attorney for the National Legal and Policy Center watchdog group.

Black Lives Matter did not return a request for comment.

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