In an embarrassing setback, many donors have been giving millions of dollars to “the Black Lives Matter Foundation” which is not the Black Lives Matter movement.
The foundation is basically a guy in California with a UPS store as an address who somehow raked in millions off duping the left.
We don’t know how much of these ill-gotten gains have been released or will be clawed back but this is another example that liberals are not really paying attention and jump from one bandwagon to the next, screwing up things in their wake.
Buzzfeed reported that The Black Lives Matter Foundation, a Santa Clarita, California–based charitable organization that has one paid employee and lists a UPS store as its address, has a very different goal, according to its founder: “bringing the community and police closer together.”
And they were not the only ones to mistakenly support the Black Lives Matter Foundation. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, corporations including Apple, Google, and Microsoft raised $4 million for the soundalike foundation — and almost delivered the money. Hundreds of grassroots fundraisers also directed more money and attention.
“I don’t have anything to do with the Black Lives Matter Global Network. I never met them; never spoke to them. I don’t know them; I have no relationship with them,” Robert Ray Barnes, the founder of the Black Lives Matter Foundation, told BuzzFeed News in a lengthy interview. “Our whole thing is having unity with the police department.”
In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Black Lives Matter spokesperson confirmed that the groups are indeed “two completely separate organizations” and that Barnes’ foundation “has nothing to do with us.”
“The Santa Clarita group is improperly using our name,” the spokesperson said. “We intend to call them out and follow up.”
But Barnes, a 67-year-old music producer in LA, defended his organization and its name. “No one owns the concept,” Barnes said, adding that as a Black man, his life had been tainted by painful experiences with the police, including the 2011 death of his wife’s ex-husband allegedly at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Though the social movement entered the national consciousness during the Ferguson demonstrations in August 2014, he claimed Black Lives Matter had actually “stolen” his name and idea, and cast the global movement as an opaque organization that hasn’t been transparent about how it uses donations. Barnes registered his foundation in May 2015.
“It appears there is a lot of scamming going on, but how can it have to do with me?” Barnes asked. “I had plenty of motivation to create the Black Lives Matter Foundation and the people who were doing Black Lives Matter weren’t interested in a foundation. They never created it. Now all of the sudden they’re interested in it.”
Further obscuring the situation is the movement’s official name, “Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc” — which wasn’t registered in the state of Delaware until 2017 — while Barnes owns and operates the Black Lives Matter Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit registered in California. Because the official movement is not a nonprofit — it raises money through a charity partner called Thousand Currents — Barnes’ organization has benefited from the brand confusion as people have conflated the two and donated money to his charity via GoFundMe, PayPal, or employee donation matching platforms.
