(Part I in a Series)
Tracy Jake Siska, President, The Chicago Justice Project
More...One of the goals of the Chicago Justice Project is to enhance public discourse on issues where an open public discussion has been lacking or on issues where the discussion requires a greater degree of factual evidence. Nowhere is this more needed than in the discussion to re-fund the antiviolence program Ceasefire. Gary Slutkin, the administrator of Ceasefire, has recently made a strong behind the scenes push to get his program’s Illinois state funding restored.
Coinciding with this effort several very favorable media articles appeared in both Chicago dailies and the New York Times Magazine [Blocking the Transmission of Violence, By ALEX KOTLOWITZ, May 4, 2008], as well as an extremely favorable column by Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune [Blagojevich can fix gaffe on CeaseFire]. All of the media coverage has either ignored the audit completed by Office of the Auditor General of Illinois or dismissed the audit’s findings by attributing them to mere accounting deficiencies that could easily be corrected and should not prohibit the program from future state funding.
Those that support the project have so far refused to openly discuss the findings of the audit. CJP believes that this is a mistake because all publicly financed projects must be held accountable for their actions...
2 comments:
From the report...> "It is clear from the audit that Ceasefire played fast and loose with the State’s money and failed to live up to its responsibilities under the contractual agreements it entered into with the various state agencies. To date Ceasefire has yet to explain why it withheld a percentage of the money directed to its community partners, on average about 17%, and spent that money on personal and fringe benefits."
There is more trouble with CeaseFire than meets the Circle Prayer Eye...> "It is important to remember that Ceasefire engaged plenty of community partners and withheld money as a regular practice and failed to detail it in the contracts with the State. This certainly seems unsettling at the least and leaning toward underhanded or deceitful. Any non-profit that got caught failing to detail what it was doing with this much money as part of the daily operations of the organization would face the loss of their funding."
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