A Tacoma nonprofit’s leader sought $50,000 for her private consultancy from a pool of taxpayer funds given to the nonprofit to award to small businesses and organizations, state records show.

The proposed award to RISE LWP, a business founded by Tacoma Urban League CEO Desireé Wilkins Finch, was determined last summer to be a conflict of interest by the Washington State Department of Commerce because the award stemmed from the Tacoma Urban League.

“During our normal course of business, Commerce discovered there was a conflict present in the proposed award list from the Tacoma Urban League,” department spokesperson Amelia Lamb said in a statement on Feb. 23. “We determined Desireé Wilkins Finch’s business was ineligible for funding since she was the CEO and contract signer. As a result, no funds were awarded to this business.”

Nearly $200,000 was collectively awarded to a handful of businesses tied to current or former Tacoma Urban League board members, recent employees or committee members tasked with deciding who received funding, The News Tribune found in a review of public records. At least two of the awards are being reviewed for potential conflicts, according to Lamb.

The Tacoma Urban League, a Black community advocacy organization, awarded more than $1.2 million last year to over 100 small businesses and organizations through the Community Reinvestment Program (CRP), according to a document provided by the Commerce Department. The state agency oversees the program, which is intended to address racial, economic and other harms created by the war on drugs.

The Tacoma Urban League received $1.5 million in funding under a contract with the Commerce Department. The nonprofit then awarded dollars to Black-led small businesses and organizations serving Tacoma who applied for the grants.

While the agency found conflict with Wilkins Finch’s proposed award, it didn’t suggest anything more serious in correspondence last summer to the nonprofit CEO and others.

The Commerce Department’s determination did not infer or indicate “any sort of malfeasance or wrongdoing on the part of the League or any of its leadership,” an agency official wrote in an email on the subject, records show. The official called the nonprofit’s award selection process “robust” and noted it had been “forthcoming and clear in its processes and methods.”

Wilkins Finch was publicly accused last fall by a former volunteer at the nonprofit of admitting to giving CRP funds to friends. The claim, which Wilkins Finch has adamantly denied, prompted The News Tribune to examine the nonprofit’s awarding of program dollars.

In light of news reports late last year that raised questions about CRP distribution within urban leagues in Tacoma and Seattle, the Commerce Department said in November it was reviewing program records and vowed to take action should any malfeasance be discovered. The review remained ongoing in early March, according to Lamb.

Wilkins Finch has been on paid administrative leave since November due to an unrelated internal complaint, reportedly involving a dispute over an employee’s firing, according to Wilkins Finch and the Tacoma Urban League.

In a statement through her attorney on Feb. 25, Wilkins Finch asserted she followed every directive provided by the Commerce Department throughout the development and execution of the CRP contract.

“The state, along with the Tacoma Urban League’s fiscal partners and relevant stakeholders, received detailed reporting on both our process and the list of award recipients,” Wilkins Finch said. “I stand firmly by the integrity of the process and the safeguards that were put in place to comply with conflict of interest requirements.”

Corey Orvold, the ex-volunteer who alleged Wilkins Finch admitted giving funds to friends during a conversation between the two, called it “upsetting” that people with direct ties to the nonprofit benefitted from awards.

“I find it unacceptable,” Orvold told The News Tribune on Feb. 19. “The money was supposed to be in the hands of the community to benefit community members.”

Messages sent to a Tacoma Urban League spokesperson, seeking comment for this story, were not returned.

Sitting on the committee

Last year, Potential Unleashed Consulting was awarded $100,000 — the highest amount offered by the Tacoma Urban League. Although 25 businesses requested as much, only three received it, a document shows. Jahmad Canley, the founder and president of Potential Unleashed Consulting, also served last year for a handful of months as the Tacoma Urban League’s board chairperson. He’s listed online by the league as a consultant for the nonprofit.

Additionally, Canley was a member of a selection committee created to choose which applicants would receive CRP funds.

Canley told The News Tribune that he served as board chair after the selection process, and he declined to comment on why he resigned in October after four or five months in the role. In an interview Monday, he explained that he was asked by several people to join the selection committee. He acknowledged having reservations because he planned to apply for an award and didn’t want there to be any conflict.

Canley said he was told, including by the Commerce Department, that there was no issue. To be sure, Canley said he went the “extra mile” and recused himself from not only scoring his own application but also every application seeking $100,000.

“How about we remove me from anything and everything that has to do with this category?” he said, referring to his thought process at the time.

Taliesha Garrett also sat on the CRP selection committee.

Garrett is an operations executive with a consulting business called Eight-Twenty-Eight, and she’s married to the business’ chief impact officer. Eight-Twenty-Eight was awarded $50,000, according to documents.

In an interview Tuesday, Garrett said she understood the optics could be “interesting,” but she hadn’t expressed any formal concern at the time and didn’t believe there was any conflict.

“I didn’t vote on our business,” she said. “We followed the process as it was set out.”

Lamb, the Commerce Department spokesperson, told The News Tribune that specific categories of individuals were ineligible to receive CRP funds, including people privy to the selection process or in control of the awarding of funds. Asked how the agency determined eligibility for Potential Unleashed Consulting and Eight-Twenty-Eight, Lamb said Tuesday that both awards are on Commerce’s list for review for potential conflicts.

“As a matter of practice, we cannot comment on the review until it is complete,” she said.

The Tacoma Urban League’s selection committee process was laid out to the Department of Commerce last summer, email records show. The overview provided five members’ names — each reportedly received a $1,000 stipend in their role — and detailed conflict-of-interest safeguards in place, among other information.

The overview included examples of required recusals, such as Canley’s self-removal from $100,000 applications and committee members abstaining from applications that belonged to them, their spouse, an immediate family member or someone with whom they have a close, personal relationship.

“Due to the small size of the community, there was a high likelihood that committee members would know applicants,” the overview document said. “The following measures were established to maintain integrity.”

An organization that contracts with the Commerce Department must ensure that funds awarded to recipients follow conflict-of-interest and other guidelines set by the state agency, according to Lamb.

“If Commerce determines there is a potential conflict of interest, we follow our standard process to determine the potential recipient’s role and actual eligibility,” Lamb said. “There are other instances — for example, administrative staff who had no interaction with the contract – where there would not actually be a conflict of interest.”

Connections to the league

CRP awardees included an organization led by Zakiya Cita, who is currently on the Tacoma Urban League’s board of directors, and businesses connected to two people recently employed by the Tacoma Urban League, documents show.

There’s no indication that those awards violated the Commerce Department’s conflict-of-interest rules, but they do illustrate how close some ties were between the nonprofit and grantees.

Cita’s sustainable fashion nonprofit, The Chayah Movement, was awarded $5,000. Cita told The News Tribune that board members played no role in the review, evaluation or approval of grant awards.

“I take governance and conflict-of-interest responsibilities seriously and would not engage in any process that presented an ethical concern,” she said in a statement.

Innovative Change Makers, a community organization founded by former Tacoma Urban League employee Brian Gatewood, received $20,000, according to documents. Gatewood said in an interview Tuesday that he left the nonprofit in December 2024 and applied for the grant opportunity after he was gone.

“I don’t necessarily see how that can be a conflict,” Gatewood said.

Elevate Plus Consulting Group was awarded $10,000, documents show. CEO Jermaine Ogden is married to a former Tacoma Urban League employee. Ogden’s wife was forced to resign last year, he said, but she was not the ex-worker who filed a complaint against Wilkins Finch. Without offering specifics, Ogden said his wife disagreed with how things were being handled within the league, including the CRP, although she wasn’t a decision-maker and had no direct dealings with how the funds were allocated.

In an interview Wednesday, Ogden said he almost didn’t apply for the award because qualification requirements kept changing, but then Wilkins Finch reached out to him to note that she hadn’t seen his application.

“I know that my business qualified for it,” he said. “However, I chose not to apply, not because I initially thought it was a conflict of interest, but just from what I was hearing in regard to the inconsistencies in how the money was being allocated.”

There might be similar connections between the league and awardees not verified by The News Tribune.

“It is important to understand that proximity to community work does not automatically equate to impropriety,” Wilkins Finch said in her statement to The News Tribune. “Tacoma is a close-knit ecosystem of leaders, entrepreneurs and advocates. Eligibility determinations were guided by the contractual rules and compliance standards set forth by Commerce, not by personal relationships. Any suggestion otherwise overlooks the structured review, documentation and oversight embedded in the process.”

‘A clear firewall’

The distribution of funding was not as straightforward as: Tacoma Urban League to awardees. But the distinction appears largely technical.

To manage the CRP process and awards, the Tacoma Urban League didn’t look far from its leader, calling upon another organization spearheaded by Wilkins Finch.

The Tacoma Black Fund, which Wilkins Finch founded and leads as CEO, is “crafted to channel Black dollars throughout Black businesses and programs in the Black community in Tacoma,” according to its website. The Tacoma Urban League loaned its CRP funds to The Greater Tacoma Community Foundation, which awarded grants to applicants as the Tacoma Black Fund’s fiscal sponsor, a website FAQ said.

In order to receive a CRP award, applicants were required to join the Tacoma Black Fund, according to the FAQ. Membership is $100 per quarter or $400 per year, and members receive voting rights in the organization’s decision-making.

“It ensures that decisions about where the money goes are made by Black people in our community through a democratic, community-led process,” the website’s FAQ said.

During the CRP process, Wilkins Finch temporarily stepped back from formal leadership in the Tacoma Black Fund but has since resumed, according to the FAQ.

“To ensure fairness and eliminate any conflict of interest, we created a clear firewall between the Tacoma Urban League (TUL) and the Tacoma Black Fund (TBF),” the website said. “While TUL secured the funds for GTCF, through a state contract with the Department of Commerce, the review and decision-making process was led independently by TBF under the former leadership of Tasha West-Baker and the TBF Loan Readiness Committee.”

The Tacoma Urban League was billed $16,000 in June by West-Baker for her work as a consulting CEO for the Tacoma Black Fund, according to an invoice obtained in a public records request with the Commerce Department. West-Baker, who’s now the Tacoma Urban League’s chief operating officer, told The News Tribune on Thursday that she began working for the league after the CRP process ended.

The Tacoma Black Fund also got paid for its efforts, according to a document.

In a May letter to the Commerce Department, Wilkins Finch notified that $225,000 of the $1.5 million in CRP funds had been allocated to the Tacoma Black Fund for program management and administration, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained in a public records request.

As CEO of the Tacoma Black Fund, Wilkins Finch is not compensated, the organization’s website said.

Her gross pay as Tacoma Urban League CEO, from which she has been sidelined now for four months, was the equivalent of a $204,000 salary in June, according to an analysis of a payroll record from that month.

Late last month, Wilkins Finch told The News Tribune that she has not been kept apprised of details related to her leave or the nonprofit board’s third-party review.

“I have not been provided a resolution timeline, and no transition or continuity plan was initiated with my input to safeguard the organization’s leadership and stability during this period,” she said. “While this period has been difficult, I remain eager for a fair conclusion so that the Tacoma Urban League can move forward with strength and stability, continuing its mission to foster economic empowerment, social justice and civil rights for the community it serves.”