WHEN TISHAURA JONES WAS ELECTED IN APRIL as the first African-American woman to be mayor of the city of St. Louis, progressive activists and the organizations they work with erupted in delight.
The morning after Jones’s historic win, ArchCity Defenders, a St. Louis nonprofit that built its reputation as a holistic legal advocacy organization for indigent clients trapped in the court system, added its voice to the buzz on social media.
“Big news in #STL! Congratulations Mayor Elect @tishaura,” ArchCity tweeted, tagging Jones’s personal Twitter handle.
Later that day, when the mayor-elect announced a transition committee to help set up her new administration, it became clear that Jones’s win was also a significant event for ArchCity. Three of the committee’s 12 members had direct ties to the organization: ArchCity Executive Director Blake Strode; one of its board members, activist Kayla Reed; and staff attorney Nahuel Fefer.
“With all of the urgent challenges in STL, esp. for incarcerated people, those who are un/underemployed, renters facing eviction, unhoused people, and more, I feel lucky to be a part of the team shaping @tishaura’s transition into office,” Strode tweeted.
Since then, ArchCity connections have popped up all over city government and related agencies.
Fefer, who previously worked on economic policy in the office of Mayor Francis Slay, left ArchCity shortly after the election to take a key role in Jones’s administration as her director of policy.
Reed, whose main job is executive director of grassroots racial justice organization Action St. Louis, took part in an April 24 press conference alongside Jones, Congresswoman Cori Bush and St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. Reed joined calls from the others to close the city’s Medium Security Institution, the jail known as the Workhouse that ArchCity and Action St. Louis have been seeking to shut down for years.
Strode went on to serve as a member of the new mayor’s Stimulus Advisory Board, a volunteer body that provided recommendations to Jones on how to spend funds from the approximately $500 million the city will receive via the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
And Jones’s pick to lead the St. Louis Development Corp., Neal Richardson, comes from U.S. Bank. Richardson said previously he was mentored there by Stephanie Grise, an executive at U.S. Bank’s parent company who chairs ArchCity’s board of directors.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit barred by law from participating or intervening in political campaigns, ArchCity makes clear that it is not an electoral organization operating at the campaign level.
Even so, how influential is ArchCity these days?
“They’re very influential,” says Alderman Brandon Bosley, whose 3rd Ward includes Hyde Park and the neighborhoods along North Grand Boulevard near Fairground Park. “They not only influence public policy in the city; they also influence it in the county.”
Bosley adds: “Any organization that has reach to the city and the county, and actually has some money in their pockets — that’s as influential as it can get, especially during election season. That’s when you put the people in office who are most in line with the agenda that you have as an organization. I can definitely see them becoming more influential over the years, contingent upon what they involve themselves in.”
The money in their pockets
Away from ArchCity’s high-profile lawsuits and the media coverage it generates around issues like cash bail and tenant evictions, there’s something else about ArchCity that tends to escape notice: its skill at raising money. Steadily and intentionally, an organization that began life in 2009 as a scrappy little law firm has turned itself into a fundraising powerhouse, fueled largely by money from anonymous donors.
In the fiscal year that ended in June 2020, ArchCity raised a record $4.41 million in donations and grants, with the biggest contributor kicking in $400,000, according to the fiscal 2020 tax return available on its website. The total was almost double the amount the organization drummed up in 2019.
As recently as 2016 ArchCity was still generating more from fees and other payments for its legal services work (about $360,000) than the $242,000 it received that year from donors, McPherson’s examination of the organization’s past tax returns reveals.
Now, donations and grants reign supreme. And ArchCity rivals or surpasses some longer-established nonprofits around St. Louis when it comes to fundraising.
For example, ArchCity’s $4.41 million haul in fiscal 2020 was far more than the $1.67 million reported on the most recent tax return from the Show-Me Institute, a free-market think tank with close ties to retired fund management executive Rex Sinquefield.
ArchCity is also outraising well-established, widely known cultural institutions like the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. On its latest tax return the Rep reported $3.26 million in contributions and grants (this does not include revenue from ticket sales).
Among organizations sometimes allied with ArchCity, the 501(c)(3) foundation supporting the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri has also seen a sharp increase in donations. Still, it came in behind ArchCity, with just over $3 million reported on the most recent tax return.
Its fundraising success and its links to elected officials like Jones and Bush mean ArchCity now sits at the top (or very near the top) of a progressive nonprofit establishment in St. Louis that wants to dramatically reshape the region’s political landscape. Comprising activists, academics, environmentalists, labor organizers and political groups, and supported by grantmaking institutions such as the Deaconess Foundation, this movement seeks to wield power not only via street protests and media appearances, but directly at the voting booth.
“Our position on candidates is simple. We don’t do this work to elect people; we elect people to do this work,” Reed and Strode wrote in an essay in May for The New York Times that marked one year since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“All of this work is political”
Elsewhere in the essay, the pair traced the evolution of their activism since the killing of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in 2014 by a Ferguson police officer. They said their movement goes beyond “tepid reforms” like implicit bias training and police body cameras. Now, they say, they want to mobilize the community and shift the entire public dialogue in St. Louis.
“While this may seem like an obvious strategy, it is one that is too often forgone, either by committed activists who assume the effort will be futile or by nonprofits that deeply fear being labeled ‘political,’” they wrote. “All of this work is political — we aim to build power with those who have been disempowered.”
In January ArchCity and Action St. Louis helped lead a coalition of more than 40 organizations that launched the People’s Plan, billed as “a comprehensive policy agenda designed to redistribute power and resources in St. Louis City.” Other nonprofits backing the plan include Forward Through Ferguson, the St. Louis chapter of The Bail Project, and the Coalition Against Police Crimes & Repression.
Aside from closing the Workhouse, the plan’s priorities include defunding the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, including the department’s Real Time Crime Center and overtime pay for officers.
Other items on the list: affordable housing and universal childcare; reform of tax incentives for developers; requiring tax-exempt large hospitals and universities to make payments in lieu of payroll and property taxes; and raising local taxes on the wealthy.
In her first budget as mayor Jones cut $4 million in funding for the police department. She was also able to empty the Workhouse of detainees, but only for a few weeks. (Inmate disturbances at the city’s other jail, the Criminal Justice Center, forced the city to move about 140 detainees back to the Workhouse in recent days.)
ArchCity does face some well-funded opposition in the nonprofit world. For example, the St. Louis Police Foundation, which provides equipment and training to the city and county police departments, raised over $10 million in 2019. That was about four times the amount the foundation raised in the previous year, according to its tax return.
“Our position on candidates is simple. We don’t do this work to elect people; we elect people to do this work.”
Kayla Reed and Blake Strode, writing in The New York Times
But few organizations match ArchCity and its allies in terms of public clout.
On social media they have battalions of supporters, including some city politicians, ready to amplify their messages and swat down heretics (like McPherson) who dare ask questions about anonymous donors.
Two years ago, Ben & Jerry’s provided a national PR boost to the “Close the Workhouse” campaign when the company dished out ice cream around St. Louis. And in May, a glowing profile of Reed from the Missouri Independent referred to her as “one of the leading voices in St. Louis’s public life and, ultimately, a queenmaker.”
[Click here to read McPherson’s sidebar on ArchCity and St. Louis media organizations.]
Together, ArchCity and Action St. Louis “are driving the narrative,” says 7th Ward Alderman Jack Coatar, who represents areas including Downtown St. Louis, Soulard and Lafayette Square.
“Whether you agree with them or not, they’ve certainly been successful in getting their issues out there front and center,” Coatar says.
ArchCity declined to make either Strode or Grise available for an interview for this story. Action St. Louis did not respond to McPherson’s e-mails.
From city partner to city adversary
ArchCity was founded in 2009 by three Saint Louis University law graduates: Thomas Harvey, John McAnnar and Michael-John Voss. A 2014 Riverfront Times article referred to the trio as “legal superheroes.” It detailed their work with indigent clients navigating a thicket of traffic fines, court appearances and arrest warrants, in a system that seemed expressly designed to victimize poor and black St. Louisans.
From the beginning ArchCity pursued a holistic model based on that of the Bronx Defenders in New York. The RFT wrote: “[M]ore than just offering legal aid to the indigent, ArchCity Defenders works to help its clients improve their overall lives, be it securing housing, getting drug treatment or finding a job.”
In 2014, the year of the Ferguson protests, Harvey and his colleagues published a groundbreaking whitepaper detailing abuses in the court systems of municipalities in North St. Louis County. The paper helped pave the way for major court reforms, including a $4.75 million settlement ArchCity agreed with the suburb of Jennings in 2016.
Eddie Roth, who served as director of human services for St. Louis City from December 2014 until July 2017, is quick to give credit to ArchCity for its successes and its ambitions. Roth says the 2014 whitepaper “was to municipal government abuse what the Pentagon Papers were to Vietnam.”
During the mayoral administrations of Slay and Lyda Krewson, Roth dealt directly with ArchCity when the nonprofit had contracts with the city to provide services to the homeless and senior citizens; one such initiative sought to end chronic homelessness. (Federal agencies provide much of the funding; the city merely administers the grants.)
Things changed, Roth says, when ArchCity began losing out to other social services organizations, such as St. Patrick Center and Peter & Paul Community Services, that submitted superior proposals to run programs funded by the grants.
In March 2017 ArchCity and the SLU School of Law Legal Clinic sued the city over its treatment of the homeless, saying the city was not meeting its obligations.
ArchCity “diminishes its potential by becoming more a purveyor of grievance than an instrument of progress.”
Eddie Roth, former director of human services for the City of St. Louis
“I think it’s fair to observe how, on the one hand, ArchCity as a fledgling organization had no greater a financial benefactor or institutional champion than the City of St. Louis,” Roth says. “ArchCity arguably owes its early existence to the city’s taking a chance on and making a substantial investment in an unproven nonprofit.”
Roth adds: “On the other hand, when the city grant monies dried up, ArchCity immediately went into vilification mode, demonizing ‘the City’ whenever it was opportune, and as a mainstay of its strategies for attracting new funders.”
ArchCity, says Roth, “diminishes its potential by becoming more a purveyor of grievance than an instrument of progress.”
Harvey, who served as ArchCity’s executive director until Strode took over in early 2018, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
How to create opponents and influence friends
In November 2017 ArchCity filed a federal lawsuit against the city, alleging inhumane conditions at the Workhouse. According to local media reports ArchCity is demanding $10 million to settle the case. Those reports also say ArchCity could also ask for attorneys’ fees.
Due in part to actions like these, ArchCity faces substantial opposition from some moderate Democrats on the Board of Aldermen, including Coatar.
“ArchCity started out with a great mission,” he says. “They were providing holistic legal defense, and filling a void where the public defenders couldn’t represent certain indigent people. I thought they were doing a great job.”
But ArchCity has changed, Coatar added.
“At some point in recent years they’ve shifted from what appears to be advocacy for the indigent to being a political arm and attacking the city, which provides them funding, and attacking politicians like myself,” he says. “It’s just baffling to me that they’ve gotten so far from their core mission, yet seem to be getting more donations than ever.”
Coatar also worries that by appointing officials like Fefer to senior roles, the city is compromising its position when it comes to resolving ArchCity’s lawsuits on matters like the Workhouse.
“It seems to present an interesting conflict when folks who are suing the city for 10 million dollars are also now directing policy for the city,” Coatar argues.
Nick Dunne, a spokesman for Jones, responded: “Mayor Jones ran on the promise to challenge the status quo, and formed a team of qualified people from across the Midwest from organized labor, legal advocacy, the arts, and much more. To target the only black-led organization on this list of former employers is telling.”
Dunne added that ArchCity doesn’t have any current contracts with the city, and said he couldn’t comment on pending litigation.
“We shouldn’t just say we want to eliminate cash bail for everybody, because some people need to be in jail. That’s just being real.”
St. Louis Alderman Brandon Bosley
Bosley says he understands why ArchCity and its allies are focusing on issues like cash bail for those unjustly trapped in jail. Bosley agrees that there does need to be some reform.
But he also says the way the activists are approaching the issue is not practical.
“We need to be very specific with our ask, and we shouldn’t just say we want to eliminate cash bail for everybody, because some people need to be in jail,” Bosley says. “That’s just being real.”
McPherson also contacted 8th Ward Alderwoman Annie Rice and 15th Ward Alderwoman Megan Green, two members of the board who are allies of the mayor and generally supportive of ArchCity, to seek their views. Neither Rice nor Green responded to voicemails or follow-up texts.
Following the money trail
Uncovering where exactly ArchCity’s money comes from is not easy. The organization is not required to publicly disclose the identities of its donors, and like many other 501(c)(3) nonprofits it does not do so voluntarily. It is, however, required to list the amounts they give.
In its most recent tax filing, ArchCity disclosed that 11 contributors gave it at least $100,000 each in fiscal 2020. The largest donation was $400,000; the next largest was $250,000. The remaining nine donors gave amounts ranging between $100,000 and $170,000.
All told, these 11 donors provided about $1.90 million of the $4.41 million ArchCity listed in gifts, grants and contributions on its tax return for fiscal 2020.
In a May interview on local podcast Gateway Giving, Strode said ArchCity has some major multiyear grants from private foundations which sustain the organization, and that government grants are a decreasing share of revenue.
“We’ve made a conscious decision in recent years not to pursue some of the reimbursement grants that we’ve received previously from public sources, in part because the reporting requirements around them are so onerous,” Strode said. “We’re able to do our work much more effectively and flexibly with other sources of funding.”
Adding in fees from its legal services work, minus certain expenses, took ArchCity’s total revenue up to $4.64 million in 2020, according to the tax return.
Yet in a separate annual report posted on its website, ArchCity said its total revenue was only $3.71 million for the fiscal year.
The reasons for this discrepancy of more than $900,000 between the tax return and the annual report are not clear. Nor is it clear how much of this amount may have been collected for Action St. Louis, which ArchCity sponsors (more details below).
Tracking expenditures is a bit easier. The annual report shows that most of ArchCity’s $2.36 million in spending during fiscal 2020 went to payroll, taxes and benefits for its lawyers and other staff members.
Strode said during his podcast interview that ArchCity now has 31 staffers, about half of them attorneys. The rest include social workers, community organizers, development staff and communications staff. (Action St. Louis has eight staff members, according to its website.)
The 2020 tax return shows that Kayla Reed was paid $64,768. Based on McPherson’s review of prior year returns, fiscal 2020 appears to be the first year in which Reed received compensation from ArchCity.
Reed was the only ArchCity board member who was paid. The return has scant details, but it appears to indicate the money is her salary as the executive director of Action St. Louis.
Strode’s base compensation was recorded as $94,674.
Would you like your money dark, or merely anonymous?
Coatar argues that the funding for ArchCity and Action St. Louis is “dark money.”
“Like many of the so-called progressive organizations in town that seek transparency and open government, they’re more than willing to hide behind their nonprofit status and not disclose their donors,” he says.
But St. Louis lawyer Elad Gross rejects this view.
“An organization like ArchCity that is using their funding mostly for legal work is not really like the dark-money stuff that is directly paying to put somebody into office, or to put some law onto the books,” says Gross, an advocate for stronger enforcement of Missouri transparency laws who has done extensive research into the subject of dark money.
OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan Washington research group that tracks money in U.S. politics, defines dark money as funding from anonymous sources to influence political processes such as elections or legislative agendas, according to Anna Massoglia, an investigative researcher at the group.
Generally speaking, OpenSecrets does not consider 501(c)(3) organizations to be dark-money groups, Massoglia told McPherson. But such groups need to be extremely careful when engaging in activities like voter education and sponsoring candidate forums; they cannot express a preference for a particular candidate, she added.
“When an individual is in office, they [the 501(c)(3)] may be able to express support for a governing official they may want to work closely with,” Massoglia says. “In terms of expressing favorites among candidates, even retrospectively, that’s something that could raise issues.”
“An organization like ArchCity that is using their funding mostly for legal work is not really like the dark-money stuff that is directly paying to put somebody into office, or to put some law onto the books.”
St. Louis lawyer and transparency advocate Elad Gross
Gross, who worked as a volunteer public defender and has sued the city on behalf of jailed clients, is no foe of ArchCity. But when it comes to fundraising, Gross told McPherson there are steps organizations like ArchCity could take to be more open.
Transparency “does become an issue where you see a 501(c)(3) start to get more involved on the political side of stuff, rather than just teaching kids math or building homes. Then all of sudden, where the money is coming from might be pretty important,” Gross says.
“The bigger that the organization becomes, the bigger the worry is,” he adds. “Any kind of money that you’re spending to do something with government in general, I’d really like to see where that money is coming from.”
A “c3” and a “c4”
ArchCity and Action St. Louis aren’t linked merely in terms of the issues they tackle; they also have direct financial ties. ArchCity acts as a “fiscal sponsor” for Action St. Louis, which is also organized as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization and is eligible to receive tax-deductible contributions. Large nonprofits often use these sponsor arrangements to help younger, smaller groups get off the ground.
Under this arrangement Action St. Louis is not required to file its own tax returns, making its revenues and expenses more difficult to track.
Action St. Louis has a sister organization that Reed also runs called Action St. Louis Power Project, which is organized under different IRS rules as a 501(c)(4). These groups are common in Missouri and other states. Records from the Missouri Secretary of State’s office show that Reed incorporated both nonprofits in July 2020.
OpenSecrets says c4 groups are the most common kind of dark money group.
Such organizations, typically referred to as “social welfare” organizations, are allowed to support political candidates and engage in campaigns. But this cannot be their primary purpose, and the de facto rule is that they must limit such activities to 49.9 percent of their overall expenditures, OpenSecrets says.
“Oftentimes when you have these groups, either spending directly on elections or funneling money through other political groups into elections, their purpose gets more muddled,” Massoglia says.
During this spring’s primary and general elections in St. Louis City, the Power Project spent more than $100,000 on campaigns, according to required disclosures filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission.
The Power Project spent most of this money promoting Jones and several aldermanic candidates, including incumbents Green in the 15th Ward and Dan Guenther in the 9th Ward. They also backed progressive challengers Anne Schweitzer (who unseated Alderwoman Beth Murphy in the 13th Ward) and Shedrick Kelley (who lost to Coatar in the 7th Ward).
The sources of the Power Project’s money are not clear; as a c4 it is not required to disclose its donors.
Gross says that because the Power Project is politically engaged, it cannot be fiscally sponsored by a c3 organization like ArchCity.
A search via the tax-exempt organization search tool on the IRS website did not produce any records relating to Action St. Louis. Nor did it turn up any records on the Power Project. (The IRS notes on its site that certain data updates have been delayed.)
When applying for tax-exempt status, c4 organizations are normally required to file IRS Form 1024-A. In addition, the organization must make available for public inspection its approved application for recognition from the IRS, as well as all supporting documents, according to the IRS website.
Action St. Louis did not respond to requests from McPherson regarding the status of any exemption applications with the IRS.
“We’re not answering your questions”
ArchCity and Action St. Louis do not take kindly to outsiders asking for specifics about the sources of their money.
In June Strode and Reed tangled publicly with Jane Dueker, a lobbyist and attorney for the St. Louis Police Officers Association, a union that represents many city police officers. On Twitter, Dueker — a persistent and ferocious critic of Jones and her political allies — demanded that Action St. Louis produce its IRS exemption application.
“The bigger that the organization becomes, the bigger the worry is. Any kind of money that you’re spending to do something with government in general, I’d really like to see where that money is coming from.”
St. Louis lawyer and transparency advocate Elad Gross
Dueker accused Action and ArchCity of being part of a “dark money nonprofit industrial complex.”
Reed fired back: “I’m not going back and forth with white supremacists. We lead the campaign to defund the police and their lobbyist…we continue to organize.”
Last week, at the request of ArchCity Communications Director Z Gorley, McPherson e-mailed a partial list of questions for this story, including why ArchCity doesn’t disclose its major donors and why Reed is the only board member who gets paid. In a reply Gorley called the questions a “strange fishing expedition,” and said ArchCity would not respond.
A few hours later, Strode – normally considered an effective, strategic leader by others who have worked with him – threw a bit of a tantrum on Twitter.
“Somewhere out there, there’s a faux-reporter with no real journalistic credentials trying very hard to work up a fictional hit piece on ArchCity Defenders,” he wrote.
Strode added in his Twitter thread: “We won’t return your call. We’re not answering your questions. We’re not playing ‘show me your papers’ (which we’ve already filed and made accessible).”
When life gets complicated
Under Strode’s leadership, ArchCity is laying out ambitious goals as part of the transformation it seeks. These goals go far beyond defunding police, Strode said in his Gateway Giving interview.
“’Defund’ to me is a compromise demand,” Strode said. “We identify as an abolitionist organization. For us, what that means is we believe in the abolition of the prison-industrial complex: prisons, jails, prosecution, policing as we know it.”
With lofty goals like this, what’s ahead for ArchCity and its allies? Will they be able to maintain their financial support and ensure that city politicians like Jones deliver on their demands?
One setback for the activists came within the past week, with the return of city inmates to the Workhouse. The infamous jail, which activists call “decrepit and inhumane,” remains very much open.
“At some point in recent years they’ve shifted from what appears to be advocacy for the indigent to being a political arm and attacking the city. It’s baffling that they’ve gotten so far from their core mission, yet seem to be getting more donations than ever.”
St. Louis Alderman Jack Coatar
For ArchCity, another sign that life is getting more complicated came in late July. Post-Dispatch reporters Robert Patrick and Rachel Rice wrote a story about hundreds of detainees in St. Louis area jails, all facing federal charges, who had been moved to jails in Kentucky and Indiana.
A big reason for the moves had to do with the Workhouse. In order for Jones to make good on her plans to empty the notorious jail, the city needed to reduce its prisoner population by ridding itself of federal detainees. (Even though many of these detainees are St. Louisans, they are charged with federal crimes and had been housed under a contract between the city and the feds.)
It turned out, as some observers had been warning for months, that this process produced some harmful knock-on effects. The Post reported that federal officials had no choice in some cases but to send prisoners to jails that were more than four hours away from St. Louis. This makes it much harder for their lawyers and family members to visit them.
It was a natural issue for the Post reporters to raise with ArchCity. Over the years the organization has fought relentlessly on behalf of thousands of jailed St. Louisans, their families and their communities.
Yet the situation involving the federal prisoners appeared to be the antithesis of the reforms often demanded by ArchCity.
So when the Post contacted ArchCity about the detainees’ relocation, the group did what officials at powerful, well-funded organizations everywhere tend to do when reporters ask inconvenient questions: It declined to comment. –McP–
[Click here to read McPherson’s sidebar on ArchCity and St. Louis media organizations.]
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They are haters. Jealous because Arch City is taking on the rot in St. Louis.
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