Saint Francis Ministries Series
By Emily Chen-Newton
Featured
Documents from a Saint Francis investigation show Smith invested $11 million in a friend’s business for software that crashed and destroyed the organization’s financial records. Saint Francis spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in a program led by Smith’s wife to harvest a “miracle” food in El Salvador, where staff asked for and received Visa credit cards for the purpose of getting cash to bribe local officials. Smith repeatedly was warned about the financial perils of entering a contract to provide services in Nebraska, where Saint Francis is projected to lose $27 million in the current fiscal year, before Smith signed the deal.
The state of Nebraska is cutting short Saint Francis Ministries’ nearly $150 million dollar child welfare contract. Today, (Tuesday, Dec. 14) the CEOs of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and Saint Francis Ministries (SFM) announced, in their words, “a mutual agreement” to end their case management contract more than a year early. This marks the end of an emergency contract signed in January 2021, originally intended to extend to February 2023, a month Governor Ricketts leaves office.
This announcement comes one day before the Nebraska legislative Investigative and Oversight Committee is set to release its recommendations on how the state should proceed with Saint Francis Ministries. It also comes one day after the Episcopal Church of Chicago announced it will discipline the former leader of SFM, Father Bobby for what it calls his “poor judgment”.
Eight days after they began protesting excessive caseloads in their jobs, Marshuana Martin, Aron Sanders (pictured above) and their colleague Darinita Shannon were terminated from their positions at Saint Francis Ministries (SFM).
In July of 2019, a contract between Saint Francis Ministries (SFM) and the state of Nebraska was finalized tasking Saint Francis with managing the care of roughly 2,000 abused and neglected children in and around Omaha. Since then, Saint Francis, which originally claimed they could do the job for roughly 40% less than their competitor, has repeatedly fallen short of compliance with various child welfare regulations, and recently their “Child Placing Agency License” has been put on probation. This probation is far from the first red flag for SFM, but never before has their ability to care for children across the whole state hung in the balance as it does now.
State senators to serve on a committee investigating child welfare management in the Omaha area have been announced. State Sen. M Cavanaugh has been leading the legislative charge for the investigation into Saint Francis Ministries, and the government departments that awarded the multimillion-dollar contract since last year. In a rare decision, Sen. M Cavanaugh was not given a spot on the investigative committee that she herself proposed.
A special committee will investigate the organization managing foster care and adoption for 2,500 children in the state after a resolution presented by Senator Michaela Cavanaugh was approved by the legislature today. Gross financial mismanagement within the child welfare organization, Saint Francis Ministries (SFM), has been uncovered over the past year, including $80,000 spent on Chicago Cubs tickets. The baseball team is owned by the brother of Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts.
The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services agreed to an emergency contract with child welfare organization, Saint Francis Ministries (SFM) on January 29th. The contract allows SFM to continue case management of foster care, adoption, and child welfare cases in the Omaha area, and Sarpy county. This new roughly two-year agreement replaces a five-year contract with Saint Francis Ministries signed in 2019 which has seen intense scrutiny from the legislature and advocates since 2019. (Image Credit: Alyssa Sieb https://nappy.co/alyssasieb)
Thousands of Nebraska children have been placed in the care of Saint Francis Ministries (SFM) since 2019 since the Kansas based child welfare agency was awarded the contract for case management in the Omaha area. SFM grossly underbid the contract based upon the previous cost of providing services in this area. Trying to operate on an inadequate budget, SFM saddled caseworkers with more cases than is legally allowed in the state of Nebraska, and as a result caseworkers have been leaving in droves.