St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Jacob Barker joins KSMU's Gregory Holman to talk about recent Post-Dispatch reporting on perceived problems with the ways some Missouri churches and nonprofit groups spent federal taxpayer funds intended for child nutrition programs during the pandemic.
Government actions
Barker, a reporter with the Post-Dispatch for nine years, says he spent three months reporting a half-dozen articles on actions by government authorities to ensure that taxpayer money was appropriately spent on feeding children.
Last fall, Barker reported that Missouri barred six nonprofits across the state from participating in these federal programs after state regulators found problems with the nonprofits' spending practices.
A Springfield-area church, Life360, and its nonprofit arm Life360 Community Services, were not among those six organizations.
But, Barker recently reported for the Post-Dispatch, state authorities repeatedly questioned Life360's spending on high salaries, rent payments and "management fees" in connection to the nutrition program.
In July of 2022, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services sent a certified letter classifying Life 360 Community Services "as seriously deficient in its operation of the [Child and Adult Care Food Program] as defined in Federal Regulations."
The church and nonprofit received roughly $43.8 million in reimbursements, according to the Post-Dispatch.
Church response
Life360 denies wrongdoing. “I think it’s the best run of any organization, and the state’s helped us do that,” Pastor Ted Cederblom told the Post-Dispatch, according to the newspaper's July 23 report. “I’ve given my life toward this.”
On July 27, Life360 provided KSMU a statement through a spokesperson, Miles Ross. KSMU was not able to arrange a separate interview with church officials — who Ross said were traveling out of state for a conference — before deadline.
In part, the written statement from Life360 Pastor Cederblom says:
- "The reporter from the St Louis Post Dispatch took two years to engineer facts to fit the narrative of stories he has written about other organizations that, unlike LCS, have been banned from the CACFP [Child and Adult Care Food Program] and SFSP [Summer Food Service Program] food programs; he took facts out of context and twisted them into something that would garner headlines, and he avoided showing the good work LCS does for rural Missouri. Further, the use of uncorroborated anonymous sources to build his story is questionable journalism. LCS disagrees with the premise of his article and questions his journalistic integrity."
- "LCS will continue to serve the citizens of Missouri and other states while remaining compliant and in good standing with the State of Missouri."
The Post-Dispatch article includes one source the story refers to as a "person familiar with the organization's finances who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution."
That anonymous source commented that "a lot of money shifted over" between the church, nonprofit and food program.
In a second statement received late Sunday night in response to follow-up questions by KSMU, Life360 disputed several aspects of the Post-Dispatch report, including salaries of two church officials it says were misreported by the Post-Dispatch.
Church officials said the newspaper article suggested Life 360 Community Services "was not participating in the USDA food programs administered by the State of Missouri prior to the COVID-19 pandemic" — but, they said, the church had been a participant since 2016.
The church noted that as of June 6 of this year, "seriously deficient" conditions found by state regulators in July 2022 "had been fully corrected." Life360 "was and always has been responsive to State oversight," church officials said.
When asked whether officials with the church or nonprofit had asked for a fact correction from the newspaper, Life360 officials said in their statement, "LCS has not taken responsive action to the Post-Dispatch article for the reason that any attempts to do so would likely prove futile."
