Florida doubles payout to Lauren’s Kids
In the waning days of the most recent Florida legislative session, it appeared the nonprofit agency founded and run by Plantation State Sen. Lauren Book would walk away with only half-a-million dollars in taxpayer funding after consecutive years of receiving six-figure sums.
Then came the April 30th meeting of the budget conference chairs. That’s when Lauren’s Kids got sprinkled.
The so-called “sprinkle list” is used to describe how legislators shower favored organizations with additional dollars near the end of session.
Toward the end of the hearing, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Sen. Rob Bradley, R- Green Cove Springs, announced that the children’s cancer awareness foundation Live Like Bella and Book’s organization, Lauren’s Kids, had been erroneously left off the list. He said each would receive an additional $500,000.
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WTF ? I guess no One in Washington DC. Sees this as double dripping ? Getting $30.000 +/- Salary but living in a multidollar home. Hello People of Florida time to wake up and Demand accountability / audit of her lauren kids slush fund
“Book insisted that her CEO salary was restructured so that is not paid with state funds and that she derives no personal benefit from public tax dollars.”
Does we know, then, where that $144,250 salary comes from?
I mean, I assume private donations of some sort.
Is there anything we can do to raise awareness among Lauren’s Kids private donors, that the first $144,250 of their donation dollars goes directly to Book’s personal salary? That way, those private donors would be on a more informed position as to how best to deploy their donation dollars. (Let me know if I’m jumping to conclusions here, or misrepresenting facts).
Or, if private donors already ARE aware of this, do we know whether any of those private donors stood to personally benefit from legislation sponsored by Book? Wish I was better at tracking such stuff.
Finally, with respect to these education programs that purportedly are the charity’s primary activity— has anyone reviewed the content of these programs, and do we know whether they are reasonably accurate with respect to child sexual abuse prevention?
Florida has a very strong public records law. FOIA requests are one good way to get that information. Don’t be surprised if you end up with multiple rabbit holes from any single point of entry.
In 2016, Lauren’s Kids received over $2.8 MILLION in gov’t funding. Non gov’t funding was only $825k. Of that $825k, only $268k was profit from services rendered (i.e., profits from fundraising efforts.)
Employee salaries were a total of $323k, of that, $144k went to Book. About $1 million went to “independent contractors” with 6 figure contracts.
When you think about it, a non-profit organization that rakes in $3.68 million in 2016 but derived only $268k from earned income is nit that great a business. Lauren’s Kids is completely welfare dependent in order to exist; 76% of Lauren’s Kids money came from the government, while only 7% of Lauren’s Kids revenue came from income they earned.
Put frankly, the organization would cease to exist if it was forced to function without all these government “sprinkles.”
Meanwhile she gets paid tax dollars as a legislator PLUS tax dollars for her foundation. What corruption?!
It is nice to know that the land of Duh has so much money to waste that they can just throw money to their personal pet projects. But what about all those untested rape kits that they said was untested because if lack of funding? Lauren Book doesn’t fund that through her charity.
Was this a ‘behind closed doors’ error? Just another fraud cast upon the citizens of Florida.
Excuse me, I have to go throw up.
Good cushy work if you can get it. It takes most of us years to earn that much money. Lauren gets it for free with one stroke of the pen.