RICHMOND, Va. — An organizer who received hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to run a homeless shelter for vulnerable women and children in Richmond has been accused of embezzling money.
The allegations are raising questions about how and why the city tapped an unknown organization with no experience operating homeless shelters to take on such a significant responsibility.
According to a criminal information document filed this week in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Kia Player of RVA Sisters Keeper is facing one count of wire fraud for submitting falsified and fabricated invoices to the city for shelter services that never happened.
The news was cause for outrage for Rhonda Sneed, who provides food and necessities to homeless people on the streets of Richmond nearly every day through her organization Blessing Warriors RVA, which relies on community donations.
“It's heart wrenching every day to see this every day, and for money be given to you, and you just abuse it for your own purposes? While people suffer every day? Nah," Sneed said.
According to court filings, the timeline starts in August 2022 when Player sent an application to the city, seeking funding to run an inclement weather shelter that would provide refuge to homeless women and children during the winter months. She did not register RVA Sisters Keeper as a legitimate organization with the State Corporation Commission or as a 501(c)(3) until after applying.
Despite that, Richmond ended up selecting the organization to operate a shelter on the city's Southside, and the city council signed off on giving the organization $995,000 in governmental funding.
At the time, Sneed said she had never heard of RVA Sisters Keeper.
“We looked it up. We tried. We couldn't find anything," Sneed said. "It didn’t seem like anybody. Just somebody off the street said, ‘I’m going to open up a shelter,’ and the city gives them a million dollars.”
The shelter operated from October 2022 through April 2023.
Prosecutors said over the course of the scheme, Player generated 35 falsified invoices including some that totaled $170,000 for meals ordered through VCM Catering Services. However, VCM Catering Services was a made-up business. In reality, prosecutors said Player paid her own mother, who was a Richmond Public Schools cafeteria manager, $4,000 a month to provide meals to the shelter. Some of that food, the mother took from the school.
Player also allegedly forged invoices showing non-existent or inflated services for laundry, pest control, and cleaning services.
Another fabricated invoice allegedly showed $48,000 in contractor work for various projects, such as roof repairs and plumbing upgrades, that wasn't performed. All the while, prosecutors said the shelter's roof leaked and 40 homeless people had to share one shower and two bathrooms, none of which were ever upgraded.
Sneed said she visited the facility once and was concerned by what she saw.
“It was chaos. It was a lot of people, a lot of kids, men and women, just in a massive room. It was crazy. It was totally unorganized," Sneed said.
Player is additionally accused of funneling at least $68,000 to her own business and bank accounts. Prosecutors said she used those fraudulent proceeds to pay for a tattoo, flights, a luxury Caribbean ferry ride in Miami, and for shopping at several stores.
Prosecutors said Player and her co-conspirators caused at least $199,000 in losses to the city and the federal government through their embezzlement.
Her defense attorney Michael Moore declined to comment on the allegations since the case is still playing out in court. Player has a plea agreement hearing scheduled for November 18.
Sneed said she's demanding answers as to why the city chose RVA Sisters Keeper to run a homeless shelter and who was responsible for vetting the organization before giving it money.
She and other advocates attended a June 2023 city council committee meeting, complaining about an alleged lack of services provided by the city's homeless shelters that previous season and raising questions about how they spent taxpayer dollars.
Local News
Community frustrated with Richmond's homeless services
"Shelters should be treated like other state and government agencies, requiring audits. You need an audit team. Nobody's checking who's doing what," advocate Nancy Williams, who works closely with Sneed's organization, told the committee at the time.
Player also attended that meeting, and her partner told the committee that at the time they were "doing all we can as a new provider." While they acknowledged they did not have experience working directly with homeless people prior to running a shelter, they said they had an extensive background in the mental health field. They also said they were cooperating with an audit that was occurring at the time.
Sneed said moving forward, the city needs to implement stronger safeguards and vetting practices to prevent something like this from happening again.
“They have to understand that. You can't keep the same people that were in charge that allowed this to happen. To make this work, they have to clean house," Sneed said.
A city spokesperson said the Department of Housing and Community Development was responsible for selecting the 2022-2023 inclement weather shelter providers through a dedicated competitive process.
"As was apparent in that process, there were not a large number of shelter providers who were interested in applying or able to provide the service. This a very challenging service to provide and adding seasonal bed space and staffing capacity makes it additionally challenging and expensive. Among the few organizations who did apply were some new and less established organizations, that were geographically well positioned to increase and diversify access to the inclement weather shelter," a spokesperson said. "Since that time, the City has focused more heavily on identifying long established shelter providers to support inclement weather shelter needs. Our current partners, The Salvation Army, CARITAS, and HomeAgain all have long histories of performance providing shelter and support services. HomeAgain was founded in 1980, CARITAS in 1987, and The Salvation Army has been providing shelter in Richmond since 1984.”
CBS 6 is committed to sharing community voices on this important topic. Email your thoughts to the CBS 6 Newsroom.
📲: CONNECT WITH US
Blue Sky | Facebook | Instagram | X | Threads | TikTok | YouTube
