In November, Glamour magazine named Sheri Boelter one of its “50 Phenomenal Women of the Year” for her work as director of the Tumbleweed Runaway Program. The short description of her work contains information Boelter acknowledges was exaggerated. She said she didn’t know where the magazine got the information.
Editor’s note: This article contains two clarifications/updates in the body of the story.
The board of directors of the Tumbleweed Runaway Program is investigating allegations that its executive director has inflated and in some cases fabricated statistics regarding the number of homeless young people in Billings.
The board’s investigation into the activities of Sheri Boelter was sparked by allegations raised by one former employee, but similar concerns have been raised by other current and former employees.
The allegations were contained in a letter to the board, dated Dec. 3, 2014, from Sabrina Currie, who was Tumbleweed’s development director for 15 months before resigning early last October.
Currie raised numerous issues of credibility and honesty in the six-page letter, saying she felt a moral obligation to inform the board of “deceptive and fraudulent things going on” within the organization.
Her claims were backed up by Carmen Price, who was the development director Currie replaced and who lasted only six months there. In her own letter to the Tumbleweed board, dated this Feb. 11, Price said she became “increasingly concerned that the organization’s director continually misrepresented the agency’s reporting protocol and acted deceptively by camouflaging the agency’s internal procedures as well as the number of youth it serves.”
One former and one current employee, both of whom hold or held positions of substantial responsibility, said they had seen Currie’s letter to the board and shared many of her concerns. Both asked not to be identified, for fear of retaliation, but one of them said, “I am very proud of Sabrina and wholeheartedly believe in what she’s doing.”
Tumbleweed is a nonprofit agency founded in 1976. Headquartered at 505 N. 24th St., it provides services to runaway, homeless and otherwise at-risk youth and their families. Those services include emergency shelter and transitional housing, support groups and family counseling.
In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2013, the most recent year for which federal tax reports are available, Tumbleweed had total revenues of $753,625, of which $283,108 came from federal grants and $256,123 from private contributions and grants. Other major sources of income were $35,000 in court service fees, $130,822 from a contract with School District 2 and $13,275 in miscellaneous revenue.
Sabrina Currie
Boelter, a graduate of Billings West High, has a master’s degree in social work from New Mexico Highlands University. She took over as Tumbleweed’s executive director in the fall of 2011. Before that she worked for the Billings Community Action Agency.
Tax records show that her compensation from Tumbleweed in 2012-13 totaled $78,939, including a salary of $67,588 and $11,351 in “other compensation.”
One specific allegation made by Currie and Price was that Boelter continually misled major funders and the Billings community by telling them Tumbleweed’s Street Outreach Program was very active and engaged, regularly delivering much-needed supplies to homeless teens living on the streets and in camps and caves.
During their time with Tumbleweed, Currie and Price said, street outreach workers went out a couple of times a month, or once a week sometimes, but rarely ventured beyond the Downtown Skate Park and “smokers’ corner” near Billings Senior High School.
Their allegations were supported by Tasha LeClair, who was an outreach worker for Tumbleweed from June 2013 to early January 2014.
“When I was there,” LeClair said, “we struggled to get out. I kept asking all summer when we were going to go out… . We complained probably in every meeting, for the whole time I was there.”
LeClair said it was maddening, after being refused permission to do the job for which she was hired, to be working in Tumbleweed’s drop-in center with another employee when Boelter led tours through the building.
“Sheri would lead people—donors and board members—back through the drop-in center while I was at my desk and she would be telling them all this stuff we were doing, supposedly, and Tara (the other worker) and I would turn to each other and just be baffled.”
When she challenged Boelter after one of those tours, LeClair said, Boelter wouldn’t respond to her and then stopped coming to the drop-in center at all. “The last month I was there, I saw her maybe in the kitchen a couple of times,” LeClair said. “And she canceled our meetings.”
LeClair said her own attempts to find out how to contact board members were unsuccessful, so she gave up. But she did go to a “whistleblower” page on the federal Administration for Children and Families website and anonymously reported possible deceptive practices by Tumbleweed.
Price said she heard a similar message about the board of directors when she worked for Tumbleweed. “The director stated staff was to NEVER contact the board,” Price said in her recent letter to the board, “and if we had concerns, we must take them to HR and then to her (Boelter). If warranted, she would then address the board herself.”
Boelter flatly denied every charge made by LeClair and Currie. She was not asked about allegations made by Price because Price agreed only recently to give Last Best News a copy of her letter to the board. That was after Boelter wrote to this reporter, on Feb. 25, to say she would have no further comment, directing all inquiries to Paul Collins, an attorney at the Billings firm Crowley Fleck, who is also chairman of the Tumbleweed board.
Boelter also said in her email: “I will not be continuing communication with you until your motivation is to shine a spotlight on the life-changing work that Tumbleweed does.”
Collins, for his part, did respond to a lengthy series of questions posed by Last Best News, but when asked for follow-up explanations or more information, he waited almost two weeks and then responded on Feb. 17 by saying that because the board was still conducting its own investigation “while continuing to address the substantive mission of the organization,” it was “too much of a distraction” to respond to any more questions. He has not responded to any further inquiries.
He did, however, send out a letter in the last week of February addressed to “Dear Tumbleweed Supporter.” It’s not clear how many letters went out, or who received them, but in it Collins makes multiple references to “the” or “a” former employee’s allegations regarding Boelter, without mentioning anyone else the board has talked to, or whose letters it has received.
Collins did mention what he called “some of the most sensational allegations” made by Currie, who is not named in the letter, but he also said the allegations were “refuted by eyewitnesses.”
Collins was obviously referring to doubts raised by Currie, LeClair and Price in regard to a Youth Count survey conducted in July 2013.
Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
The Tumbleweed Runaway Program is headquartered at 505 N. 24th St.
The survey was a joint project of Tumbleweed and the Billings Metro VISTA Project, overseen by the city of Billings’ Community Development Division. It probably is the most “sensational” of the allegations made against Boelter because the Youth Count numbers were used to support federal grant applications, including funding for the Street Outreach Program.
As part of that survey, Boelter claimed to have been led to an encampment of more than 50 homeless teenagers somewhere in Lockwood, which more than doubled the number of youths counted over three days by 35 other workers and volunteers involved in the project.
Two Americorps VISTA members, Joshua Downes and Chelsia Davis, worked full time on the project for a year, beginning in January 2013. Downes said he and Price were together at Tumbleweed on July 12, 2013, the first day of the survey, when he received a text from Boelter saying she and a friend, “a big guy,” were in Lockwood administering surveys to a “large camp of youth she had found.”
A day or two after the count, Downes said, Boelter told him in a face-to-face conversation that the “big guy” was a police officer.
Boelter said in an interview with Last Best News that Downes was simply mistaken about the police officer.
“He doesn’t remember it accurately because I didn’t go to Lockwood with a police officer,” she said. “The kids wouldn’t have talked to me.”
Price said in her letter to the board that she was instantly suspicious about “the camp allegedly found by the director and her male police officer friend.” Her suspicions were heightened when Boelter rebuffed offers from Price and Downes to go out to Lockwood and help her with the surveying, or to have outreach workers bring supplies to them.
“This cohort of homeless youth was never once seen at Tumbleweed, had never been visited by the Street Outreach staff, and to my dismay, was never again mentioned by the director,” Price said in her letter.
Asked in an interview why she didn’t want help in filling out the surveys, Boelter gave two answers. At first, she said the teens camped out in Lockwood were “very uneasy” and did not want many people around.
She said her thought was, “We have to go fast. We have to get what we can because otherwise they’re not going to be willing to fill out a survey.”
Later in the same interview, however, she said she didn’t need detailed information, but only a head count, as she had been trained to do in her years of running homeless youth programs in Seattle. She said the VISTA workers “wanted that information,” but it really wasn’t needed by Tumbleweed.
“I didn’t have time to be thorough,” she said. “I didn’t want to be thorough. It wasn’t my agenda.”
On Dec. 28 of last year, three weeks after Currie wrote to the Tumbleweed board, Kendra Nieskens, a former Tumbleweed employee who was the leader of the street outreach team during the Youth Count, wrote her own letter to the board, stating that she and a young Tumbleweed client, who told them of the Lockwood encampment, accompanied Boelter to the gathering. Nieskens and the unnamed youth apparently are the eyewitnesses who Collins said had “refuted” Currie’s allegations.
In her letter, Nieskens said the encampment was near Highway 212 and Interstate 90. After their arrival, Nieskens said, she and the unnamed young guide—later identified only as “DJ” by Boelter—“began to survey the youth” while “Sheri ran to McDonalds to purchase Big Macs for all the youth. She is incredibly generous and purchased 50 burgers with her own funds.”
Sabrina Currie said Sheri Boelter intentionally misrepresented the significance of Currie’s photo of a young man waiting for his girlfriend outside the Tumbleweed office.
LeClair, who was an outreach worker during the Youth Count, said she offered on several occasions to take supplies to the Lockwood encampment after the Youth Count weekend, but Boelter discouraged her from doing so and never mentioned the encampment again.
Boelter said that wasn’t true, and when asked how much follow-up there was at the youth camp, she said, “Oh, my gosh, a ton.”
However, in an interview, Nieskens said she did not return to the Lockwood encampment in the immediate aftermath of the Youth Count weekend. “I think we did go back a couple of weeks later, and they were gone,” she said.
Boelter also said she could probably produce receipts showing what was spent delivering outreach supplies to the Lockwood encampment, as a well as a personal bank statement documenting her purchase of 50 Big Macs. A week later she said she had the Tumbleweed receipts and would produce them.
The next day, however, was when she refused to answer any further questions and referred all inquiries to Collins. She did not respond to an email seeking more information on the records and bank statement.
There are some unexplained discrepancies in the surveys turned in by Boelter. Of the 53 surveys she turned in, 26 were signed by her, one by DJ, the young helper, and 26 were unsigned. Also, 13 of the surveys were dated July 12, three were dated July 13, and 36 were dated July 14.
But when asked if she went back to the camp on Saturday and Sunday, after being taken there Friday, Boelter said, “I don’t think I did.” Asked why the surveys had three different dates, Boelter said she filled out surveys at other locations as well as Lockwood, including the skate park and at some caves in the Rims where homeless youth were living.
Downes, however, said in another email, “I am aware that she went to the caves in the Rims. From what she told Chelsia and I, the 53 surveys were all from the camp, whereas the 27 from the caves were just a ‘headcount’, which was never included in data tabulation since there was no evidence, or rather, surveys.”
Downes also produced a piece of writing, dated Nov. 11, 2013, that Boelter gave him for use as a “prologue” to the Youth Count report. It was never used in the report, Downes said, but in it Boelter wrote: “One camp located just outside of Billings contained 52 homeless young people between the ages of 12-18.” In the same document she went on to say, “We also counted 27 nameless young people who were sleeping in the caves.”
An analysis of the surveys turned in by Boelter, still on file in the Community Development Division, shows that most of them contained nothing but the age and gender of the youth purportedly surveyed, and only 13 of the 53 surveys were filled out past the third page of the six-page survey. By contrast, the vast majority of surveys turned in by the other volunteers were completely filled out.
Also, of the surveys compiled by Downes and his volunteers, 79 were excluded from the report because the youths surveyed fell outside the age range of 13 to 21 or they failed to meet the definition of homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. But only one of Boelter’s surveys was excluded; the other 52 youths all fell within the allowable age range and met the other criteria.
The second major issue involving questionable statistics arose at Tumbleweed’s annual fundraising event at the Crowne Plaza on Oct. 2, 2014. Currie said she was in the audience when she heard the emcee, Tim Pollard, whose wife, Ruth, is on the Tumbleweed board, tell of how there were 70 youths in the drop-in center one night the previous February when it was 26 below zero, and of how 13 of them sold their bodies to stay warm.
Currie said she had already been concerned about other numbers she’d been hearing and had been asked to publicize, but the annual event was “the tipping point.”
She said in her letter to the board that she was embarrassed to hear those numbers because she had never “seen a report or heard from any other staff members that this was the kind of crisis we were in.”
When Currie later asked Boelter about the numbers, Boelter responded by email, saying Pollard had been told that 70 was the total number of youths “with no safe place to go this winter,” and that 13 was the total number of youths “this winter who admitted selling their bodies.”
It wasn’t clear how Pollard’s narrative ended up being so inaccurate, but Collins told Last Best News that “it would have been better” if Boelter had corrected or clarified Pollard’s remarks the night of the annual meeting. But because she did not, he said, “that number was re-reported.”
Indeed it was, more than once. An article about Tumbleweed in the November 2014 issue of Noise & Color, a monthly magazine in Billings, repeated the claims about 70 youths crowded into the center one cold night and 13 who “were forced to sell their bodies in order to have a warm place to stay.”
The author of the piece, Jim Huertas, said he didn’t remember whether he got that information directly from Boelter or from someone else at Tumbleweed. Boelter said Huertas, who had appeared in a promotional video for Tumbleweed and was at the annual meeting, must have gotten the information from Tim Pollard’s speech.
That cold night in February was featured once again, in mid-November, when Boelter was named one of Glamour magazine’s “50 Phenomenal Women of the Year.” The short piece on her work included this: “On one particular night last year when the temperature hit 26 degrees below zero, 68 teens showed up at the organization’s drop-in center, where they knew they would find food, shelter from the cold, and one other life essential—hope.”
Boelter said she never spoke with anyone from the magazine.
“If you ask Glamour magazine where they got their information, they Googled it,” she said. (Note: A spokesperson for Glamour has disputed this account. Go here for details.)
“I can’t answer where everybody’s getting my words,” Boelter said. “What I can answer to is when I send out a PSA or anything where I say what my words are. That is defendable. Because I don’t make things up.”
Boelter also said that when the board started asking about the various numbers being reported, Tumbleweed employees went into the database and discovered that in fact 36 youths had admitted selling their bodies last winter for shelter or food.
“I have their names,” she said. “I have their Social Security numbers. I have their dates of birth. I have their stories documented. It’s all in the database. I have to track it for our federal grants.”
She did not explain why she estimated the number of youths who had sold their bodies in preparation for the annual meeting and then later found hard numbers in the database.
The third instance of questionable numbers was contained in a blog entry posted on July 8, 2014, by the Pride Foundation, written by Kim Leighton, the regional development organizer in Montana for the foundation, which promotes equality for LGBTQ youth in the Northwest.
In her piece on Tumbleweed, Leighton wrote: “The Tumbleweed Program is currently serving a significant number of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth. Last night 90 homeless LGBTQ youth slept outside because they had been ‘thrown away’ by their families.”
Currie said in her letter to the board that Leighton got the information directly from Boelter, which Leighton confirmed. (*See note below.) In his initial response, Collins said Boelter stated that “the file of statistics on LGBTQ youth was in Sabrina’s office and that she (Boelter) cannot locate it and cannot determine where that number is from.”
Collins said the number, 90 homeless LGTBQ youths, would “appear to be in the range Tumbleweed would expect for a statewide figure, but Sheri has not yet found such data.” In an interview with Last Best News, however, Boelter said the number she gave to Leighton was 48 youths.
In addition to specific allegations about statistics and numbers, former employees talked about a pervasive atmosphere of unresponsiveness by higher-ups at Tumbleweed.
LeClair said there was a time when Nieskens, who wrote the letter about the youth camp, was demoted from team leader to regular outreach worker, and as a result she refused to come out of her office for days. LeClair, on her own, was trying to control a situation in which adults, some of whom were drug dealers, were coming into the drop-in center. She said she went to Boelter for advice about working with Nieskens.
She said Boelter responded by saying that when she worked at a Wendy’s restaurant, she often had to work on her own, and she asked if LeClair was requesting more supervision.
“I said, ‘this isn’t a fast-food restaurant,’” LeClair recalls saying. “I remember getting so frustrated. After that she pretty much didn’t directly answer any question I asked her.” She described Boelter as “oddly intimidating.”
Price, in her letter to the board, said her biggest concern when she worked at Tumbleweed was that she was being asked to use numbers given to her by Boelter without any supporting context or background. She said there was no central database or software system being used to process reports, and that counselors in outreach, the runaway program and in public schools submitted reports directly to Boelter at her request.
“I was never given access to review any such reports, and I wasn’t aware of anybody else that reviewed the reports,” Price said. “Rather, I was instructed to participate in and condone reporting numbers that I was denied the chance to confirm. Essentially, I was asked to overlook potentially unethical and illegal practices.”
After she sent her letter to the board, Price met with Collins and the board’s governance committee to talk in more detail about the issues she raised. A few days after that meeting, Price sent an email to Collins saying she had let LeClair know that the board would also be contacting her.
Price went on to say, “In the meantime, however, Sheri has contacted her (LeClair) with efforts to manipulate and intimidate… . Sheri contacting people, in my book, is harassment.”
LeClair said Boelter contacted her via Facebook. In a screen shot of her first message, Boelter said she wasn’t aware of how LeClair felt about her until being told by a reporter. “Just want you to know- I always liked you. And (it) was painful to hear your thoughts on me.”
LeClair responded by saying, “You said the same thing after you received my resignation letter”—in which LeClair said: “Tumbleweed leadership does not meet my personal standards and ethics.” She also asked Boelter not to contact her again.
But Boelter wrote back, an hour later, to say, “What could I possibly be lieing (sic) about? You didn’t know youth are homeless in our community? Wow… No worries, Tasha. I won’t be contacting u. You might want to look in the mirror and evaluate just who your allegations are hurting.”
Currie said the deception and fabrication sometimes extended to small and seemingly trivial incidents, which only heightened the air of unreality at the agency.
At the same annual event where the bogus numbers about youths crowded into the drop-in center were first aired, Currie said, there was a slideshow that featured a photo of pillows, blankets and sheets in a dumpster at Tumbleweed. Boelter told people at the meeting she found a youth sleeping in the dumpster.
Currie, though, said, “I told her I had thrown a bunch of bedding away that was left at Joy’s Haven (a home run by Tumbleweed) by strangers. Even after I told her it was me, she continued with the story that it was a bed made for a young homeless boy to sleep.”
Similarly, Currie took a black-and-white picture of a young man, who was not allowed into the drop-in center, lying in the grass just beyond the railroad tracks near Tumbleweed. Currie said he was waiting for his girlfriend, who was inside the building. Currie liked the photo enough to put it on her Facebook page.
At a Pride Foundation event in Billings on Dec. 11, Currie said, Boelter displayed the photo and said the youth in the picture was trying to commit suicide and was lying there waiting for a train to come by. Boelter said Currie wasn’t at that event or she would have known that she had only said the youth was suicidal, which was true.
But Currie produced a text message from Travis Dimond, a member of the Tumbleweed board, who was at the event and described for her what Boelter said about the photo. In his text, he said the young man in the photo “was waiting for the train to come along, had lost hope.”
In an email to Collins, Currie asked him to ask Boelter “to stop using my image in her fabricated stories.”
Meanwhile, Collins assured supporters in the letter that went out in late February that the investigation was continuing. But he also signaled his support for Boelter and again cast doubts on Currie, without naming her.
“Sheri has been a great asset to Tumbleweed and is largely responsible for improving its financial condition and opening two houses for youth,” Collins wrote. “For the board to react hastily would be foolish, especially when the evidence we have seen to date lays some allegations firmly to rest and also raises strong questions about the former employee’s motivation for making accusations that she did not make when she worked for Tumbleweed.”
Boelter evidently was encouraged by the tone of Collins’ letter. In the email to this reporter in which she said she could produce records of purchases for the Lockwood encampment, she wrote: “I also wanted to let you know- that Tumbleweed Board of Directors sent out a letter to our donors and community partners informing them of this ‘inquiry’. Just wanted to give you a heads up- word is out and people are talking! Iyiyiyiyi! Warm Regards, Sheri.”
Currie, echoing remarks made by Price and LeClair, said it was painful to go public with her concerns because she went to work for Tumbleweed focused solely on helping young people and believing strongly in what the agency was doing.
As for Boelter, Currie said, “I thought the sun set on her. She was this amazing woman doing this amazing work.”
She said it was sad to find out otherwise, and as she wrote to the board, “This has been a traumatizing and heavy burden to carry… . This shameful situation could have been prevented by people who are supposed to be held to a higher standard.”
In his letter to supporters, Collins did not give any indication of when he expected the board to conclude its investigation.
*Editor’s note: That sentence originally read: “Currie said in her letter to the board that Leighton got the information from Boelter, but Leighton said she wasn’t sure where she got it.” Leighton said Thursday that she got the information in an email from Boelter.
