The Gay & Lesbian Times and the GLBT community have long been supporters of Auntie Helen’s, local nonprofit that provides laundry services to people living with AIDS in San Diego County. It is an absolute necessity for some people living with AIDS, who are often so sick they cannot get out of bed, to get their laundry washed. We remember when founder Gary Cheatham started the organization out of his own garage, washing and drying his friend’s laundry and delivering it to their homes. So we were disappointed to hear that Auntie Helen’s executive director Bob Stanley, one of Cheatham’s own friends, has been knowingly misstating the number of client’s the organization serves and has been mismanaging its money and assets. According to last week’s news story (“Ex-employees accuse Auntie Helen’s of fraud, mismanagement”), Auntie Helen’s has been saying it serves 400 clients when it actually only serves 35.

Since the story broke, we’ve received numerous letters from Auntie Helen’s board members, employees and volunteers who have called the ex-employees who sounded the alarm “troublemakers” or “power grabbers.” The former employees may indeed be “disgruntled” – although we do find it ironic that one of them was named Employee of the Year just last year – but numbers are numbers. You can’t say you are servicing 400 clients when you’re not and that’s a conservative number. Auntie Helen’s has said for years that they were serving between 400 and 500 clients. It doesn’t matter if the whistleblower is disgruntled or they’re a happy go lucky character: fraud is fraud.

One question that boggles are minds is how an executive director – who told our reporter that he did not know about Auntie Helen’s low client numbers until an employee recently brought it to his attention – could not know that his organization was doing laundry for only 35 people? We are talking about a more than 90 percent difference in clients. Again, how could Stanley not know?

Even if you do believe that the executive director did not know that his organization was losing clients, how, as he stated in last week’s news story, can he be “the most competent person there to hold the job”? What is Stanley saying about the rest of the people that work for his organization? What is he saying to the GLBT community in general with that statement?

Of course, it goes without saying that any organization that loses 90 percent of their clients would have heads rolling. So what makes Bob Stanley the exception? Many of the letters we received from Auntie Helen’s advocates pointed to Stanley’s character saying that he’s an honest man, has integrity and has done many good deeds. But we must ask, does a person’s past deeds and character supersede his present day behavior? We don’t think so. Even if it did, Stanley does get paid $58,000 a year for what he does. So to say that what he does for Auntie Helen’s comes from the kindness of his heart is simply disingenuous.

The news story also showed that Auntie Helen’s lost $46,000 in revenue last year. We asked ourselves, how could this be the case? Even amidst the economic downturn, perhaps because of it, thrift stores are experiencing a resurgence. As the National Association of Resale and Thrift Shops (NARTS) reports, the industry as a whole has increased in the number of new thrift stores by five percent for the past three years. News papers around the country have reported that thrift store sales have increased dramatically while most other businesses have sunk since the economy crashed. And yet, Auntie Helen’s thrift shop continues its downward spiral!

And what is the role of Auntie Helen’s board of directors in all of this? It appears that the current board is severely lacking oversight. When a now-former employee brought the matter to the board’s attention, it seems like their heads went further in the sand.

We think that Auntie Helen’s has lost touch with the community. According to county numbers, about 6,000 people are living with AIDS in San Diego County and as Terry Cunningham, chief of HIV/AIDS services in San Diego County, will tell you, many people living with AIDS are in a physical condition that prevents them from accomplishing what we normally take for granted such as eating three meals a day and getting their laundry done. How can any organization not lose touch with its community when it only serves less than one percent of it?

We therefore call for Bob Stanley and the current board to step down and for a new interim board to be put in place. It happened recently with Pride. As you might recall Sen. Christine Kehoe, City Councilmember Todd Gloria and former deputy mayor Toni Atkins demanded that its former board step down after its former executive director spoke out against its board president receiving $5,000 in compensation for his unpaid position. Auntie Helen’s fraud on its grant applications amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years and their revenue loss, in light of their industry’s growth is staggering. If Kehoe, Atkins and Gloria will mettle in the affairs of a private organization over $5k, where are our saviors with respect to Auntie Helen’s?

On a final note, we noticed that someone has been trying to skew the results of our online survey question, which asked our readers if they thought if Auntie Helen’s executive director has committed fraud. We received more than 800 ‘No’ votes from the same IP address. So someone – We presume its Auntie Helen’s PR person Michael Dudley – spent hours voting and deleting their cookies over and over again. We recognized this and deleted those votes. The final survey results reflect one IP address per vote as our policy states.