The Fall of FamilyConnections: How Fraud Cheated Families

The news hit like a tornado in April: FamilyConnections, arguably the best-known family assistance nonprofit in Austin, would shut its doors.

Effective immediately.

The reason? Suspected fraud.

A real tornado could not have been any more devastating.

Overnight, more than 30 employees lost their jobs and parents throughout Austin lost a resource that had provided them with education, assistance, and camaraderie for nearly two decades.

Worse, police say the whole thing was an inside job, allegedly perpetrated by the organization’s own executive director.

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Louanne Aponte had been working as the executive director of Family Connections since 2004 — that’s when Connections Resource Center merged with Austin Families to create one large nonprofit to better serve parents and children in Austin.

It’s also when police say the criminal conduct began.

“We are alleging that all of [Ms. Aponte’s] criminal conduct occurred between the dates of September 13, 2004 and February 26, 2010,” says Travis County Assistant District Attorney Gregg Cox. “It was an ongoing scheme of continuing conduct.”

One nobody knew about until it was too late.

No Accountability

Like many nonprofit boards, the one that oversaw FamilyConnections placed a lot of trust in the organization’s executive director — even to the point of not administering a background check on her. If they had done so, police say it likely would have disqualified Ms. Aponte from the job because she had a history of criminal conduct: She was convicted back in the 1990s on two separate theft charges, both of which were felonies that involved stealing from two separate employers. She received two concurrent three-year prison sentences, says Mr. Cox, although she did not serve them in their entirety.

Similarly shocking is the fact that the board of directors did not demand financial accountability from Ms. Aponte — and in the end, that’s what brought down FamilyConnections.

For years, Ms. Aponte claimed that the accounting firm of Faske and Lay had been conducting FamilyConnections’ financial audits. The board of directors never questioned these audits, which they inspected at regular intervals. Indeed, at least one former board member says everything always looked in order.

“Once at a board meeting I commented that there seemed to be little variation between actual expenses and budgeted amounts [and] in my experience, there is often variation from month to month,” recalls Larry Elsner, the executive director of Open Door Preschool, who served on the FamilyConnections board of directors from 2006 to 2007. “Louanne commented that they did a really good job of budgeting.” Mr. Elser believed her and said the audits that Ms. Aponte presented to the board never looked suspicious so nobody thought to second guess her, even though she was solely in charge of conducting audits of more then $1.5 million funded to FamilyConnections.

It proved to be their undoing.

In February, the Texas Department of State Health Services discovered some anomalies in the $50,000 contract it had with FamilyConnections to improve Austin’s breastfeeding rates. When FamilyConnections’ audits were pulled to verify information, the board of directors discovered that every single one of them was false — dating back to 2004. A managing partner at Faske and Lay confirmed that it had not performed the audits and that the reports Ms. Aponte have given to the board for six years were all forgeries.

Two months later, police swept in and accused Louanne Aponte of misappropriating funds at FamilyConnections and stealing $30,000 from the nonprofit and the Texas Association of Child Care Resources and Referral Agencies. They seized her home in Circle C, her Mercedes Benz, a boat and some of her bank accounts; they also charged her with two counts of tampering with governmental records, two counts of theft and two counts of misapplication of fiduciary property.
The only problem was, she was nowhere to be found.

“I believe that other newspapers have reported Ms. Aponte has fled to Venezuela,” Mr. Cox says, “and I have no reason to disagree with those reports.”

Betrayal and Broken Hearts

The whirlwind of police and media scrutiny, coupled with the loss of their beloved nonprofit and their jobs, has taken a serious toll on the former employees at FamilyConnections — none of whom had any idea Ms. Aponte was anything other than their devoted boss, mentor and friend.

"[She] was the first one to step up: if you came up with a personal problem, she was always willing to work with you,” says Melissa Fuentes, the former library manager at FamilyConnections. “She was a caring person.”

Ms. Fuentes recalls all of the times Ms. Aponte’s family, including her husband and daughter, came to help out at FamilyConenctions. The memories just don’t mesh with the woman revealed in the police report. Ms. Fuentes can’t reconcile the woman she knew with the person accused of bringing down the nonprofit and causing her to lose her job. She wonders whether everything about her relationship with Ms. Aponte was a lie.

“[This situation] has made me question all of that,” she says. “Why was she so helpful and supportive? Was it so no one would ask questions or doubt her? Was it all a part of her manipulation? Was her family involved? Did they have an idea of what was going on?”

Ms. Fuentes isn’t the only former employee asking these questions. Speaking with other staff members and volunteers is like interviewing the walking wounded. All were so deeply committed to FamilyConnections and its mission that suddenly finding the center closed and themselves out of job, apparently at the hands of the executive director they trusted, has knocked their world off center. And for many, having to face their former clients has made a bad situation even worse. Ms. Fuentes’ voice breaks when asked about her clients’ reactions to the closing.

“When they walk up to the agency, it's heartbreaking to tell them: No, you cannot come and play. You cannot sit in our kitchen. You cannot see our fish tank. You cannot check out our toys,” she says.

The feeling of betrayal is certainly mutual: former clients of FamilyConnections are angry that one woman operating under dubious oversight could destroy a nonprofit that had devoted itself to the Austin parenting community. Within days of the closing, the blogosphere lit up with frustrated postings from mothers who had relied on FamilyConnections and who now found themselves without a lifeline of support.

“I loved Family Connections. That facility got me through the first six months of my daughter’s life. I took my first parenting class there. I met my first group of mommy friends there. The toy library was ingenious! I loved to take my daughter there on a rainy day. We always found people to talk to and play with,” wrote Lori Anderson, an active contributor to LiveMom.com. “I am very sad that this resource is gone, and even sadder that maybe the loss could have been prevented with better money management.”

Keeping the Spirit Alive

Other former clients, determined to make a difference, began exploring ways to continue FamilyConnections’ necessary work. Leah Roberts created a Facebook page, entitled Friends of Family Connections, to mass support for continuing FamilyConnections’ programs at other agencies. To press her case, she spoke at the City of Austin’s Early Childhood Council meeting on April 10, along with other parents and childcare providers, about the potential impact of Family Connections’ closure on Austin parents and the need to maintain the nonprofit’s programs. Over the past few months, both parents and educators have flooded the Facebook page with messages of support; some have emailed and called City Hall to echo Ms. Roberts’ call to action.

The sentiment is not lost on city employees, who agree that the services FamilyConnections’ provided should be maintained. The question is how — and by whom?

“[The Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services] department is working with City Council and various partners to ensure that essential services continue for children and families,” says Carole Barasch, who works with the department. The meeting on April 10, and another held on May 11, focused on generating long-term recommendations about the most effective ways to allocate funding to support healthy families and children.

To that end, the City of Austin has reallocated the childcare and family services funding that formerly went to Family Connections to provide those services, says David Lurie, the Austin/Travis County Health and Human Services Director. The department expects that the most critical programs and services that FamilyConnections offered will be absorbed by other agencies as early as this August.

“The City of Austin gave the money that was formerly FamilyConnections’ to Workforce and Any Baby Can,” says Ms. Fuentes. “For the most part, it isn’t necessarily going to continue the programs of [FamilyConnections], but maybe do a variation of the programs we offered and they might use some of our staff to do so.”

Any Baby Can has wasted no time in putting the new money to work: the agency now offers 150 parent education sections in 16 topic areas. It also has resumed the FamilyConnections’ postpartum support groups: The Baby Blues Postpartum Support Groups are held each Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Texas Oncology Building (4104 James Casey St., 2nd floor) and every Thursday at 10 a.m. at Any Baby Can (1121 E. 7th St.).

Meantime, Workforce Solutions of the Capital Area has taken over some of FamilyConnections’ child care quality improvement services, including training for child care center directors and teachers. “Workforce Solutions is committed to preparing the future workforce of the Capital Area by improving quality in the early-childhood development system so that children are prepared to succeed in school, and eventually, the workplace,” says Weston Sythoff, the organization’s communications coordinator.

Although the City did not require any local agency to assume FamilyConnections’ library services, Ms. Fuentes, who was able to quickly find a position as the library manager at Child Inc., says she is in the process of transitioning the FamilyConnections library to Child Inc. The latter organization currently is creating a guardianship agreement with the FamilyConnections board of directors to assume operation of the Family Place Library. The new library will be called the Child Inc. Community Library and is already looking for volunteers to help staff the library.

Loose Ends

As city employees, volunteers, and parents scramble to clean up the mess left behind by the meltdown of FamilyConnections, police continue to search for the woman they believe is responsible for it. Because Louanne Aponte’s husband is Venezuelan, police say she likely fled to that country when the criminal activity starting coming to light. If she returns, a host of criminal charges await both her and her husband: police have charged Marco Aponte with two separate felony 3rd degree counts of money laundering in connection with liquidating investment funds and removing those funds from the bank. “Mr. Aponte was aware of Ms. Aponte's theft when he did those two transactions,” says Assistant District Attorney Cox. “He knew that the funds were the proceeds of a criminal activity.”

The question is: will either he or his wife ever stand trial for their alleged offenses?

Those involved in the FamilyConnections tragedy seem less concerned with that than with their own unwitting involvement in the catastrophe: they are haunted by their naïve trust in a woman now charged with ruining the organization they worked to build for nearly two decades. It is a bitter pill to swallow, made all the more sour because they considered her a friend.

“We are shocked that someone we knew and came to work with every single day was capable of doing this to all of us and just leaving us,” Ms. Fuentes says. “Everyone feels personally and professionally betrayed. It has made me question the people whom you trust.”

NOTE: Parent:Wise Austin had been a longtime supporter of FamilyConnections, sponsoring its Celebration of Families event for five years.