Cover Story

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.

Imagine a theme park where a family of four could get in for fifteen dollars – for the entire day. Imagine arriving by public transportation or enjoying free parking right outside the park’s entrance. Imagine bringing your own food and drinks through the gate, rather than paying extortionist prices for less healthy options. Imagine never waiting longer than ten or fifteen minutes to board a ride, and never worrying about losing a child in the crowd. Imagine a place where people of all levels of physical and cognitive ability are welcome and even celebrated.

Open your eyes. You’re at Morgan’s Wonderland.

Marriage is not a noun; it's a verb. It isn't something you get. It's something you do. It's the way you love your partner every day.

That’s how relationship and personal growth expert Dr. Barbara De Angelis describes marriage: a union that must be nurtured through constant tending.

Easier said than done…especially if you’re a parent.

For many of us, finding that special someone began so innocently — easy-breezy laughter and silliness, long talks and longer walks, holding hands and candlelit dinners. Love comes easily and follows a natural progression in our daydreams: a fabulous wedding, an enviable marriage, perfect children, and growing old together rocking on the porch. But for so many in this country, those picket fence images all too often fade into divorce. The estimate for first marriages ending in divorce currently sits between 40% and 50%. Divorce happens for myriad reasons, but for a lot of couples the unexpected stress of having children is a big one.

He was always the worst-behaved child in the room. It didn’t matter where he went. Or when. Three-year-old Cameron* simply couldn’t control himself — ever.

“He was bouncing off the walls all the time,” recollects his mother, Susan*. “I loved him dearly but couldn’t bear to be around him because he was so obnoxious, in-your-face, he could never sit still, never stop moving, couldn’t control his impulses—he was always hitting, kicking, jumping or touching.”

Desperate to figure out what was going on with her son, Susan stumbled onto an article about a little girl whose behavior seemed nearly identical to Cameron’s and who was “cured” through a special diet.

If anyone should have noticed her daughter had a learning disorder, Liz Green figured it would have been her. As a kindergarten teacher, she had been specifically trained to spot learning difficulties. But since her daughter, Hayleigh, was an excellent student and an enthusiastic reader, the subtle clues went unnoticed.

“Each night we read, Hayleigh made more and more substitution errors,” she says. “She read ‘rampant’ for ‘repellant’ and ‘habitat’ for ‘hatchery’.”

It didn’t make any sense. Ms. Green asked her daughter’s teachers about the errors, but nobody seemed particularly concerned. Until second grade.

When Ryan Voldstad was a toddler, he’d pick up a badminton racket and pretend it was a guitar. Weekdays would find him performing impromptu concerts for his friends at daycare, serenading them with his own rendition of “Little Bunny Fu Fu.” By second grade, it became apparent Ryan should play an instrument, so his parents enrolled in him in Austin’s Childbloom Guitar Center — a move they say changed both his, and the entire family’s, lives.

When Susan and her husband saw their son’s first report card, they were shocked: a string of Bs and Cs littered the page.

The financial meltdown that destroyed FamilyConnections is not uncommon in the nonprofit world.

A 2008 report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimates that the nonprofit sector falls victim to $85 billion in estimated fraud each year.

“There has been a significant jump in the incidents of malfeasance,” says Gary Snyder, the author of Nonprofits On The Brink: How Nonprofits Have Lost Their Way And Some Essentials To Bring Them Back. Mr. Snyder collects data on billions of dollars of charitable and non-profit fraud at thousands of charities. His research shows that 2009 was a record-breaking year for fraud and that 2010 will exceed that. “Each year there has been an increase [in fraud], with 2009 ending with the largest [increase] of over $1.5 billion in fraud — a 50% rise over the previous year,” he says.