As public spending on homelessness has come under increasing scrutiny, a nonprofit that runs domestic violence shelters in Southern California has paid its CEO, who lives in Hawaii, more than $1.6 million in salary, vacation pay and other compensation for the last two years of tax filings, a sum that is several times larger than the compensation of executives running similar organizations.In the nonprofit’s 2024 tax form, the latest to be made public, Carol Adelkoff, the chief executive officer of 1736 Family Crisis Center, earned $742,181.Adelkoff earned even more the year before. According to forms filed with the IRS, in 2023 she pocketed $907,923, a payout that included a $495,000 bonus, a number that exceeded her base pay at the time.The next highest-paid employee that year, the nonprofit’s finance director, made $206,000.When asked about her pay, Adelkoff said the unusually high compensation was the result of a payout of unused vacation time that had accrued over the 40 years she has worked at the nonprofit. She said the kind of work ethic needed to grow an organization such as hers meant it was challenging to take time off.“The salary didn’t jump like that,” said Adelkoff, who was earning a little over $400,000 a year before that number shot up in 2023. She said her base salary over the last several years has remained around $405,000, meaning that the vacation payout totaled roughly $824,000 over two years. “It was simply a matter of reducing accrued vacation liability on the books and paying it out,” Adelkoff said.A letter sent to The Times from the center’s attorney, Kerry Garvis Wright, said the nonprofit’s board worked with legal counsel and financial experts to find a way to lower the increasing liability, including a vacation payout to Adelkoff before her retirement. The 2024 tax form did not originally specify how much the vacation compensation was, but it is being adjusted to show the payout was $329,243, according to Wright.Experts say the vast majority of nonprofits cap the amount of vacation time an employee can accrue, most often to one-and-a-half times the vacation hours allotted to them for a single year. A woman walks below a mural, featuring a testimonial from a homeless person, at a building where the nonprofit 1736 Family Crisis Center operates from in Los Angeles. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times) According to Wright, the board allowed Adelkoff to accrue eight weeks of vacation a year as CEO, a number that was reduced to four weeks in 2012. She said the organization caps the total vacation time other employees can accrue, but not Adelkoff.“The demands of the chief executive role for an expanding organization, with increasing numbers of shelters, clinics, and locations across broader geographic territories, together with growing client and staff responsibilities, funding complexities, fundraisers, community functions, and 24-hour oversight of residential and other service locations, made it difficult for Ms. Adelkoff to take time off,” Wright wrote in the letter. “As a result, over the course of the decades she served the organization, her vacation pay accrued substantially.”The 50-year-old Family Crisis Center brings in about $15 million in revenue — nearly all of it taxpayer money from government grants — to run crisis hotlines, domestic shelters and programs to help those struggling with homelessness. In federal filings, the nonprofit says it runs 16 facilities in L.A. and Orange counties and employs about 170 people.Adelkoff has overseen the organization while her primary residence has been listed on the Big Island of Hawaii, for at least 11 years. According to Wright, the board requested that Adelkoff stay on as chief executive even after leaving California in 2002. “The organization has clearly thrived under her caring leadership,” she wrote.Her compensation as stated in the latest available tax filings outstrips the pay for leaders of much larger nonprofits in the homelessness arena. For instance, in 2024, the Weingart Center Assn. paid its CEO $481,271 in base pay and bonuses, according to the organization’s latest tax filing. The nonprofit last reported an annual revenue of roughly $89 million.In 2023, CEO of People Assisting the Homeless and its affiliates — one of L.A.’s largest providers of homelessness services, with annual revenue of $175 million — earned roughly $379,000.That year, Adelkoff took home well over twice that.“The bigger question is, was it appropriate for a person to be able to accrue that much money and suddenly get it paid out?” asked Brian Mittendorf, an expert in nonprofit accounting at Ohio State University, who viewed the organization’s tax filings.Laurie Styron, the CEO of CharityWatch, a nonprofit watchdog organization, called this kind of payout “highly unusual.”“How was this decision made?” she said.In the letter Wright wrote: “The Board has regularly acknowledged Ms. Adelkoff for her exceptional leadership and devotion to the organization, determining that her compensation should reflect her high performance and achievements.”Adelkoff has led the 1736 FCC since 1984, growing it from an organization with a $200,000 annual budget into a nonprofit operating six shelters, multiple hotlines and dozens of volunteers.The year after she began, the 1736 FCC said it planned to open what it said was the country’s first transitional shelter for women fleeing abusers and has since expanded into helping homeless veterans and teenagers struggling with depression. It was incorporated as a nonprofit a year later. In 2018, the California League of Cities honored Adelkoff for her work.In its latest tax filing, 94% of the nonprofit’s revenue came from taxpayer dollars, including money from multiple levels of government. Since 2021, the organization has received at least $25 million in grants from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which disburses city, county and federal funds to address the region’s homelessness problem.The Times compared Adelkoff’s most recent compensation to leaders of 16 other nonprofits in L.A. County that aid people escaping domestic violence and provide other homelessness services. Of them, the next highest earner was the CEO of the Jewish Family Service LA, who earned $423,932 in 2024, when the organization’s revenue topped $70 million, less than a third of which came from government contracts.The median annual compensation of the 16 executive leaders was $159,737, which included base salary, bonuses and other compensation.The Times requested copies of the 1736 FCC’s vacation policy and minutes of board meetings where Adelkoff’s vacation payouts were approved. When reached by phone, Ron Troupe, the nonprofit’s board president, who has served on the board for at least 25 years, said board documents were not public and that he could not provide meeting minutes.Another board member, Wendell Barner, said he did not have information about Adelkoff’s compensation and directed a reporter to the nonprofit’s main office line.Experts in nonprofit accounting questioned how an organization could allow someone to accrue so much vacation. In California, unused vacation hours are considered wages and, while employers can’t enforce a “use it or lose it” policy, they can set caps on how much vacation an employee is allowed to accrue.In a survey published earlier this year by a nonprofit research organization, 97% of California nonprofits that responded said they cap the number of vacation hours an employee can accrue. A common practice is to cap vacation accrual by multiplying annual vacation hours by 1.5; for instance, an employee who earns three weeks of vacation a year would not be able to collect more than 180 hours, or four and a half weeks.Experts noted that while it’s normal to pay out existing vacation when someone leaves an organization, it’s not while they’re still working there.“It’s an unusual benefit,” said Marc Owens, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who spent a decade overseeing the division at the IRS that regulates nonprofits. “The amount is stunningly large.”Adelkoff said she has no more accrued vacation to be paid out, and she and Wright wrote that her total compensation last year was lower. They said the most recent tax filing will not be available until next year, but when it is, it will reflect Adelkoff’s historical base salary, which has hovered around $405,000.::On the 2024 tax filing, the nonprofit states that Adelkoff works an average of 70 hours a week. According to property records, Adelkoff owns a 3,700-square foot home on the Big Island. She has claimed the four-bedroom home as her primary residence since at least 2015, according to a county tax office employee, affording her a home exemption tax break.According to a dispute with a neighbor chronicled in court documents, Adelkoff and her then-husband acquired the home in 2002. The same year they sold a home in Palos Verdes Estates in L.A. County, according to property records. In 2017, Adelkoff’s 20-year-old daughter testified in a lawsuit that she was raised in Hawaii and that her mother lives there “year-round.”Adelkoff would not confirm her state of residence to The Times. She said that since she works for an organization that helps people escape abusers, she could become a target, and that keeping her location secret, even confirming the state, was a matter of security.The Times spoke with two CEOs who run similar organizations in the L.A. area. Speaking generally, both said that while they could feasibly do portions of their jobs from afar, other parts, such as attending fundraising events, would be much more difficult. They said that being on-site aligns with the idea of managing community-based organizations. Being able to visit shelters means they frequently can meet the people they serve and better understand what’s working and what’s not.Nonprofit experts also questioned if someone were living 2,500 miles from the organization whether they could be an effective manager.“I’m sure that that’s an operational challenge,” said Ohio State University’s Mittendorf. “My big question would be, does it create more of a financial burden on the organization?”Adelkoff did not respond to questions about how often she travels to Southern California for work and if she does, who pays for that travel.::The revenues of 1736 Family Crisis Center have fluctuated in recent years. Between 2013 and 2021, they grew steadily from $7 million to a peak of $18 million, with an increasing reliance on government contracts. In 2023, when Adelkoff took home nearly a million dollars in total compensation, revenue had dropped to $13 million. The next year, it grew slightly.Earlier this year, the 1736 FCC held a celebrity poker tournament in Manhattan Beach to raise additional funds. Jason Alexander, the actor best known for his role on “Seinfeld,” attended and has been a donor for two decades. There are few hard rules with nonprofit executive pay. The IRS stipulates that pay must be “reasonable” and states that organizations should rely on a comparison of pay across organizations doing similar work.State law mirrors the federal one. The California Nonprofit Integrity Act, which went into effect in 2005, says that a nonprofit board must ensure that a CEO’s pay is “just and reasonable,” but does not dictate specific numbers.Executive boards function as oversight bodies. In federal tax filings, the 1736 FCC’s board states that when determining its CEO’s salary, it did a review of compensation at comparable nonprofits, but does not name any. The Times reached out to board members to ask for a copy of compensation data used, but received no response.While state or federal law does not place term limits on nonprofit board members, experts said setting term limits is a good practice.In the case of the 1736 FCC, the majority of members have served on the board for extended terms. Five members, including the president, Troupe, have sat on the board for at least 14 years over the last two decades, according to a count of members listed in the nonprofit’s federal tax filings.“Most board governance experts will all agree that that is not a great setup,” said Geoff Green, the CEO of CalNonprofits, an organization that researches and advocates for nonprofits in the state.Brian Galle, a nonprofit law professor at UC Berkeley, said that while long-serving board members can bring institutional knowledge and consistency, the concern is that they lose their independence from management over time.Another unusual aspect of the 1736 FCC’s board, experts said, is that it pays a member of the board who is not an employee. Troupe, who has served as either board president or director since at least 2000, began collecting a salary in 2005 and has been paid anywhere from $30,000 to $97,500 a year since, according to tax filings.Generally, nonprofit boards are made up entirely of volunteers. If there is one paid member, it’s typically the CEO or another full-time employee, nonprofit experts said.“The board’s No. 1 rule is to oversee the organization and it’s hard to do that if the decisions you make directly affect your pay,” said Styron of CharityWatch.Owens, the former IRS division head, said he believes the 1736 FCC’s tax forms would prompt questions from regulators.“If similar organizations are paying less, why is this one paying more? What did the board look at when it was assessing reasonable compensation?” Owens said. “There’s a lot that would be of interest to a regulator based on this [tax form].”This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.
