ORLANDO, Fla. – Two weeks after the onePulse Foundation Board of Directors voted to dissolve the nonprofit organization, the head of a charity watchdog organization says donors stand little chance of being reimbursed.

The onePulse Foundation spent seven-and-a-half years working to create a memorial honoring the 49 people killed in the Pulse Nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016.

They never broke ground on the project.

“To see this money essentially wasted and these promises not fulfilled – it’s a real tragedy,” Laurie Styron said.

Styron is the CEO of CharityWatch, a charity watchdog organization based in Chicago.

She told News 6 it is unlikely that donors who wrote a $20 or $100 check will see any refunds as a result of the organization dissolving.

“When it comes to small individual donations – generally speaking, people are out of luck,” she said. “There are a lot of rules and laws in place that dictate that charities have pretty narrow choices when it comes to how to distribute restricted funds or unrestricted funds, even when they’re a nonprofit organization.”

A restricted fund is a donation made for a specific program or budget item, like the memorial project. An unrestricted fund is a donation made to the organization with no note detailing a specific program.

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“A lot of times that money is long gone,” Styron said. “It’s been spent on other things, whether it’s other programs or on overhead. In most cases, charities have pretty wide latitude to spend the contributions they receive as long as it’s for some charitable purpose, or at least related to the mission.”

Styron examined onePulse’s tax returns and audits, and she said most of the organization’s assets were in land, buildings, and equipment – not cash.

She said when a nonprofit organization dissolves, it needs to keep spending the cash that it has on paying staff, paying for accounting and legal services, until everything is settled, and they officially shut their doors for good.

She said that could take months.

What’s more, onePulse returned the property it acquired from Orange County to use for its museum project, and the property that houses the nightclub was owned by ousted foundation founder and nightclub owner Barbara Poma.

She sold it to the City of Orlando in October for $2 million.

“It’s unlikely that there would be a lot of money left over to refund those smaller donations to the general public, once all of the fees related to winding down the organization are incurred,” she said. “I’ve been doing watchdog work for about 20 years now, and unfortunately, this is not a rare occurrence.”

Case Study

Styron points to Washington, D.C., where the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund had planned to build a $130 million education center to showcase some of the items left by loved ones at the Vietnam Memorial.

“It will give visitors to the education center – and I think visitors to the wall – a bit more depth of that experience,” foundation curator Jason Bain said in 2017. “Not just to read the names, but to see these faces and to understand that these were real people, real human beings, who had lives that were cut short.”

That organization raised $45 million for the project before canceling their plans, blaming rising costs.

They refunded about $200,000 of that, but only to donors they had legal agreements or contracts with.

Styron said onePulse could have similar agreements.

“(Those donations) have to be used for what the charity says they will be used for, and if they’re not, there’s typically a contract in place that requires the charity to refund those donations or that otherwise outlines what happens if the charity fails to fulfill its promises,” she said.

onePulse’s Future

News 6 contacted onePulse to ask when its dissolution plans would be made public, when it would be notifying the Florida Department of State, how it plans to pay down any outstanding debt if their assets were tied to property they no longer own, and if refunds would be made available to donors.

Spokesman Scott Bowman said it is still early in the process.

“Last week the foundation hired legal counsel who is reviewing the appropriate steps needed to carry out the board’s decision and comply with applicable Florida Statutes,” he wrote in a statement. “The answers to your questions will be part of that process and will be shared at the appropriate time.”

“I would really encourage the people operating the organization today, the ones that are responsible for, for dissolving it, to be as transparent as they possibly can, with who’s going to get the assets with their intentions, if they will be refunding many donations,” Styron said.

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