The City of Atlanta gave $35,000 in taxpayer funds to the Chicago-based Inner-City Muslim Action Network in 2023, signed a contract requiring detailed spending reports, and then never bothered to collect them. Nor, it turns out, did anyone at City Hall follow up with three other nonprofits that split a combined $205,000 in public safety donations that same year.
That is the finding of a Center Square investigation published by reporter Johnny Edwards, who filed more than a half-dozen Georgia Open Records Act requests trying to locate the mandatory annual reports. Edwards found no evidence the reports were on file with the mayor's office, the Department of Contract Compliance, the Finance Department, Procurement, the Law Department, the City Council, or the Atlanta Police Department.
Put plainly: the city wrote the checks, signed the contracts, and walked away.
In 2023, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve a resolution directing $205,000 to four nonprofits. The stated purpose was to "support public safety patrols and other public safety initiatives" by aiding community organizations that hire off-duty police officers, organize neighborhood watches, and take other steps to protect residents and businesses.
The four recipients and their shares: IMAN received $35,000; the Buckhead Public Safety Foundation received $100,000; the MLK-Ashby Merchants Association received $35,000; and the Cascade Business Association received $35,000. Each organization signed what the city titled a "Donation Agreement."
Page two of each agreement stipulated that the nonprofit must submit reports before the end of every calendar year "detailing the use of all disbursed funds and work performed including but not limited to the allocation of funds, expenditures for programming, and other related costs." The annual reports were to continue until the money was fully spent.
Those reports appear never to have materialized, or, at minimum, no city office can locate them.
IMAN's case raises the sharpest questions. The organization is headquartered in Chicago and operates an Atlanta branch on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Its contract with the city called on IMAN to "carry out all project activities" and "make significant investments in improvements to protect and enhance the quality of life for inner-city communities across the Atlanta area."
What those investments looked like, no one can say. IMAN's founding executive director, Rami Nashashibi, did not respond to requests for comment. The Center Square reported that IMAN's Chicago and Atlanta offices did not respond to multiple calls, emails, or an in-person message left at the Atlanta branch.
The $35,000 donation is not the only Atlanta money flowing to IMAN. The Center Square earlier reported that the organization received $250,000 in federal FEMA grants distributed through Atlanta for services described as aiding "unhoused immigrants." Those grants were part of a broader pipeline during the final year of the Biden administration, when Washington was distributing hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments and NGOs for border migrant services. Seven other nonprofits received a combined $5.7 million in FEMA grants from Atlanta for similar purposes.
A pattern of taxpayer money flowing to migrant-serving nonprofits with limited oversight has surfaced in Democratic-run states and cities across the country.
When The Center Square tried to obtain IMAN's FEMA spending records, the mayor's office initially quoted production fees ranging from hundreds of dollars to more than $1,000. The records were eventually released for $50. What they showed was not reassuring: taxpayers paying for landscaping work, heating and air system repairs, Home Depot purchases, restaurant bills, Instacart orders, gasoline costs, mileage, and Georgia Power utility bills.
IMAN also organized a "Benefit Concert for Gaza" in Chicago, raising money for Anera, a nonprofit that Israeli watchdog groups have accused of aiding Hamas. Anera strongly denies any links to any terrorist organization. But the juxtaposition, a group receiving Atlanta public-safety dollars and federal migrant-services grants while fundraising for a contested overseas cause, is exactly the kind of thing spending reports are designed to sort out.
The Buckhead Public Safety Foundation offers a useful contrast. Executive Director Debra Wathen told The Center Square that her organization combined the city's $100,000 donation with $400,000 raised from other sources and used the money to pay off-duty police officers for patrols in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood, covering APD Zone 2. She said the foundation also used donated patrol cars.
Wathen reported tangible results: "The visibility was so much better" and crime went down.
Yet even Wathen could not recall submitting the annual spending reports required by her contract. Her explanation was telling:
"I don't know if they ever asked for them."
If the city never asked the one nonprofit that appears to have done its job, what chance is there it followed up with the others? The MLK-Ashby Merchants Association and the Cascade Business Association, each recipients of $35,000, did not respond to phone or email messages from The Center Square.
Georgia's Constitution includes a Gratuities Clause that bars local governments from giving away money or resources without receiving something of value in return. Atlanta's charter, approved by the Georgia General Assembly, carves out an exception allowing the City Council to donate tax money "for purely charitable purposes." But the contracts themselves created an exchange: money for public-safety work, documented through annual reports.
Lester Tate, a former president of the State Bar of Georgia who has litigated cases involving the Gratuities Clause, did not mince words about what the missing reports mean. He told The Center Square:
"The job of enforcing the contract should be the city executives' who entered into the contract. But it appears that they're just not doing their job."
Tate went further:
"I think if the city's got the contract, and they're not requiring that, then they're complicit in just making a donation."
In other words, if the city never enforced the reporting requirement, the transaction may not qualify as a contract at all, it may be an unconditional gift of taxpayer money, which raises its own legal problems under state law.
The city's Department of Law, through attorney Amber Robinson, declined to engage. Robinson stated that "the Department of Law cannot provide legal advice to persons or entities outside of City government, or disclose legal advice provided to the City of Atlanta which is protected from disclosure under the Attorney/Client Privilege." That response does not answer whether the city ever sought its own legal review before making the donations, or after discovering it had no spending records on file.
The office of Mayor Andre Dickens was no more forthcoming. The Center Square reported that executive press secretary Michael Smith, whose 2025 salary is $155,000, did not answer email or phone messages.
A familiar pattern has emerged in Democratic-led jurisdictions, where oversight of nonprofit grants lags far behind the speed at which the money goes out the door.
What makes Atlanta's situation particularly galling is how small the sums are relative to the city's budget. A $35,000 donation is not a rounding error, but it is manageable enough that basic compliance should have been effortless. The contract already spelled out the requirement. All the city had to do was ask for the paperwork and read it.
Instead, no department took ownership. No one followed up. And when a reporter tried to find out what happened, the city's response ranged from silence to attorney-client privilege claims to inflated document-production fees.
This is not a story about one rogue grant. It is a story about institutional indifference to the taxpayers who fund the grants. If the city cannot track $35,000, what confidence should residents have in the $5.7 million in FEMA grants flowing to other nonprofits, or in the larger commitments Atlanta makes every budget cycle?
The problem is hardly unique to Atlanta. From Minnesota's quarter-billion-dollar Feeding Our Future fraud to budget crises in New York City, the same dynamic repeats: elected officials approve the spending, sign the contracts, hold the press conference, and then treat oversight as someone else's problem.
Several open questions remain. Who at City Hall selected these four nonprofits? Did any city attorney review the donations for compliance with the Gratuities Clause before the checks were cut? Has the city launched any corrective action since the missing reports came to light? And what, exactly, did IMAN do with $35,000 in public-safety money?
Atlanta's taxpayers deserve answers. So far, the only people doing the asking are reporters filing records requests, not the officials whose job it was to ask all along.
When a government writes a contract it never intends to enforce, it is not oversight. It is a blank check with extra steps.
