South Holland Woman Gets Prison Time For Bilking $1.8M From IL Dept. Of Education

CHICAGO — A South Holland woman and former executive of Chicago-area non-profit organizations has been sentenced to a year in federal prison for misappropriating nearly $1.9 million through a pair of fraud schemes, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Barbara Harris, 55, served as the Executive Director of the Center for Community Academic Success Partnerships (CCASP), which received government grants to provide after-school programs to schools in the Chicago area, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Illinois.

From 2012 to 2017, Harris schemed with another CCASP executive, Tony Bell, to submit grant applications that inflated CCASP’s projected annual expenses and falsely claimed that the organization would receive services from five subcontractors. In reality, prosecutors said that Harris knew that the subcontractors, two of which were other non-profit groups run by Harris and Bell, provided no actual services to CCASP. The scheme resulted in approximately $1.8 million in losses to the Illinois Department of Education, prosecutors said.

Harris also engaged in a separate fraud scheme before and after she was indicted in the CCASP fraud case. From 2021 to 2023, while serving as Co-Executive Director of another non-profit, specifically, the South Suburban Community Services (SSCS), Harris bilked the federally funded AmeriCorps VISTA program, which awards grants to non-profits working to bring communities out of poverty. Harris submitted grant applications falsely representing that VISTA members would work for SSCS programs in the south suburbs of Chicago. Harris knew, however, that those SSCS programs had already been funded. Still, Harris obtained approval for eleven VISTA members to work at SSCS, and none of them performed services in accordance with their assignment descriptions, causing a loss to the VISTA program of $98,699.

Harris pleaded guilty last year to a federal wire fraud charge and admitted her criminal conduct in both schemes. On March 20, U.S. District Judge Andrea R. Wood sentenced Harris to 12 months in federal prison.

“This type of crime erodes the public’s faith in non-profit organizations generally and the federal programs that fund these organizations,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Caitlin Walgamuth argued in the government’s sentencing memorandum in Harris’s case. “Additionally, because the misappropriated grant funds were competitive, Harris’s conduct likely denied other organizations critical federal funding opportunities.”

Bell, 65, of Matteson, pleaded guilty last year to a federal wire fraud charge.

His sentencing is set for Aug. 21.