LGBTQ+ Shelter Mystery: Where’s Ruby Corado? Where’s The Money?

Note: Click here for an update to this story: Karl Racine, the attorney general for Washington, D.C., announced on Aug. 1 he wants a court to freeze the bank accounts of the recently shuttered LGBTQ+ shelter Casa Ruby.

---

Casa Ruby has been serving Washington, D.C.’s most vulnerable community for a decade, as its only LGBTQ+ bilingual, multicultural provider of social and temporary housing services, run by and primarily serving transgender women of color.

“We’re a place for resources , for food, housing, immigration and Latin@ Services HIV Prevention & Victims,” says Casa Ruby’s Instagram site. According to the nonprofit organization’s website, Casa Ruby has provided those services to more than 6,000 people, and employed close to 50 people.

But as of now, some of those employees tell the Washington Post, all of Casa Ruby’s programs are closed and this desperately-needed haven is out of business.

You won’t know that by visiting its official page or social media sites, In fact, a pop-up message insists, “Casa Ruby is open!” and lists the address in Dupont Circle, along with the banner declaring, “Trans Lives Matter.”

But click on the “Donate” tab, and it’s immediately clear that something is amiss: “Oops! That Page Can’t be Found,” says the auto-generated “404” error code page.

What else is missing? According to the Post:

• Hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants and donations
• Paychecks for three pay periods, going back six weeks
• Office supplies, which ran out Friday, as did access to the internet and air conditioning
• Transitional houses around Washington, D.C. have been vacated
• Programs designed to help immigrants and victims of crimes have been suspended
• Founder and former executive director Ruby Corado can’t be located and so far hasn’t responded to press inquiries
• Interim executive director Jacqueline Franco also can’t be reached
• The organization’s board of directors; All resigned, the last one leaving in April

I did hear from one person at Casa Ruby: Chief operations officer and former human resources manager Shadonna Whitten has been with Casa Ruby six years. Just before this story was published, Whitten sent me a message via LinkedIn, telling me she was not interested in providing a comment for this report.

Kisha Allure, a 10-year employee, told the newspaper Casa Ruby is now “deserted.” She was most recently the director of its victim services program, earning $46K a year. Her program served 300 clients, all victims of sexual abuse and hate crimes.

“We took in vulnerable individuals 24 hours a day when nobody wanted them. We had programs for people to literally build their lives back up,” said Allure. “We had trans women who were D.C. natives, trans women of color, and we kept them in a safe space as the mission told us to do. The full respite care center for trans people of color—built by us, ran by us—is now gone in smoke.”

First Sign of Smoke

The Post reported that the D.C. Department of Human Services informed Corado last fall of its decision to not renew Casa Ruby’s $839,460 grant to run a low-barrier shelter. “Low barrier” is a legal term for an emergency shelter that does not require a client to provide any of the following:

• criminal background checks
• credit checks or income verification
• program participation
• sobriety
• identification

The $839,460 grant was one of three grants the district had greenlit in 2021, according to the newspaper, totaling nearly 1.7 million.

The next day, Sept. 25, Corado launched a GoFundMe appeal, announcing it would close that shelter and hoping to raise $75,000 to keep other locations open. As donations poured-in, from $5 up to $2K, Corado posted photographs on the site, captioned: “50 LGBTQIA lost their shelter beds and 30+ lost their jobs!”

More than $130K was raised, but the home to at least 10 young people shut down in September. This was her second online fundraiser of 2021; a GoFundMe launched in March, with the same aim to support low-barrier transitional housing, raised more than $108K.

Corado announced her resignation on Oct. 1., via Facebook Live.

In her video, Corado addressed accusations that she earned too much money, given that her salary had increased more than 800% in 7 years. “They want to use me as a distraction,” she said. “The reality is that I am not the cause of all of this. It’s called transphobia. In their eyes, trans people are only good to be sex workers.”

Corado said that some of her clients returned to sex work. Others refused to go to alternative shelters and instead returned to abusive families. “I stepped down to focus all the attention on the real issue, the clients not having a safe place to go and employees who will soon be homeless,” Corado wrote in an email to the Post. “I am done being the center of the story.”

In October, Corado named Alexis Blackmon, the nonprofit’s director of government affairs, as the interim executive director. Blackmon is a Black trans woman who grew up in D.C.

“It’s time to support the Black trans leader,” Corado said at the time. “You didn’t want to support it because I’m not Black. You don’t have that excuse now.”

About that: Sunday’s story in the Post created a lot of buzz on social media, including this tweet by D.C. attorney Preston Mitchum, the director of advocacy and government affairs for The Trevor Project, and a leading activist for Black queer youth.

As for Blackmon, she left Casa Ruby in February, less than six months after her appointment as interim executive director for a job with the District of Columbia, as a community outreach and relationship specialist in the mayor’s office of LGBTQ affairs. She did not return messages as of press time, but she told the Post in all her time at Casa Ruby, she never had access to the nonprofit’s bank accounts; Three employees confirmed that to the newspaper.

A tweet announced Blackmon’s replacement in May: interim executive director Jacqueline Franco.

Who is Ruby Corado?

When Ruby Corado was only 16, her father encouraged her to leave El Salvador and go to the U.S. On her way through Mexico, she said she survived kidnapping and gang rape. She arrived in D.C. alone, with no family and without resources.

Corado turned to sex work for several years and at times was homeless. She eventually evolved into an activist for the LGBTQ+ community with emphasis on Latinas who are transgender.

According to the Post, Corado started the nonprofit as a small drop-in center in 2012, with the help of unpaid volunteers. She grew Casa Ruby into an organization with more than 100 employees and nearly $3.5 million in annual revenue, according to federal tax filings reported by the newspaper.

A lot of that money came from the district, with two dozen grants since 2015, not to mention additional funding from the mayor’s office.

That data shows her own salary grew as well. In 2013, Corado earned just $31,895. The next year, she married David Walker in October 2014. Vincent Gray, then the mayor of Washington, D.C., walked the bride down the aisle.

By 2020, Casa Ruby was raking in nearly $4.2 million a year in revenue, and that year, Corado took home $260,000 as executive director.

The Money Trail

Despite being flush with funds, Casa Ruby turned out to be a deadbeat, according to the Post. Landlords, a security company and other vendors complained Casa Ruby didn’t pay its debts on time. The newspaper obtained court records and more than 8K emails to and from the district’s Department of Human Services, or DHS.

Among the complaints:

• Brian Lassiter, owner of a small, minority-owned security company, Main-One Solutions, told DHS he was owed $38K for two months’ work.
• Angelique Best, a landlord who leased space for transitional housing to Casa Ruby, sued the organization for nonpayment, twice.
• Francis Whelan, another landlord, complained to DHS that Casa Ruby was “chronically late” in paying rent and often failed to pay the full amount due.
• Yet another landlord, The Menkiti Group, alleged in court that Casa Ruby owes them more than $1M in unpaid rent, utilities and late fees.
• The Post reports DHS found several of the locations Casa Ruby rented were not zoned for their intended use, or not used for what the organization claimed in its records, including its Dupont Circle headquarters.

“Where are you?”

Public records obtained by the newspaper show Corado sold her Prince George’s County, Maryland home in January for $775,000. Social media check-ins indicate she has made frequent trips to San Salvador. The last time any employee heard from Corado was in May, according to the Post.

One of those employees, director of victims services Kisha Allure, has a message for Corado.

She says neither she nor her assistant has been paid since June 3, and has run out of savings and doesn’t know how she will pay next month’s rent.

“You owe us money,” Allure said in a video posted to Facebook. “Wherever you are, you need to come to your entity ... and you need to come and speak to your staff. … We advocated for you. In 2022, where are you?”