She Runs an LA Homeless Nonprofit From Hawaii. Taxpayers Paid Her $1.6 Million to Do It.
- $907,923 total compensation 1736 Family Crisis Center paid CEO Carol Adelkoff in FY2024, including a roughly $495,000 bonus-and-vacation payout — ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Form 990 Schedule J
- $742,181 total compensation Adelkoff drew in FY2025, including $73,842 in “other” compensation — ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, Form 990 Schedule J
- 94% of 1736 FCC's roughly $15 million in annual revenue that comes from government grants — taxpayer money — ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer / GuideStar
- 40+ years Adelkoff has served as CEO of 1736 FCC, a role she has held since 1984 — 1736 FCC organizational filings
- $25,000,000 in grants 1736 FCC has drawn from LAHSA, the LA homelessness agency, since 2021 alone — LAHSA grant records
Carol Adelkoff has run 1736 Family Crisis Center, a Los Angeles nonprofit that operates domestic-violence shelters, a youth shelter, crisis hotlines, and homelessness programs across 16 facilities in Los Angeles and Orange counties, since 1984 — more than four decades. For at least the past 11 years, records show, she has done it from a 3,700-square-foot home on the Big Island of Hawaii, across the Pacific from the shelters her nonprofit runs.
The organization she leads is almost entirely taxpayer-funded: 94% of its roughly $15 million in annual revenue comes from government grants, including at least $25,000,000 from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority since 2021 alone. In the two most recently filed fiscal years, the nonprofit’s own tax filings show, that public money bought Adelkoff a combined $1,650,104 in total compensation — a figure press coverage has rounded to “$1.6 million,” and one large enough that nonprofit-accounting specialists and a former IRS official are now asking how a 170-employee crisis-services charity arrived at it.
None of what follows is disputed by 1736 FCC. It comes from the organization’s own Form 990 filings, published through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, and from reporting built on top of them. What it adds up to is a case study in how little scrutiny follows government grant money once it reaches a well-established nonprofit — and how far a single executive’s pay can drift from the people that money is supposed to help.
The numbers come from 1736 FCC’s Schedule J filing — the section of the Form 990 where nonprofits must itemize compensation for their highest-paid staff. For fiscal year 2024, Adelkoff’s total compensation came to $907,923, and roughly $495,000 of that was a single bonus-and-vacation-payout line item that, by itself, exceeded her base salary. The following year, fiscal 2025, her total compensation was $742,181, including $73,842 logged as “other” compensation. Combined, the two years show $1,650,104 in total compensation for the organization’s chief executive, filed under EIN 95-3989251.
1736 FCC’s outside counsel has an explanation for the spike, and it is specific: the board, working with legal counsel and financial experts, moved to pay down a vacation-time liability that had been quietly growing for years, ahead of Adelkoff’s “eventual retirement.” The demands of running a 170-employee, 16-facility crisis-services operation, counsel said, had made it difficult for her to actually take the time off she was accruing — so instead of vacation days, the balance came due as cash.
“It's an unusual benefit. The amount is stunningly large.”
Former IRS official, reviewing 1736 FCC's compensation filings
Adelkoff herself has pushed back on the idea that this was a raise. “The salary didn’t jump like that,” she told reporters, framing the payout as decades of deferred time off finally being cashed out rather than a decision to pay her more to do the same job. Nonprofit-accounting specialists aren’t so sure the framing settles the question. Brian Mittendorf, an Ohio State University professor who studies nonprofit accounting, has flagged the size and structure of the payout as unusual even by the standards of executive compensation at large charities.
Say Aloha to Carol Adelkoff, from L.A. based nonprofit 1736 Family Crisis Center, which she runs from her home on Big Island, Hawaii. Say goodbye to $1.6 million taxpayer funds and grant monies that she has been paid over two years to work homeless...
Adelkoff’s residency is the detail that turned this from an accounting story into a viral one. For at least 11 years, records show, her primary residence has been a 3,700-square-foot home on the Big Island of Hawaii — across the Pacific from the Los Angeles shelters, hotlines, and youth programs 1736 FCC operates on the ground.
Asked directly to confirm her state of residency, Adelkoff declined, citing security concerns tied to her work sheltering domestic-violence survivors — a category of risk that is real for shelter staff generally, but one she did not explain as specific to her own role running the organization remotely from another state. Reporters were left to establish the Hawaii residence independently.
LA's highest-paid homeless helper CEO lives luxe in Hawaii away from heinous street conditions - on $1.6M of your cash
The optics are not subtle. 1736 FCC’s shelters sit in neighborhoods where Los Angeles’s homelessness crisis is most visible — encampments, tents, and people sleeping in cars within blocks of the youth shelter and crisis centers the nonprofit runs. Its chief executive has spent more than a decade running that operation from a home on the other side of the Pacific, far from the population her nonprofit is funded to serve.
Set next to her own organization, Adelkoff’s pay stands alone. 1736 FCC’s next-highest-paid employee, the finance director, earned $206,000 in the same period — a fraction of what Adelkoff took home in fiscal 2024 alone. Across 16 other Los Angeles County nonprofits providing comparable domestic-violence and homelessness services, annual executive compensation runs at a median of roughly $160,000, according to the filings reporters reviewed.
Scale makes the gap look worse, not better. PATH, a much larger Los Angeles homelessness nonprofit with far more housing and shelter capacity than 1736 FCC, paid its CEO, Jennifer Hark Dietz, roughly $409,000 — about a quarter of what Adelkoff drew in combined FY2024-FY2025 compensation, from an organization built to run programs at a fraction of PATH’s footprint.
Laurie Styron, CEO of the nonprofit watchdog CharityWatch, put the question plainly when reporters asked her to assess the filings: “How was this decision made?” It is not a rhetorical question. Boards of directors, not executives, are supposed to set and justify nonprofit pay — and 1736 FCC’s board has yet to publicly walk through its reasoning beyond the vacation-liability explanation its outside counsel gave.
As of publication, no regulator, funder, or 1736 FCC board action has been reported in response to the filings — no state attorney general inquiry, no LAHSA contract review, no board shake-up. The story is days old; whether it produces consequences beyond media coverage is, for now, an open question.
The scrutiny lands against a broader backdrop of accountability trouble at the agency that funds much of 1736 FCC’s work. On June 11, 2026, the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Trump administration suspended federal funding to LAHSA over agency-wide findings of “obvious fraud” and mismanagement — HUD's letter did not specify the exact dollar amount withheld. That freeze is a separate action, aimed at LAHSA’s systems generally rather than 1736 FCC specifically — but it is the environment this story breaks into: a homelessness-funding apparatus already under federal scrutiny for how loosely it tracks the money it hands out.
For a nonprofit whose mission is sheltering domestic-violence survivors and homeless families, the unanswered question is not really about Adelkoff’s vacation balance. It is about who was watching the register while $25,000,000 in LAHSA grants and millions more in other government funding flowed into an organization whose own board, by its lawyers’ account, let a compensation liability grow for years before anyone moved to address it.
Carol Adelkoff has run 1736 Family Crisis Center from a home on Hawaii’s Big Island for at least 11 years while collecting $1,650,104 across the nonprofit’s two most recently filed fiscal years — $907,923 in FY2024 and $742,181 in FY2025 — from an organization that draws 94% of its revenue from government grants. Her own finance director made $206,000 in the same period; the CEO of a much larger LA homelessness nonprofit, PATH, made $409,000. No investigation or board action has been reported as of publication. The filings are public, the math is not disputed, and what happens next is still an open question.
