* From April of 2015…
Sixteen months ago, prominent organizer and minister Leon Finney Jr. decided to ring in his seventy-fifth birthday bash with some big news: the Woodlawn Community Development Corporation was launching an initiative to give South Side black communities a multimedia production center. Just a few doors down from his Metropolitan Apostolic Community Church, Finney packed a historic Bronzeville mansion with the fruits of his networks and resources, creating Urban Broadcast Media (UBM). His vision: to “allow people of color to have a voice.”
Since then, donors such as PNC Bank, ComEd, and Community Trust Credit Union have invested about $700,000 to renovate the brightly colored house on King Drive for UBM, which is now filled with state-of-the-art acoustic equipment, rentable recording studios, and production rooms. Finney sees UBM as a black-owned media enterprise in the same vein as The Chicago Defender, Negro Digest, or any other historical black media institution in the U.S., and as a means of regaining control over the way black Chicagoans’ stories are told. In a world where a few large corporations control the vast majority of media outlets, the efforts of local broadcasting centers, especially those for black media, are often overshadowed.
For what it’s worth, the company’s YouTube page has not exactly been a rousing success.
* From this past September…
Federal authorities have launched a wide-ranging criminal investigation of the Rev. Leon Finney Jr. amid allegations from a federal bankruptcy judge that he engaged in fraud, self-dealing and mismanagement while running a nonprofit that managed a quarter of all public housing units in Chicago.
The revelation of the criminal investigation comes less than a week after the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Finney had stepped down from the nonprofit Woodlawn Community Development Corporation shortly after the firm filed for bankruptcy in October, pulling the curtains back on its finances.
* Sun-Times today…
The campaigns of two of Chicago’s most powerful politicos paid Rev. Leon Finney Jr.’s struggling media nonprofit more than $100,000 last election cycle to help bring out voters to the polls despite the company never holding a business license, records show.
Most of the money came from Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s campaign, which paid Urban Broadcast Media $93,540 in five installments between March and October of last year, according to campaign finance records.
The JB for Governor campaign fund recorded those payments as “media buys” in their financial report to the Illinois State Board of Elections, but deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks acknowledged the money actually paid for field canvassing.
“The work was mistakenly listed as media buys instead of strategic field consulting on the committee’s campaign finance report and is being amended,” Fulks wrote in a statement to the Sun-Times.
Um, they paid a not-for-profit media company almost a hundred grand to do “field consulting”?
What?
