Center for Community Academic Success Partnerships (CCASP)
Outcome
Former CCASP Executive Director Barbara Harris pleaded guilty to wire fraud in February 2025 for submitting fraudulent grant applications that inflated projected expenses and named fictitious subcontractors, causing $1.8 million in losses to the Illinois State Board of Education, while also defrauding the AmeriCorps VISTA program of an additional $98,699.
Details
Center for Community Academic Success Partnerships — Grant Fraud (2012–2023)
Outcome: Barbara Harris, former Executive Director of the Center for Community Academic Success Partnerships (CCASP), pleaded guilty to wire fraud in February 2025 for two separate fraud schemes spanning over a decade that caused combined losses of approximately $1.9 million to public grant programs.
Barbara Harris, 55, of South Holland, Illinois, served as Executive Director of CCASP, a Chicago-area nonprofit that received government grants to provide after-school academic programs to schools in the Chicago area. From 2012 to 2017, Harris schemed with another CCASP executive, Tony Bell, to submit grant applications to the Illinois State Board of Education that inflated CCASP's projected annual expenses and falsely claimed that the organization would receive services from five subcontractors.
In reality, the listed subcontractors — including two other nonprofits run by Harris and Bell themselves — provided no actual services to CCASP. The fraudulent grant applications caused approximately $1.8 million in losses to the Illinois State Board of Education between 2012 and 2017.
In a separate scheme from 2021 to 2023, Harris served as Co-Executive Director of South Suburban Community Services (SSCS) and submitted grant applications to the federally funded AmeriCorps VISTA program falsely representing that VISTA members would work for SSCS developing economic opportunity programs. Harris fraudulently obtained approval for eleven VISTA members to work at SSCS, none of whom performed services in accordance with their VISTA assignment descriptions, causing an additional $98,699 in losses to the AmeriCorps program.
Harris pleaded guilty on February 27, 2025, before U.S. District Judge Andrea R. Wood. Sentencing was set for July 11, 2025.
Primary Source: Former Executive of Chicago-Area Non-Profit Pleads Guilty in $1.8 Million Fraud Scheme
How Crucible Prevents This
A grant application audit hook comparing claimed subcontractor names and projected expenses against actual vendor payments and deliverables would have detected the fictitious subcontractors within the first grant cycle. Crucible's conflict-of-interest enforcement control would have flagged that Harris and Bell controlled the two nonprofit subcontractors listed in CCASP's own grant applications. Crucible's AmeriCorps VISTA compliance hook would require documented member activity logs before approving VISTA position renewals.
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