Why I am not going to the SNAP conference

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By Kay Ebeling

From personal experience I feel most nonprofits really do little more than provide their staff with income, as well as pay the overhead it takes just to be a legal nonprofit. So in the end the people in need are still sitting there in the waiting room not getting any help, but the social workers all drive nice cars. Conferences seem to me to be nonprofit leaders handing each other business cards.

With SNAP there is the added element of wonderment I am left with every time I ineteract with this "survivors network for those abused by priests." The mistakes SNAP continues to make exactly the same way in city after city leave adult victims feeling alienated and more isolated than before they made contact with the group, and many survivors after their experience with SNAP go away and never come back.

The Pope's last U.S. visit is a good example of how SNAP misses opportunities. With almost a year to prepare, SNAP showed up in a frenzy with ideas for events that apparently just popped up days before the Pope's arrival. Then SNAP followed the guy around and held disorganized demonstrations, from what I hear wasted mounds of cash even paid for 4-star hotel rooms full price then left them empty.

And the survivors, some of them newcomers, were left as always in a state of wonderment. And alienation. The end result is almost always survivor alienation.

Plus David Clohessy SNAP spokeman has a brother who is a pedophile priest and SNAP kept that fact about their director secret. Today information about Kevin Clohessy at Bishop Accountability is contradictory. From phone conversations I've had, it appears SNAP leaders around the country do not even know that Clohessy's own brother is one of the perpetrators. Why wasn't that information made public from the start?

(UPDATE: People who've been around since 1993 say everyone knew back then about David's brother, in many emails. I do stand corrected in that. Cover-up may be too strong a word, and I edited this to put let emphasis on Kevin. This article is still about how that information is handled today. There still is contradictory information at Bishop Accountability about Kevin C, and there are still myriad problems in SNAP.

As to hurting David's feelings or the response I'm getting that we shouldn't point out things that are wrong with SNAP because it's run by vulnerable survivors? Neither one of these points gets to me. Sorry, guess I'm missing those brain synapses. I write what I see, I write what I experience.)

You can’t help but wonder about an organization that after 21 years still sends out press releases, announcements, and other notices with incorrect addresses, typos in links, incorrect contact information, the wrong time, the wrong day.

After 21 years of this confusion, SNAP now has a reputation for showing up at the wrong place at a different time than was announced, or just not showing up at all and leaving the new survivor who just came forward for that event standing on a sidewalk all alone.

In L.A. the press has just stopped showing up for SNAP events.

Wonderment. For survivors so often our experience with SNAP leaves us in wonderment

Me, after three years watching this from my perch at City of Angels, I am now suspicious of SNAP. To make the same mistake over and over is understandable in a fledgeling group grasping to create something from the ground up. But SNAP even states in almost every press statement that it's been around for twenty-one years, yet it still can't figure out how to hold a press event? It still forgets to return emails? It still gets the names and dates wrong and addresses go out with typos and no one shows up for the press event.

To continue to make the same mistakes over and over for 21 years makes it look more like they are making the mistakes on purpose, because the real results of these "events" when SNAP breezes through a town is Survivors are turned off, get frustrated and hurt, take it personal, go home, and say they never want to have anything to do with the "movement" again.

SNAP does a great job in city after city of bringing the Movement to a stop.

SNAP spokesman David Clohessy criticizes the church all the time about the whereabouts of defrocked pedophile priests, saying the public has a right to know where sexual predators live, yet no one knows and people have barely heard of his brother pedophile priest Kevin Clohessy.

David became director of SNAP within weeks of his brother entering therapy and disappearing into the Paracletes. Doesn't that seem questionable to other people besides me?

Especially when SNAP kept that information secret?

No one at SNAP ever mentioned Kevin Clohessy until the New York Times and other reporters started to ask questions.

Now at Bishop Accountability there is conflicting information about Kevin Clohessy. The director of SNAP handles his own brother's case with such secrecy? That to me creates more questions than if Clohessy had just been public with information about his brother from the start.

Then the way Clohessy runs SNAP as a series of mistakes leaves a person, again, wondering.

SNAP managed to bring the movement to a stop in L.A., now they are doing it in Texas, the Virginias, the Carolinas, and from what I can see, trying to do it in New York, but people there are, I hope, savvy enough to prevent it.

There is no excuse for a national organization with at least a $500,000 a year budget and five full time paid staff members to be so inept, especially after 21 years, unless ineptness has been its goal from the very start.

Recently it’s really been driving me mad to read another David Clohessy statement from SNAP about the whereabouts of a defrocked pedophile priest.

Where is his own brother Kevin Clohessy? Is this the transparency Clohessy says SNAP and survivors demand of the church.

How Clohessy even became president of SNAP stymies me.

Although he convinces survivors that he has a great deal of experience in public relations, this series of mishaps: wrong email addresses, showing up at the wrong place, standing up in front of a church saying something that is totally unsubstantiated sometimes outright wrong and ends up making survivors look foolish, sending out press releases two hours before an event that should have been planned days, even weeks in advance.

That is about the worst public relations I've ever seen. Last press event I went to in L.A. reporters came up to me ANGRY saying, why did you say this was going to happen and there would be people here. I, luckily, was able to say, hey, don't ask me, I'm not part of SNAP. (B Blaine told me in 2006 that I could not sign letters to the editor or represent myself as being being a member of SNAP, at the Pershing Square event. Just swiped me out with a slash, wonder how many other people that has happened to).

The end result is that SNAP has little credibility to reporters in L.A. It took years of screwing things up to get to that condition, now SNAP just never comes here anymore.

That is good PR if you are doing Reverse PR.

Someone on the SNAP Message Board told me Clohessy’s brother was a perpetrator priest. Then I read it in a couple books, where the authors evidently interviewed Clohessy about it and eked a few words out of him about his brother, but there was nothing at Bishop Accountability in 2006 except the name Kevin Clohessy and a news story from 2003 the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

Oddly, the news story at the BA database (under C for Clohessy) was not linked, there was just a regular listing in normal unlinked type of the Dispatch story in the column where all the news story links usually are at BA.

So I went to the Post Dispatch and purchased the story for something like two dollars, and read it. And thought it was strange, then sent it to a couple people. Never mentioned it at City of Angels until today, except at City of Angels 2 where I started doing a counter espionage thriller fiction story based on my "hallucinations" about a group called SNARL last Christmas break, then realized the posts weren't really fiction or hallucinations.

Now at Bishop Accountability there is a more thorough listing under Kevin Clohessy but now there is conflicting information. In the original Dispatch story David C says he is sorry for the parents of that child who his brother molested. Now the summary of Kevin’s crimes says the priest is accused of having sex with an adult.

This on top of 21 years of blatant mistakes, I think, makes SNAP's credibility extremely questionable.

How can Clohessy lead an organization that puts so much attention on outing the location of pedophile priests, when they are no longer priests but living somewhere in the community, when, well, where is Kevin Clohessy living these days? Does he have passes to wander around whatever city he is in?

Why did SNAP keep this information from the public until reporters started to ask questions, instead of being forthcoming about it from the beginning? I find this strange and it leaves me-

As always-

Befuddled, in a state of wonderment, going huh? That doesn't make sense, as is always my experience in dealings with SNAP.

FINANCES???

To all the persons who have spoken to me that you wonder where SNAP gets and spends its money, it says right on their website in the annual report for 2008 these instructions:

Email snapadmin1@gmail.com for copies of financial statements.

They are required by law to send financial docs to taxpayers when they request them, because they are bringing in income and paying no tax.

So to request financial documents here is the link, look under the pie chart, it says email us for the financial statements under the pie chart in the 2008 Annual Report at: http://www.snapnetwork.org/PDF_files/annual_report_012709.pdf
City of Angels has been promised a copy of SNAP’s financial documents for 2007 and 2008 next week, in an email from SNAP Admin last week.

So when we get the financial papers, we will share them with you, because that is what we do at City of Angels. When we get them… Meanwhile-

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I had no plans to post this post, it just spurted out of my head. I do all the posts at City of Angels in a response to nudging, I hope it is angelic nudging and not something else. It sure feels like it is the right thing to do.

I am so internally eternally angry at the way SNAP has missed one opportunity after another to release this information to the world, and instead the story has just sort of sizzled and burned out in city after city.

I wake up muttering about SNAP. Something is wrong there, either it's just terrible mismanagement or humongous fraud, but something is definitely wrong there.

I also wonder why we all feel we can't criticize SNAP, like it's some kind of church ...

I am sure this post won't win me any friends, but truth is I already don't have many, except in other cities, not L.A.. Even with 510 plaintiffs in Los Angeles in 2007, I never hear from anyone in L.A.

Not a person.

SNAP had a full time paid "regional director" here for years, and I can't find one survivor in L.A. There's a few still active down around Long Beach where that one Leader lives, but no survivors up in the city of L.A., where I think hundreds still live, are public except me.

The hundreds who used to show up at demonstrations in L.A. in 2003 or so are, from what I gather talking to people, so burnt out and angry, including feeling used and forgotten by SNAP, they just don't want anything to do with this whole issue anymore

Go figure

I learned in those years my daughter and I were homeless 2003-2005 that nonprofiteering is one of many new quasi criminal activities that have become ordinary in post-Bush America, where no one knows what anyone is doing if it requires Federal oversight.

So that's why I don't go to conferences, even the SNAP conference.

In reality SNAP is the work of three or four people in St. Louis and Barbara in Chicago doing other stuff, with no interest in entertaining ideas from the grass roots. It’s all very strange to me, and continually, things don't add up.

SNARL Fiction piece at City of Angels 2

Maybe I am a little bitter because I'm doing City of Angels with very little financial support, just a few clicks a month, so I have to do two part time jobs to make City of Angels happen. It seems like if SNAP were a network, I would have been embraced and made part of it and given backing or at least a way to raise money through them, which I asked them to do and they ignored my emails. They ignore City of Angels entirely, act like it's not even here. That to me is not being a network at all.

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Part 2 tells the most important part, the lies SNAP told me that as a journalist I found out the truth on my own. There is no explanation for it. This whole story is like my own version of self destruction though. It's Monday now and it's too late...

Also Read more here:

The Whole SNAP Story, from City of Angels perspective... All based on true experience

.I remember the moment, in Pershing Square, a vigil while the bishops held their national meeting in the L.A. Biltmore across the street. I was disheveled, bloated and fat and self esteem? None. This was my second time finding SNAP. First time I'd been a warrior, moved a hundred miles to be closer to a SNAP meeting in Oakland, started a second daytime meeting in San Francisco. Wrote letters, started printing things out that I found on this new thing the Internet.Mid 1990s.Now it was 2006, there had been a murder in my family so I hadn't done SNAP for several years, now I could come back, all the chaos and insanity in that part of my life was finally ending and I could start paying attention to this priest thing again.Barbara Blaine who sat next to Mary Grant and I finally got a chance to talk to them. I was in awe of them, gazing up at them, probably looked pretty pathetic.I said, "It feels so good to be able to send out a letter to the editor and sign it Kay Ebeling, SNAP Los Angeles."Blaine and Grant looked at each other then looked at me, and said simultaneously:"You can't."