CHICAGO — A politically connected nonprofit at the center of a dispute with Mayor Brandon Johnson’s health department appealed to the mayor while competitively bidding for millions in city anti-violence funding, records show.

Acclivus Inc. CEO LeVon Stone sent then-Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Olusimbo Ige a “Notice of Protest” letter on Nov. 25, 2024, and copied Johnson on it, according to a copy obtained by the Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request. The correspondence came five days after Johnson’s campaign donated $25,000 to the community violence intervention group and a week before the deadline for organizations to apply for the city grant money.

Ige’s past quarrel with the group before she was pushed out of her job spurred controversy this week following a Chicago Tribune report over her complaints that Acclivus tried to circumvent city protocols and use its close ties to the mayor and his team to help make its case for city grant funding. It’s unusual to copy the mayor himself on a protest about a standard request for proposal. The mayor’s staff and representatives from Acclivus have both said they followed the city’s procurement guidelines.

Stone’s November 2024 complaint called on the Health Department to rescind its RFP, arguing the language was written to let a single lead grantee control the entire funding allocation.

“Concentrating power in a central agency will limit community voice in decision-making, including allocation of violence prevention funds, and subsequently will hinder community capital building,” Stone said. “The top-down approach proposed here falls short of challenging on-going structural racism within systems, and to do so replicates the trauma and disconnection that systems-involved families in need of assistance have experienced over generations.”

Ige responded the next day that she would “circle back soon.” The mayor and Ald. Stephanie Coleman, 16th, the City Council’s Black Caucus chair who was also copied on the email, did not reply in the thread.

Mayoral spokesperson Allison Novelo told the Tribune on Tuesday the mayor’s office did not intervene following Stone’s calls to rescind the RFP, which remained unchanged.

CDPH eventually did pick Acclivus as a grant recipient. It split the anti-violence contract between two lead organizations — Acclivus and Metropolitan Family Services, which had won earlier rounds of competitive bidding under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot. That is despite language in the original solicitation stating the department sought to fund only “one organization (the Lead) to convene, develop, support, and connect (to a broader array of institutional partners) a network of community-based organizations,” according to a copy of the RFP posted on the city’s procurement website.

The Tribune reported this week that Ige, who was forced to resign in May, had internally documented allegations that Acclivus initially refused to apply for the RFP at all and instead sought funding directly from the mayor’s office. Acclivus Chief Operating Officer Sheila Regan denied those allegations as “all baseless and also do not make sense.” Novelo has also noted Acclivus scored higher than Metropolitan Family Services on the 2024 RFP and “followed the City’s competitive RFP process, like every other applicant, and did not make any requests for appropriations outside of those competitive grant awards to the Mayor’s Office.”

The November 2024 letter wasn’t Stone’s only communication with the mayor.

He sent two more letters to the same group of recipients in February 2025, escalating his complaints. In the first, addressed to Ige and copied to Johnson, Coleman and CDPH Violence Prevention Director Marlita White, Stone objected to the department’s refusal to let Acclivus provide direct services in five neighborhoods where it already worked. He wrote that the group had “sincere concern at CDPH’s request that Acclivus not perform CVI direct services to the 5 target communities in which Acclivus currently provides considerable and historic CVI programming — Grand Boulevard, Greater Grand Crossing, Washington Heights, Washington Park, West Pullman.”

Two days later, in a letter addressed to Johnson, Stone requested advance payments in lieu of the city’s standard reimbursement process.

“As a minority-led, Delegate agency, we contend that Acclivus should be subject to working capital in the form of quarterly advance payments or other comparable means,” he wrote. “Payment arrangements like full reimbursement projects require agencies to have wealth in order to accept city projects. Such (Community Based Organizations) like Acclivus, specifically composed of and representing marginalized communities who have suffered from generations of disinvestment and poverty, should not be required to agree to finance city projects through cost reimbursement protocols.”

Regan has said the city’s chief procurement officer sided with Acclivus’ request for advance payment, pointing to a 2021 city working group report recommending the practice be explored. But Ige — who Regan said “was very insistent with us that she did not agree that advance payment should be provided” — prevailed. Stone had argued in his Feb. 6 letter that Ige’s position contradicted CDPH’s own stated principles: “The proposed financial model directly does exactly the opposite,” he wrote. “To affirm that a business must have funds in order to receive funds (from) the city, makes wealth a prerequisite, directly perpetuating privilege.”

At an unrelated news conference on Tuesday, Johnson did not directly answer a question about how he responded to Stone’s appeals, saying only that “the concern was making sure that the work that CVI does, that that work was being fully supported.”

“I think in that particular situation, there was some concerns about making sure that those resources got out in a timely manner,” Johnson said after signing an executive order on data centers at Northerly Island. “Because the work is just that crucial, and so anything that my administration can do to ensure that resources are getting to the people who are doing the work with some expediency, of course, we want to make sure that that is streamlined and as effective as it possibly can be.”

Stone and other Acclivus executives did not respond to questions about the correspondence, which the city released to the Tribune on Monday.

Meanwhile, Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, chair of the Public Safety committee, said in a phone interview to “stand by for further action from my committee” in response to the controversy.

“It’s disturbing that a delegate agency would resist standard accountability measures to such a degree,” Hopkins said. “Any time a potential contractor or delegate agency steps out of the standard process and says, ‘Hey, I’ve got friends in the mayor’s office. I’m going directly to the mayor.’ That is the reddest of red flags.”

Chicago’s 2022 procurement handbook, available on the city website, states that all bid protests must be directed to the chief procurement officer, a guardrail intended to curb pay-to-play politics that have historically tainted city contracting.

Joe Ferguson, the city’s former inspector general, said Tuesday that the apparent “open lane for direct communication to the mayor’s office” should be reserved for the procurement process, though he stopped short of saying there was evidence of any ethical breaches.

“The very fact that the questions exist are themselves problematic, at least so long as Chicago is known for its history of patronage and favoritism in its contracting,” said Ferguson, now president of the Civic Federation.

He cautioned, however, against reading the dispute as a broader referendum on community violence intervention work.

“The critique is ‘we’re spending a lot of money, and therefore we should have this greater transparency and accountability around impact,’ that’s a fair question,” Ferguson said. “But I don’t think it’s fair to say that the absence of that of those accountability metrics means that this is something that is not legitimate. It is important.”

The political ties between Acclivus and Johnson have raised concerns from some good government experts, given the close involvement of Johnson’s senior adviser, Jason Lee, who waded into the flap over the nonprofit’s 2026 grant size and an audit into its data reporting practices this year. Regan has fiercely challenged the audit as unfair, saying CDPH has been derelict in working on an efficient system to collect metrics on participant outcomes.

Acclivus’ community and civic engagement director, Bamani Obadele, has done political work for Johnson and for allies, including former Ald. Pat Dowell, the mayor’s handpicked Finance Committee chair. Obadele, a former deputy at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services who was convicted of fraud in 2010, now runs a political consulting firm, Goshen Impact Services.

Coleman, the Black Caucus chair, did not respond to a request for comment about the letters sent by Stone. Obadele has also contributed to Coleman’s campaigns in 2023 and 2025, both personally and through Goshen.

Some Acclivus supporters have long criticized the city’s earlier decision to award lead CVI contracts to Metropolitan Family Services, citing its predominantly white board — though the director of its Metropolitan Peace Initiatives arm, Vaughn Bryant, is Black. Lance Williams, a Northeastern Illinois University professor who has worked with Acclivus, wrote a 2021 op-ed in Crain’s Chicago Business criticizing the Lightfoot administration for excluding the group: “People in the community look at this and say GTFO.”

Dowell has also advocated for Acclivus, according to sources in Lightfoot’s former leadership team, who said she even approached Lightfoot about funding for the group — a conversation Dowell has denied having, while also stressing her advocacy is unrelated to Obadele’s past political consulting work for her.

During one October 2023 budget hearing, Dowell’s frustration with Acclivus being passed over appeared to surface publicly, without naming the group, when she asked a deputy health commissioner she referred to only as “blue suit”: “I want to know where the Black-led violence prevention organizations are.”

—Tribune reporter Jake Sheridan contributed.

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