A coalition of groups that received lucrative no-bid contracts from the Mills Administration from 2022 to 2024 — funded by federal COVID-19 money — simultaneously organized massive pro-Democrat canvassing and voter turnout operations, accord to a Robinson Report investigation.
At the center of the scheme is the Community Organizing Alliance (COA), a left-wing political group nominally aimed at boosting turnout among immigrants and non-white voters. COA’s advisory board includes Abdullahi Ali, the founder and CEO of Gateway Community Services (GCS), as well as Fatuma Hussein, the executive director of the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine (IRCM), formerly known as United Somali Women of Maine.
Ali and Hussein both received lucrative no-bid contracts from the Mills Administration in February 2022 for the alleged purpose of hiring Community Health Outreach Workers (CHOWs). According to the contract documents, the outreach workers were empowered to buy groceries for potential voters, as well as sign them up for welfare, free fuel, and free health care. All the while, the groups were required to keep a database of the households and individuals who’d benefited from these services — a database that would amount to valuable intelligence for a left-wing political operation like COA.
In the run-up to the 2022 and 2024 elections, Maine agencies charged with public health awarded nearly $10 million to this network of non-profits. Other than top level connections with Democratic politicians and left-wing interest groups, these organizations shared in common one other key characteristic: the ability to quickly contact and mobilize groups of ‘new voters.’
By 2024, the COVID-19 pandemic was no longer a burning issue in any real sense of the word or even stretch of the imagination — yet the money kept flowing. Dual-hatting individuals, often sharing office space, played key roles in organizations receiving public financing and maintaining webs of beneficiaries, with data and contact information at their fingertips. With the flip of a switch, such resources could be activated for purposes having little to nothing to do with public health. This curious confluence of spending on groups often led or controlled by politically motivated persons bears a closer look.
First, there is an infrastructure of voter contact organizations. Then, peeling back the assorted characters at play, the substantial overlap becomes clearer. What remains in some question is where the money went and how many winks and nods were exchanged.
Community Organizing Alliance‘s Voter Outreach Campaign
At the center of the political machine was the Lewiston-based nonprofit Community Organizing Alliance (COA). COA launched in 2022, almost immediately after Abdullahi Ali and Fatuma Hussein accepted no-bid contracts from the Mills Administration. Ali and Hussein are both on the advisory board for COA, and the Executive Director is a former employee of Ali’s at Gateway Community Services.
COA describes itself as a “social justice, civic engagement organization which educates, empowers and engages young people centering Black and immigrant voices.”
In the run up to the 2022 election, brought together political operatives and a state grantee receiving multi-million dollar contracts with which it was able to build extensive community networks in Lewiston-Auburn and later Portland.
A blog post from COA below describes their “Your Vote = Your Power” program as an “ambitious voter contact and turnout program focused on empowering immigration and BIPOC community members.”
According to COA, they were able to place 6,766 calls, knocked on 2,078 doors and engaged 1,261 voters as part of their outreach campaign.
They also say they coordinated rides for voters to polling places, and specifically targeted Lewiston and Portland for “ensuring no voter was left behind.”
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who is now running as a Democrat in the 2026 Maine gubernatorial election, is prominently featured speaking to the COA in the first picture published by organization in their blog post regarding their 2024 election outreach initiative.
The event at which Bellows spoke was entitled “Are you planning to vote & what’s your vote plan?” and was co-hosted by Gateway Community Services Maine and the Portland-based nonprofit Immigrant Welcome Center.
Safiya Khalid, a former Lewiston City Councilor, a former employee at Gateway Community Services — is the co-founder and executive director of COA.
The Maine Wire has reported extensively on Gateway Community Services, whose billing practices have come under review by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. According to documents obtained by the Maine Wire, a DHHS audit found that Gateway Community Services over-billed MaineCare by nearly one million dollars from 2015 to 2017.
[RELATED: Nonprofit Accused of MaineCare Fraud Received $65,000 in Lewiston Shooting Donations…]
Last week, a former long-time employee at Gateway, Chris Bernardini, came forward in an interview with The Robinson Report to allege that Gateway intentionally circumvented internal controls as well as DHHS policies to maximize profits from MaineCare reimbursements, including through alleged fraudulent manipulation of electronic records and physical timecards.
Bernardini told The Robinson Report that he has submitted his allegations to the Office of the State Auditor.
At Gateway, Khalid’s role included managing the firm’s database of patient records. She is credited on the firm’s website as bringing to it a “background in community development and activism.”
There is a significant amount of overlap between the organizations that received taxpayer-funded grants through the Maine CDC’s Health Equity office and COA–beyond just Safiya Khalid alone.
Abdullahi Ali, the founder and CEO of Gateway Community Services listed as part of the COA team. Ali’s activism extends beyond Southern Maine to Somalia, where he unsuccessfully sought the presidency of Jubaland, a quasi-autonomous statelet, while managing to keep a hand on the tiller at Gateway.
According to state business records, COA was established in December 2023, and has an office space at 124 Canal St. in Lewiston.
Gateway Community Services Maine also happens to have an office space at the same address, and so does the nonprofit Immigrant Resource Center of Maine.
COA even held an election day watch party and phone banking event at Gateway Community Services’ Lewiston office on Nov. 5, 2024.
Fatuma Hussein, founder and executive director of Immigrant Resource Center Of Maine, aka United Somali Women of Maine, is also on the COA team. United Somali Women of Maine received $347,000 from OPHE.
Hussein is also on the board of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, as treasurer. She serves on that board with state Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland), who previously worked in a leadership role at Gateway and currently sits on the Maine Legislature’s Appropriations Committee.
COA is tied directly to top-level Maine Democratic politicians through another member of their team, BJ McCollister.
McCollister is a political consultant, former Chief of Staff to then-Maine Senate President Troy Jackson (D), and is the former executive director of the Maine Senate Democratic Committee.
He is the founder and president of the political consultancy company the Resurgam Group — where he works alongside Troy Jackson’s son, Chace — and is a partner at Frame Strategies, a media firm that has partnered with numerous Democratic candidates in Maine.
McCollister is also one of the Maine Democratic Party’s representatives to the Democratic National Committee.
While on the surface COA appears to be an independent nonprofit organization, the donation page for COA indicates that they are “fiscally sponsored” by the Maine People’s Resource Center, stating that individuals can donate to COA by filling out a check to the Maine People’s Resource Center with “COA” in the memo field.
The Maine People’s Resource Center is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit arm of the Maine People’s Alliance, a 501(c)(4) progressive activist and lobbying organization that pushes left-wing causes in Maine.
Despite the two groups appearing separate on paper, the Maine People’s Alliance and People’s Resource Center share staff, office space, and support for progressive policies and Democratic politicians.
The joint 501(c)(3) and (c)(4) arrangement that allows the group of left-wing political activists to accept tax-deductible donations, as well as government grants, while maintaining the freedom to spend large sums of money directly influencing politics via the (c)(4) arm.
The Maine Wire previously reported in August of last year that Maine’s Democratic members of Congress, Jared Golden and Chellie Pingree, helped steer a $500,000 taxpayer-funded “environmental justice” grant to the Maine People’s Resource Center.
At the time, the Maine People’s Resource Center was advertising $21 per hour job openings for left-wing activists to canvass Maine’s Second Congressional District in the lead up to the 2024 election.
The Maine People’s Alliance network has also received millions of dollars in funding from the progressive dark money network run by the Washington, D.C.-based company Arabella Advisors.
Earlier this month, Shenna Bellows — who as shown above has participated in events with Maine People’s Alliance front group COA — announced that her campaign for Maine governor is endorsed by the Maine People’s Alliance.
Maine CDC Health Equity Office Grants to “New Mainer” Organizations
The Maine Center for Disease Control & Prevention (Maine CDC) doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants through their Office of Population Health Equity (OPHE) to numerous “new Mainer” nonprofits connected to an organization that led a massive voter outreach campaign during the 2024 election season.
The OPHE’s Community Care Referral Program lists several partner organizations, many of which cater primarily to “New Americans,” refugees and asylum-seeking migrants in the Portland and Lewiston area.
Some of those groups include Gateway Community Services Maine, Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services (MEIRS) and the New Mainer Public Health Initiative (NMPHI).
The program is overseen by the OPHE Community Care Navigator, Hamda Ahmed, who is one of the office’s five staffers.
Ahmed, according to previous public testimony submitted by her to the Legislature, was formerly employed as a program manager at the New Mainer Public Health Initiative.
NMPHI, Ahmed’s former employer, was one of the organizations chosen by the OPHE to receive hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars through “COVID-19 Vaccine Equity Grants.”
Not only did NMPHI receive $330,000 from the office, but so did Gateway Community Services of Maine, receiving $363,000 through the same grant program.
State Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland), was at the time of the disbursement of these grants the assistant executive director of Gateway Community Services, a position she held from about May 2022 through 2023.
At the same time, Dhalac was also on the OPHE’s “Health Equity Advisory Council,” and was therefore directly involved in shaping the office’s strategy, initiatives and actions when they gave her employer an over $360,000 taxpayer-funded grant.
The recipient of one of the largest OPHE grants was the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, at $689,000. Deqa Dhalac is listed as the vice president of the board of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition.
Community Health Outreach Worker (CHOW) Grants
The Maine CDC’s Health Equity office is not the only state agency that has doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to these very same nonprofit organizations.
The Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in April of last year began funding a small group of nonprofits to run a program called Community Health Outreach Workers (CHOW).
Maine DHHS initially funded the CHOW program with a $1.5 million no-bid contract, expecting the program to run through March 2025.
At the end of March of this year, the state extended the contract period with a second round of grants totaling $344,000 for the program to run until the end of June 2025.
Most of the nonprofits contracted by the Maine DHHS as CHOWs previously received grants from the OPHE, including Gateway Community Services Maine and the New Mainers Public Health Initiative.
The two organizations that did not previously receive OPHE grants are Cross Cultural Community Services and the Azerbaijan Society of Maine.
Cross Cultural Community Services is a DEI consulting organization co-founded by Rep. Dhalac.
The Azerbaijan Society of Maine is a nonprofit group founded and run by Tarlan Ahmadov, who until his recent resignation was the director of the Maine Office of New Americans.
According to the department’s procurement justification form (PJF), the CHOWs “provide outreach, education, referrals, support and community networking of the Target Population groups that have been impacted significantly by COVID-19.”
The “target populations” for the project, according to the Maine DHHS, were “African Americans; various immigrant, refugee and asylum communities; Native communities; older people; youth from Communities of Color.”
The CHOW outreach canvassers were paid by the department at a rate of $240 per day.
Altogether, the accelerated flow of funding to these groups which shared a capacity to contact and mobilize voters in the run-up the the election raises an array of curious connections and common interests in key demographic areas for the Democrat Party. Recent revelations about how no-bid contracts were parceled out has substantially aided this ongoing review.
This is a developing story that The Maine Wire will continue to track and update.
