BOSTON — Mayor Michelle Wu’s office is now calling the spending “inappropriate.” There’s just one problem: the city agency that awarded the grant is the same one that promoted the program on Instagram.
The Boston Herald reported Friday that Wu’s office confirmed a $7,500 city grant was awarded to OUTnewcomers, a nonprofit offering $250–$500 “wellness allowance” vouchers to LGBTQ+ migrants for gym memberships, yoga, meditation, massages, and hair salons.
Wu’s office said the grant was designated for mental health services — not the voucher program — and that the nonprofit was using the funds “inappropriately.”
“No funds have been distributed or directed for these purposes,” the mayor’s office said. The grant has been cut from the FY27 budget.
But the city’s own Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement — the same office that awarded the grant — reposted OUTnewcomers’ flyer on its official Instagram account, @bosimmigrants. The flyer explicitly says “Get $250–$500 for Your Well-Being” and lists yoga, meditation, creative healing, peer support, and gym memberships.
The city didn’t just fund it. They promoted it.
The City of Boston’s Office of Immigrant Advancement (@bosimmigrants) reposted OUTnewcomers’ flyer on its official Instagram story.
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The story went global
The program was first reported by Mass Daily News on April 15. Within 48 hours, the story went global — picked up by the Daily Mail in the UK, Fox News, the New York Post, and the Toronto Sun in Canada, generating a firestorm of backlash directed at the mayor. Khan has since received death threats and threats of being reported to ICE. OUTnewcomers issued a press release calling the coverage “hate-driven disinformation” that “endangers LGBTQ+ Migrants in the City of Boston.” The nonprofit accused Mass Daily News and the Daily Mail of publishing “serious inaccuracies and harmful misrepresentations,” claimed the outlets “did not follow ethical reporting standards,” and said it was consulting legal counsel about “a legal course of action against these right wing media outlets.”
On Instagram, OUTnewcomers went further — claiming “these outlets never reached out to us for comment” and that “images of our founder were used without permission.”
The press release also quietly revised the voucher amount — from the $250–$500 printed on the original flyer to “small, need-based wellness vouchers of $50 or less.” The flyer has not been corrected.
OUTnewcomers’ now-deleted press release, which called Mass Daily News and Daily Mail coverage “hate-driven disinformation” and accused both outlets of endangering LGBTQ+ migrants.
Wu’s office said nothing — until the Boston Herald followed up on Friday. Then the mayor’s office finally responded, confirmed every material fact Mass Daily News reported, said the grant would not be renewed in FY27, and threw the nonprofit under the bus.
OUTnewcomers called it “disinformation.” The city called it “inappropriate.” The facts didn’t change.
Either they knew or they didn’t
Here’s the problem with “inappropriate.”
MOIA awarded OUTnewcomers the $7,500 grant. OUTnewcomers created the voucher program and published a flyer advertising $250–$500 in wellness allowances. MOIA then reposted that flyer on its official Instagram.
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The flyer is not ambiguous. Either they read it before reposting and approved the program — meaning Wu’s office is lying about it being “inappropriate” — or they didn’t read it, which means the office has zero oversight over how its own grant money is being spent.
Both are bad. Pick one.
The Weaving Well-Being program
The $7,500 grant came from “Weaving Well-Being,” a grant program administered by Wu’s Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, or MOIA. The program hands out up to $200,000 per cycle in grants of $7,500 or $15,000 to nonprofits providing “non-clinical, culturally and linguistically sensitive practices” for immigrant communities.
This cycle, 28 organizations received funding. OUTnewcomers was one of them. The program is part of MOIA’s larger $1.25 million annual grantmaking operation, all funded by the city’s operating budget.
MOIA Executive Director Monique Tú Nguyen. Photo: LinkedIn
MOIA is run by Executive Director Monique Tú Nguyen, who earned $130,153.92 last year. It reports directly to the mayor. Mass Daily News reached out to MOIA for comment. The office did not respond by time of publication.
The numbers don’t add up either
The flyer says $500. The press release says $50. The mayor says it was never authorized. The nonprofit says the city funded it. The city’s own Instagram promoted it. Nobody’s story matches.
And the $500-to-$50 discrepancy creates its own problem. If the vouchers were always $50, then the flyer advertising $500 was misleading — designed to attract applicants with a number the program never intended to honor. If the vouchers really were $500, then the press release was the lie — written after the story broke to make the spending look smaller. Either the nonprofit misled the public to drum up interest, or it misled the public to manage a crisis.
No nonprofit status, no 990s, no paper trail
OUTnewcomers does not appear to hold 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. A search of the IRS Exempt Organizations database returns no results. There are no 990 tax filings on record. No public financial disclosures of any kind.
The Weaving Well-Being grant program requires applicants to be registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits or to apply through a fiscal sponsor. Whether OUTnewcomers used a fiscal sponsor — or whether MOIA simply didn’t check — is unclear. Either way, the city awarded $7,500 in public money to an organization with no verifiable nonprofit status and no financial track record.
It’s not the first time city-funded nonprofits have gone unchecked. As Mass Daily News reported last week, the Boston Finance Commission found that Three Squares Main Street had fabricated $32,447 in expenses over 18 months — including altering a $5.15 PayPal payment to look like a $2,301 Staples charge. The nonprofit’s phone is now disconnected.
The founder
In September 2024, Khan launched a GoFundMe with a $20,000 goal, raising $2,585 from 38 donors. The fundraiser describes an arrest on May 7, 2024 on an MBTA bus for resisting arrest and trespassing after what Khan described as “a major relapse.” Khan was detained overnight by MBTA Transit Police, then transferred to ICE detention at the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, where Khan spent 57 days — including two stints in solitary confinement.
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By 2026, Khan’s organization had secured a city grant to distribute taxpayer-funded wellness vouchers. He is now at the center of a program the city says went off the rails.
OUTnewcomers pauses and points fingers
OUTnewcomers founder Sal Khan. Photo: Instagram
OUTnewcomers issued a statement Thursday saying it was “temporarily pausing” the voucher program, citing “safety threats” against founder Sal Khan.
“While we remain deeply committed to this work, the safety of our community must come first,” Khan said.
The statement did not address Wu’s office saying the funds were used inappropriately. It did not explain the $500-to-$50 discrepancy. It blamed the backlash on “anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-immigrant hostility.”
The council that won’t ask questions
City Councilors Ed Flynn and Erin Murphy have been trying to get answers on city spending for months. They pushed for an independent performance audit of city departments. The council voted it down 8–4 along Wu-allied lines — Breadon, Coletta Zapata, Durkan, FitzGerald, Louijeune, Pepén, Santana, and Weber voting no.
When Flynn and Murphy filed orders to investigate the combined $100 million city and BPS budget shortfall, Councilor Sharon Durkan blocked them from even being read into the record.
This week, Flynn and Murphy sent Wu a letter demanding she “immediately pause” planned FY27 grant cuts while essential services for seniors and young people are being reduced or eliminated.
“We are deeply concerned that funding supporting core services, including mental health supports for older adults and youth employment opportunities, has reportedly been reduced or eliminated while new discretionary funding initiatives continue to be actively promoted,” they wrote.
In a statement to Mass Daily News, Flynn went further: “Boston leaders, including the mayor and city council, must understand we are facing difficult economic challenges. We can no longer run the city as if we have unlimited financial resources to spend. Now is the time for fiscal responsibility, fiscal discipline, accountability and transparency. Tax payers deserve a city government that understands we are accountable for every dollar we receive and spend.”
The $1.25 million question
If nobody at MOIA caught this — despite promoting it on Instagram — what about the other 27 organizations in the Weaving Well-Being program? What about the rest of the $1.25 million in MOIA grants?
The mayor’s office says one nonprofit went rogue. The evidence suggests the office that funds these grants isn’t watching where the money goes — and the city council majority won’t let anyone ask.
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