A St. Paul woman is heading to prison for stealing nearly half a million dollars in grant funding intended to serve teen moms and other struggling Minnesotans through two nonprofits she founded over a decade ago.
Roberta Barnes, 59, was sentenced in federal court in Minneapolis on Wednesday to one year and one day in prison for committing felony-level mail fraud.
Barnes will also undergo two years of supervised release.
Barnes used her position as president of both the Agape House for Mothers and the Sierra Young Family Institute Inc. to facilitate her scheme, according to the criminal complaint filed against her in early 2014.
Both nonprofits are located in St. Paul.
From 2002 until the spring of May 2012, Barnes secured nearly $2 million in grant funding from the Minnesota Department of Health and the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency under the guise that the funding would support her organizations’ missions of curbing teen pregnancies and helping families with financial struggles find housing.
Barnes later admitted that, beginning in 2009, she started diverting some of the money toward personal use, including mortgage payments, car payments and other family expenses. Over time, the money added up to nearly $500,000, the complaint said.
Barnes pleaded guilty to the scheme in December 2014.
In an argument made prior to sentencing, Barnes’ attorney, Reynaldo Aligada Jr., argued that the court should weigh Barnes’ lack of criminal record as well as her life of service to disadvantaged youth when deciding her appropriate sentence, which he argued should be six months of home detention and 100 hours of community service.
“While the evidence in (Barnes’) case certainly shows that she was not honest with the agencies who provided funds, it also shows that her mistakes were rooted in her intermingling personal convictions with her professional work,” Aligada wrote in documents submitted to the court.
To illustrate his point, Aligada pointed out that at one point Barnes had multiple young women and their children living with her and her family in St. Paul.
The prosecution pushed for a longer sentence, pointing to lies Barnes told authorities after they caught wind of the fraud.
“The money she stole should have been used to help people escape from a cycle of poverty and instead (Barnes) paid her expenses and gave money to her family members … Then, when caugh t… she continued to lie,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger wrote in court documents.
Neither Barnes’ attorney nor her family could be immediately reached for comment.