Last month the center announced it was closing because it had fun out of funds. Now the Attorney General's office has filed a complaint in Superior Court in an effort to make the non-profit's directors account for the missing money.
Louise Poppema tends to her four Norwegian Fjord horses. A lifelong rider and horse-lover, Poppema is a firm believer in the therapeutic value that interaction with horses can bring, particularly to people who are mentally challenged, or who have been through some kind of trauma. It was this conviction that led her to abandon a career in law and join Flying Changes, a group set up in 1992 by Maine resident Barbara Doughty.
In 2006, while studying for a degree in clinical counseling, Poppema became an intern at Flying Changes, which by then was primarily working with children. She was encouraged by the results that interaction with horses - not just riding them, but feeding them, walking them, and caring for them - brought to children, many of whom had emotional problems.
"It taught patience, it taught calmness, it taught ability to sustain focus," she explains.
In many instances, Poppema says, therapy helped them cope better with the outside world. She remembers one little boy who said his experience at Flying Changes helped him become more patient with his sister. "Another young girl was really frightened of the horses and after the course of the six sessions found that she was more willing to try things in the outside world. So it not only helped the children in session, but it generalized. It helped them learn skills they could use in the outside world. It really was magical to see what happens, there's a synergy that occurs."
Things started to go downhill, she says, when Barbara Doughty, who declined to be interviewed for this story, resigned as director for health reasons.
"Barbara was a genius at getting people in to the center," Poppema says, "and getting little grants that would add up to keep things going. So when she left the attendance went way down."
Dr Nancy Coyne, a psychiatrist and former director of Flying Changes, says Doughty's departure left the organization without its key fund-raiser. Eventually, Doughty returned to work part-time at the center. Things had changed, however.
"It was very clear that there was this strange paranoid, hostile stuff going on." Coyne says this hostility was largely between Doughty and certain members of the board, who seemed to resent her. And she was fired early last year.
By then, Flying Changes had a new executive director, Kathryn Levesque, a probation officer with a background in criminal intelligence analysis.
It seemed like a strange choice to Louise Poppema. "To me the idea that you hire someone who doesn't know anything about the program, who doesn't know anything about how it works, and then fire the person who has started the organizaion, who knows how it works, who knows the funding sources, you not only fire her, you cut off all connections with her, you alienate her, is the biggest example of mismanagement I've ever heard of."
The complaint filed by the Attorney General's office alleges that since Levesque took over as director in December 2007, she spent more than $206,000 dollars of the corporation's money, including restricted funds earmarked for specific charitable purposes, such as scholarships.
According to the lawsuit, Levesque made numerous cash withdrawals from corporate accounts without properly accounting for the money. Flying Changes presently owes $43,000 to various creditors. Levesque desclined to comment, referring all queries to current director Dwaine Waltrip, who's overseeing the dissolution of the group's assets, which includes a property in Topsham.
"I don't think she did anything wrong," Waltrip says. "I don't see the things that they're talking about in the suit, and to go any deeper than that I don't think it right, because the whole investigation is not over yet."
Waltrip cites cutbacks in the MaineCare program and the poor economy as factors which put the director and the rest of the board under immense pressure. With no money coming in, the place still had to be run and the horses fed, says Waltrip, who adds that he and his wife dipped into their own money to pay some of the bills.
Scott Schnapp, director of the Maine Association of Non-profits, says financial hardship is no excuse for financial mismanagement. "Any well-run organization should have good internal controls and good practices which ultimately should be approving use of funds in whatever way."
As the example of Flying Changes illustrates, this doesn't always happen. "When these situations come up, sometime those policies and procedures aren't in place and they make it easier to be accessing accounts without proper approvals. That's where you can run into trouble."
This is not the first time questions have been asked about Flying Changes. It hit the headlines last November after one of its employees, James Brown, was revealed as a convicted sex offender. He was subsequently arrested for allegedly violating the conditions of his probation by coming into contact with children.
Current director Dwain Waltrip, who was on the board at the time, maintains he didn't know about Brown's background when he was hired. Brown, he maintains, was a good employee and a good man, despite his history. "We're talking about something that happened to a person when he was teenager and the other person was a teenager too. It was teenagers being teenagers."
Despite Waltrip's assertions, a check with the Maine Sex Offender registry shows that Brown served jail time for numerous crimes committed when he was in his mid-to-late 20s, against children under 14, one of whom was a boy. When that crime occured, Brown was an instructor at the YMCA.