NEW: A Denver Post investigation revealed that Aaron Clark, a burgeoning entrepreneur who last year won Boulder's Startup of the Year award, has repeatedly failed to pay his employees, contractors and vendors.
Rebecca Engel came to Justice Reskill as the first full-time hire. After a stint working for climbing gyms, she realized how much she missed direct service impact work.
Clark first alerted his staff to missed payroll on May 28. On a June 7 call with leadership, Clark said he was pushing the IRS and Gusto, the company’s payroll service, to allow him to process payments, but that he was being blocked from doing so. “We asked over and over, ‘Show us something,’ ” said Jess Hedden, Justice Reskill’s former director of communications. ” ‘Pick one person you trust. Show us money you have in the bank.’ He refused to do that.”
Less than two weeks after leadership departed — and before his former employees were even paid in full — Clark signed an agreement with a Denver recruiting agency to fill the vacant positions. In October, Diverse Talent, which focuses on finding companies diverse candidates, successfully placed three executive officers within Justice Reskill.
Corina Andariese, like much of Clark’s team of contractors, came straight to the company after graduating from the Galvanize software engineering boot camp in San Francisco. Andariese worked for Clark for six months and says she never saw a dime. Two other former contractors told The Post that Clark didn’t pay them for work with Represent Development Agency either. One individual said he was owed $5,000 or $6,000, and that Clark canceled meetings and stopped responding to his messages when asked about payment.“I never thought I’d be in a situation where I was getting the wool pulled over my eyes,” she said.
A day after The Post contacted Clark for this story, the employee was laid off. The nonprofit, which once pledged to teach coding skills to 1,000 justice-involved students every year, now has no instructors. Montoya and four other staffers — several of whom had been hired through Diverse Talent — were forced to pay for an attorney to reach a settlement with Clark. He was late on the first two installments, they say, and is now four weeks late on the third payment.Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post
“He’s intentionally preying on people’s good nature and desire to want to give back to the community,” she said.
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