Supporting Document: People’s Playground Project: NEPA GIVES Donor Reference

The People’s Playground Project — co-founded by Lisa Glover, partner of Honesdale Mayor Derek Williams — raised money through NEPA Gives, the regional giving day that ran from 7 p.m. Thursday, June 4 to 7 p.m. Friday, June 5. Two numbers describe what came in. The NEPA Gives fundraiser page shows $15,834 raised by 88 donors. PPP’s own Facebook infographic — the project’s only self-published accounting — puts the figure at about $15,000. Neither has been itemized.

The donor list tells a different story. Add up every visible donation on it and you get $8,343.80 — roughly $7,490 short of the $15,834 the fundraiser page displays. PPP hasn’t explained the difference, and the platform it used can pad the “total raised” it shows the public. Match money a sponsor pledges counts toward the figure before anyone pays it. A competitive bonus stacks on top. So the first question isn’t who gave. It’s what the headline number is even made of.

Then there’s who’s on the list. Pocono Review checked every visible name. Twenty are confirmed insiders — tied to PPP, to the foundation that holds its money, to borough government, or to the families running the project. Eighteen show dollar amounts, adding up to $2,821.30, or 33.8 percent of the documented total; the other two appear with no amount, so the figure counts only what the list shows them giving. Add the eleven donors with probable or possible ties and the group reaches 31 people and about $3,500, roughly 42 percent.

The documented total isn’t the sharpest frame, though. It folds in a sponsor-funded bonus and the anonymous gifts — a fifth of the list, 19 of 93 entries — that trace to no one. Look only at money attached to a named person, and confirmed insiders account for 53 percent of it, past 65 percent once probable ties are counted. That isn’t a guess about who the anonymous donors are. It’s the share of named, attributable money that came from inside the network. None of it was disclosed.

How the money works, and why the number is a question

NEPA Gives runs on Mightycause, a national giving-day platform. Two things about how it works matter here.

The first is the “total raised” figure, and how a matching grant inflates it. A matching grant is money a nonprofit lines up ahead of time — pledged by a board member, a business, or a sponsor to “match” donations as they arrive. On Mightycause, the matching tool is, in the platform’s own words, for display purposes only. It doesn’t move money. It moves the number on the page. A setting called “include match value in page metrics,” on by default, makes the public thermometer climb by the full match before the matching donor has paid a cent. The platform’s own example: a $1,000 match plus a single $5 donation shows $10 on the page. Five real dollars, and five nobody has given yet. The match funder is supposed to pay later, through a fulfillment link, but the platform doesn’t force it. Until they do, and whether or not they ever do, the “total raised” already counts the money.

Layer the Stretch Pool on top of that. The $884 bonus PPP collected is sponsor money, not a community donation. A project’s headline number can hold match money, bonus money, and sponsor money stacked above whatever the public actually gave.

PPP hasn’t said which it is. The fundraiser page shows $15,834; the donor list documents $8,343.80. The gap between them is $7,490.20 — 47 percent of the displayed total — and no public document explains whether that gap is community money, match money, or bonus dollars. Even crediting the full $884 Stretch Pool bonus against it, more than $6,600 has no visible source.

Even $8,343.80 isn’t a firm floor. Several entries show no dollar amount at all, and on this platform a name can appear the moment a donation is started, whether or not it’s ever finished. Some of the people counted as donors may never have given cash. The ones who did, you can’t size — a blank amount could be $10 or it could be thousands. So the visible total is neither a ceiling nor a reliable floor. How many of the 93 entries are completed payments, how many are unfinished, and how much the blank ones actually moved is something only PPP and the hosts can see.

The borough voted to commit $400,000 to the project, the replacement for the playground it removed in 2025, and remains the responsible party for it: the grants, the compliance, the spending. PPP, which has solicited these donations without registering as a charity in Pennsylvania, says the money comes from grants and donations. The borough is the one on the hook. For a public project that size, the entire financial disclosure is a single Facebook post.

The second feature is how the Stretch Pool is won. It isn’t paid out by dollars raised. It’s paid by unique donor count. As WCCF CEO Ryanne Jennings put it in a May 2026 interview: “The more donors you have, the more money you’ll get out of that stretch pool.” The platform counts a unique donor by email address. Every name on the list is a unit of leverage, which is why who’s on it, and how many times, decides the payout.

One foundation at the center

“Insider” means something specific here, and it runs through one place: the Wayne County Community Foundation.

WCCF holds PPP’s money, in a fund called “Friends of the Honesdale Parks, Central Park Playground Fund.” Lisa Glover, PPP’s co-founder, manages that fund. Her partner, Derek Williams, is the mayor of Honesdale, and he also works for WCCF as its Community Engagement Manager. WCCF co-hosts NEPA Gives, the event PPP raised the money through. The same foundation touches the fund, the mayor, and the platform.

Working outward from the center

At the center is Glover, with the largest named donation: $1,054.30. Her dedication mentions the community. It doesn’t mention that she co-founded the project, manages the fund, or sits on the WCAA board with others on the list.

Her family is on it too. Four relatives are confirmed: her mother Denise Glover ($222), her uncle Frank Blahuta ($100), and first cousins Jennifer de Leon ($20) and Kristin Benavides, whose entry shows no amount. Three more probably belong to the same family — a Blahuta relative ($25), Jeff Rembish ($25), who carries the maiden name of Glover’s late grandmother, and Joseph Birch ($25), who dedicated his gift to that grandmother by name — though those three remain probable, not confirmed. Counting Glover’s own donation, the confirmed family gifts reach $1,396.30, all of it going to a fund Glover controls; the three probable relatives would push the cluster past $1,470. Some of it is out-of-county money, routed through a Honesdale community fundraiser.

One step out: the mayor’s parents, Carolyn and Vannie Williams ($50), confirmed through public records and prior sponsorship lists. Their son runs community engagement at the foundation holding the money. His partner co-founded the project. Neither tie is noted anywhere.

Then the foundation’s own staff. Connor Simon, WCCF’s Grants and Outreach Manager, gave $25, dedicated — pointedly — to “Freedom of the Press.” Crystal Satriano, WCCF’s Development and Operations Manager, gave $50. Two employees donating to a fund their employer holds, through an event their employer runs, feeding a bonus pool their employer administers.

Out to the people who built the campaign: Catherine Schmidt-Jones, a PPP committee member, presented the project to council and then donated $100 to it. Lucas Green ($100), a PPP affiliate photographed at a project meeting, and his partner Caitlin Cowger ($500) gave $600 between them. Michele Young ($25), another affiliate, dedicated her gift to “Kitty,” Schmidt-Jones’s nickname, confirmed in a May 2026 Tri-County Independent article.

And out to the edges. Paul Meagher Jr., a Wayne County Planning Commissioner, gave $250, a county official donating to a project that could land in front of his own commission. Alison Peck ($50) turns up in WCCF’s own annual report as a foundation donor. Heather Hogan-Spencer, a WCAA board member who sits alongside Glover, is on the list through her art studio; her entry shows no amount, so whether the donation cleared isn’t verifiable, but the board tie is. Sandra Povse ($50) was at the WCAA grand opening in 2023, in the same room as Glover, Williams, Jennings, and Simon.

Lisa Champeau ($50), Director of Communications and Development at Wayne Memorial Hospital, served on the Roots & Rhythm festival board from 2014 to 2017 and as its press contact — a festival that ran in Central Park itself, with WCCF as a gold sponsor. Joelle Dujardin ($50) is a Senior Editor at Highlights for Children, where Glover worked as Crafts and Activities Editor; both are listed on the same masthead at 803 Church Street, Honesdale. She donated to her colleague’s fundraiser. That relationship appears nowhere on the donor list. And Jacqlyn Olecki ($25) turns up twice in WCCF’s 2025 Annual Report as a foundation donor — and dedicated her gift to the PPP campaign “in memory of The Pocono Review.”

And that’s just the ones we can prove

Twenty is the count that stands up name by name, a floor and not a ceiling. The donors below aren’t nailed down the same way, but their presence raises questions PPP could answer and hasn’t.

Two entries carry the Troop name, one dedicated to “Bronson.” Beth Bronson Troop is the wife of the Wayne County Planning Commission’s Vice Chairman. If those are family, then a second planning official’s relatives donated to a project that could come before their commission, alongside the confirmed commissioner already on the list. Jack Barnett ($100) appears on the WCAA Building Fund donor page, an arts-network giving list that surfaces more than once across this roster. So does a cluster tied to WCCF-funded institutions: the Cooperage Project, a preschool near the park that draws WCCF grants, a family whose name is on a WCCF memorial fund.

None of these is proven the way the 20 are, which is why they’re questions and not claims. But when a community fundraiser’s donor list keeps surfacing the county commission and institutions the foundation funds, that’s a pattern worth asking about.

The council member who appears twice

Kimberly Fisch, a Honesdale Borough Council member, voted in April to approve the PPP project. Weeks later she donated to it, and she appears on the donor list twice: two separate $50 entries.

The platform counts unique donors by email address, and it offers hosts a setting to count each donor only once, specifically to stop one person from padding a donor-count total. Did NEPA Gives turn that setting on? If it did, how does one council member show up as two entries? If it didn’t, then the count that determined PPP’s Stretch Pool payout treated a single repeat donor as two members of the public. The hosts haven’t published the rules, the pool’s size, or PPP’s share of it, so there’s no way to check from the outside.

The fifth you can’t see

Any of the 19 anonymous names could be another committee member, another foundation employee, another official who voted on the project. Or none of them. Two of those anonymous gifts are the largest single donations on the whole list — one of $1,000, one of $500 — $1,500 from sources no one outside can name. The one party positioned to know who they are is WCCF, which co-hosts the platform that hides them, holds the fund, and employs the mayor. The people who could answer are the people who benefit from the question going unasked.

Why the number matters

The platform creates two separate incentives to inflate the public-facing figure, and neither requires misrepresenting anything. Match money — pledged but not yet paid — makes the campaign thermometer read higher, building the social proof that drives more donations and looks better in grant applications and press releases. The borough committed $400,000 to a project partly on the strength of demonstrated community support; a figure of $15,834 reads very differently than $8,343. The Stretch Pool is a direct cash incentive: more donor names means a bigger bonus payout, which means every insider on the list wasn’t just showing support — they were worth money. A foundation employee’s $25 gift added $25 to the fund plus a share of the pool. The mayor’s parents’ $50 did the same. And Kimberly Fisch appearing twice means she may have been counted as two units of Stretch Pool leverage, not one. The two incentives stack. The platform is built to work this way. Whether the people running PPP understood that — and whether the borough did when it voted — are questions the public record doesn’t answer.

This wouldn’t be the first time money moving through this network was characterized one way in public and another in the records. Pocono Review previously documented that the Wayne County Community Foundation described a $75,000 contribution to the Wayne County Arts Alliance building fund — where Glover serves as an officer — as a matching grant, while WCAA’s own IRS filings record the same $75,000 as a loan, “mortgages or other loans payable,” carried unchanged across two years. No mortgage appears in the county’s deed records, and neither organization has explained the discrepancy. That campaign ran on Mightycause too, and the $75,000 was the sum WCAA had to raise to release the foundation’s match — the same platform and the same match structure now in play at PPP, with the same principals and the same unanswered question about what the headline number represents.

The questions PPP hasn’t answered

Two things would settle most of this, and PPP controls both.

An itemized accounting would show whether the $15,834 is community money or whether it folds in Stretch Pool and matching dollars the platform lets organizations count as “raised.” A statement from the hosts would show whether the unique-donor safeguards were on, and how one council member became two entries.

Neither exists. When people connected to the project have answered this reporting at all, it’s been with harassment and a cease-and-desist, not a disputed fact. For $8,343.80 in documented donations, a displayed total of $15,834, and a $400,000 project the borough has committed to and remains responsible for — run by a group that still hasn’t registered as a charity — the public record is a single Facebook post and a donor list stacked with the people who run it.

Sourced connections for every identified insider donor are documented here.

All findings based on public records, the NEPA Gives donor list, Mightycause platform documentation, municipal documents, and documented media coverage.

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