I Helped Danny Farrar’s Nonprofit During COVID, And I Feel Scammed (Opinion)

You probably know Danny Farrar for his work with Soldierfit and the nonprofit Platoon 22 (which Farrar is apparently no longer affiliated with). But there’s a lesser known nonprofit he founded during COVID called Bear the Burden Coalition (BTBC), and for some of us who donated to this nonprofit, we feel scammed.

During the heights of the COVID pandemic, extremely oppressive restrictions were placed on small businesses in Maryland and across the country. I had personally just started a business with the intention of investing in short-term rentals, designed to help boost the tourism income of Washington County. Only a few months after establishing the LLC and taking all the necessary training, the entire country was shut down due to the pandemic. Businesses were struggling, especially mine which I had invested a significant amount of money and time into, and was about to find my first short-term rental property.

The future for local small business was looking rather dim. But then Danny Farrar, a Frederick County business owner and founder of the nonprofit “Platoon 22”, approached us with his concept for a nonprofit “Bear the Burden Coalition”, designed to help small businesses affected by the oppressive requirements imposed in the name of “public safety”. Editor’s note: Farrar does not appear to be associated with Platoon 22 anymore, and all reference of him has been removed from the Platoon 22 website without explanation.

To my fellow businessmen & women,
If you are getting this letter today, it is because you are someone we admire and respect. You’re a proven leader not only in your business but in your community as well. In light of these turbulent times, we call on you to lead again, arguably the most critical fight of our generation.
Like all of you, we have shouldered a far greater share of the burden than those making these decisions. We have sustained and survived (barely) the first lockdown. We have led the way in ensuring our customer’s safety and security while utilizing our goods and services. We have thought outside the box and the restaurant.
We have pivoted until we found ourselves right back at where we started.
We have done all of this with little to no help from those restricting our dreams. The PPP was simply a passthrough to our employees, and though we were grateful to help them, the truth is, it did little to help us. State help has fallen short for many, and the gridlock at the federal level is even worse.
Today, as we stand with the election in dispute, immediate aid is nowhere in sight. The best we can hope for is help by January, and that would be a level of optimism we don’t possess.
I have fought for this country.
Now it’s time to fight again; for our dreams, our employees, our families, and way of life.
I know, without a shadow of a doubt, none of us can do this alone. That is why the time has come to form the Bear the Burden Coalition. We need you to step up and help us lead this charge.
We expect to form our official platform from the minds of everyone who steps up. With that said, we would like to propose the following to start the discussion.
Every elected official who voted to cut us to 50% or 25%, or forced us to close, will take an equal cut to their pay. All while continuing to come to work.
Large indoor establishments must face the same restrictions on capacity as the small companies do.
The county must inspect and enforce rule 2 as rigorously on the Walmarts, Targets, and home depots of the world, as they do on small business owners.
We demand a place at the table to have our voice heard when discussing economic policies regarding COVID-19.
We are happy to follow the restrictions when all share them.
If this request is not meet, we will proceed forward with the following civil disobedience.
We will refuse to comply with capacity limits.
We will refuse to close in the event of a shut-down.
We will actively protest en masse.
Again, these are just talking points. We can flesh them out and determine our course of action together. Together, it is the only way we save our dream, our economy, and our nation.
The next step is up to you. If you are ready to join our fight, please reply, “count me in.” Once we have the full list of businesses, we will notify you of the next step.
Your’s in solidarity,
Danny and Jennifer Farrar

Little did I know that with my reply of “count me in” I, and many others, would begin down a path where we would donate to a nonprofit that never accomplished any of its publicly stated mission goals, and instead simply hold a webinar for Frederick County businesses, informing them that they were pretty helpless to resist the government’s restrictions unless they had millions of dollars for litigation. And while the organization’s members have in the past claimed that the organization’s efforts helped push Maryland towards re-opening, this speculative claim holds very little weight with me, as Maryland certainly did not open before other states across the US.

Now to be fair, BTBC never said they would be helping any businesses outside of Frederick County, but their language certainly didn’t imply Frederick County would be the focus of their efforts. The BTBC website has been offline for several years, but the Wayback Machine shows the following on the archived copy of the homepage:

Bear the Burden seeks to ensure that all businesses, both large & small bear the same burden of restrictions and limitations imposed by local and national governments, eliminating hypocrisy to assure equal opportunity for all businesses to survive.

The full mission statement was posted to the Bear the Burden Coalition Facebook group on November 17, 2020 by founder Danny Farrar.

Bear the Burden seeks to ensure that all businesses, both large & small bear the same burden of restrictions and limitations imposed by local and national governments, eliminating hypocrisy to assure equal opportunity for all businesses to survive.
At this stage our non-profit status has been filed, we are working on a website, and we are getting our bank account setup.
In the upcoming days, you will be called to donate financially so that we can retain legal counsel.
Along with that donation we will ask you to help with this movement in other ways; such as, donating your talents and abilities, protesting, petitioning, and pledging to stand in solidarity with your fellow business owners.
I want to remind you that anyone can get on the keyboard and complain. Where the rubber meets the road is in action and putting your money where your mouth is.
Let’s ensure that this group is not only a group that speaks up, but one that stands up and takes action as well.
Otherwise we’re just a echo chamber of sad and broken souls and we’re too strong to do that.

I was personally asked to donate $100 to help their efforts. I was only able to donate $50, and even then that’s probably more than I really could afford to donate at the time due to the fact that I had just before COVID invested thousands towards starting a short-term rental investment company which was basically destroyed by travel restrictions and business closures. It was my expectation that my contribution, and others, would help in pushing back across the state, and provide much needed relief to businesses. And from November 2020 to February 2021, BTBC raised approximately $50,000, with the claims that they would do just that, with the bulk of that funding raised between November 2020 and the end of that year.

The result? $12,000 was spent in December 2020 by BTBC on two webinars hosted by a law firm in from Washington DC called “Boyden Gray & Associates”, focused on Frederick County. Why Frederick County? Because that’s where the nonprofit was based out of.

I didn’t speak up at the time because I believed that there would be more to come, especially those who were outside of Frederick County who donated, as our donations were just as important after all? But then the nonprofit fell silent, and the only updates shared in the BTBC Facebook group were essentially official updates concerning Frederick County and Maryland COVID restrictions. No additional webinars, no efforts to assist struggling businesses. Just sharing Facebook posts. Finally, in May 2021, restrictions were lifted and the state allowed businesses to re-open.

“Our goal was to raise money to help educate and possibly litigate if necessary, if our local, state or federal authorities did not allow small businesses to operate, or applied unfair restrictions on small businesses,” stated Brett Hess, treasurer of BTBC, on November 25, 2022. Of course what’s interesting about this statement is that “education” was not at any point in time part of the mission statement relayed to those who donated. If I want “education” on my rights, I’ll consult an attorney myself, and I know for sure it’s going to cost less than the $12,000 BTBC spent. I guess the real winners in all of this are the attorneys in Washington DC.

After years of multiple people questioning what was being done with the remaining funds, on May 30th, 2024, it was announced that Bear the Burden Coalition has donated its remaining $37k funds to the Community Foundation of Frederick County, and closed the nonprofit.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the Community Foundation of Frederick County has some excellent programs to help Frederick County, but that is not what I, and many others, donated those funds for. Those funds were donated to not only help struggling businesses, but help beyond Frederick County, to the surrounding counties and beyond to the rest of the state. Not once did BTBC disclose to potential donors that they would only be helping Frederick County businesses, and in fact their mission statement said all businesses, indicating that help would possibly even be extended to businesses beyond Maryland. But, this donation is consistent with the rest of the organization’s efforts which only focused on Frederick County, and had it been disclosed upfront that the focus of BTBC was only Frederick County businesses, I likely wouldn’t have donated at all (and probably neither would have anyone else outside of Frederick County).

To be perfectly honest, I feel like I was scammed. I donated to Bear the Burden because I thought it would help me get my short-term rental investment business going again, and more importantly help businesses in Washington County and the rest of Maryland. But the cold harsh reality is that NONE of my donation went towards helping Washington County, let alone my own business. And the fact that my donation didn’t even have the local impact I intended for it to, that’s what stings the most. Local small business owners donated approximately $50,000 under the belief that it would help everyone. That’s $50,000 that could have instead been injected into the economy to help out struggling small business owners. Instead, $12,000 was paid to a law firm to host two webinars, and the rest sat in a checking account (not even drawing interest in a savings account) for over three years.

Sadly this has absolutely affected my future charitable giving, and likely that of others. I will be extremely hesitant to donate to nonprofits because I’ve been burned by BTBC with deceitful marketing and failure to live up to my expectations. And I suspect that I’m not the only one who feels this way. And that’s truly a shame – the real victims in this aren’t just those who donated, but those legitimate nonprofits who may get reduced donations as those of us who were burned in the past become hesitant to donate to others in the future.

Unfortunately, there’s little recourse for those of us who donated and feel deceived by BTBC’s actions, as nothing done was illegal. As Farrar stated on April 29, 2024, “While you may disagree with our management decisions, it is important to distinguish this from fraudulent behavior.” And Farrar is correct, unfortunately vague marketing messaging and mission statements are not considered fraud. But I will not be the only person to say that I strongly disagree with the decisions made by those involved with BTBC, and I certainly won’t forget anytime soon the actions of Farrar, Hess, and BTBC.

Opinion article by Ken Buckler, President of Radio Free Hub City. All opinions are his own, and do not reflect those of our clients or sponsors.

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