1736 Family Crisis Center CEO pay topped $1.6 million over two tax years, with Carol Adelkoff receiving $907,923 in 2023 and $742,181 in 2024. The nonprofit said the total includes salary, vacation pay and other compensation.
That figure now sits alongside the organization’s own numbers: about $15 million in revenue, nearly all of it taxpayer money from government grants, 16 facilities in L.A. and Orange counties, and about 170 employees. For readers tied to the nonprofit’s work, the immediate question is how a compensation package of that size was built inside a grant-funded operation.
Carol Adelkoff pay totals
Adelkoff said, “The salary didn’t jump like that,” and said her base salary over the last several years has remained around $405,000. She said, “It was simply a matter of reducing accrued vacation liability on the books and paying it out.”
Her 2023 pay included a $495,000 bonus, and the next highest-paid employee that year was the nonprofit’s finance director, who made $206,000. The gap places the chief executive’s compensation far above the rest of the payroll that was listed in the filings.
Vacation accrual rules
Kerry Garvis Wright, the center’s attorney, wrote that the board worked with legal counsel and financial experts to find a way to lower the increasing liability, including a vacation payout to Adelkoff before her retirement. Wright said, “The demands of the chief executive role for an expanding organization, with increasing numbers of shelters, clinics, and locations across broader geographic territories, together with growing client and staff responsibilities, funding complexities, fundraisers, community functions, and 24-hour oversight of residential and other service locations, made it difficult for Ms. Adelkoff to take time off.”
Wright also said, “As a result, over the course of the decades she served the organization, her vacation pay accrued substantially.” According to the attorney, the board allowed Adelkoff to accrue eight weeks of vacation a year as CEO, then reduced that to four weeks in 2012. The organization caps vacation time for other employees, but not for her.
1736 Family Crisis Center filings
The 2024 tax form did not originally specify how much of the compensation was vacation pay, and it was being adjusted to show a $329,243 payout. Adelkoff said the vacation payout totaled roughly $824,000 over two years, which is the piece the nonprofit is now separating from the broader compensation figure.
That adjustment leaves the public record with two related numbers: the pay total and the vacation-liability payout behind part of it. For anyone reviewing the filings, the practical issue is not the headline figure alone, but whether the nonprofit’s compensation rules will change once the payout is fully reflected on the tax form.
