'We were being targeted': NC second lady says scrutiny of her nonprofit was political vendetta against Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson

The second lady of North Carolina says a state agency targeted her nonprofit organization for scrutiny as part of a vendetta against her husband, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson.

Yolanda Hill, Robinson’s wife, said earlier this month that she intended to shut down Balanced Nutrition, the Greensboro nonprofit she has run for nearly a decade, citing how busy her life has become due to her husband’s political career.

In an interview with WRAL on Thursday, Hill alleged that she and her organization had also received undue scrutiny from a North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services employee. Hill purported that the attention was due in part to her connection to Robinson.

Balanced Nutrition helps adult or child care centers in the Triad area that qualify for federal food subsidies. The DHHS regulates health-related nonprofits that participate in federal programs. The DHHS is run by an appointee of Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat. Robinson is a right-wing Republican who has the backing of former President Donald Trump.

According to Hill, a DHHS employee in February 2023 circulated to colleagues Hill’s social media photos showing her next to Robinson. “She screenshot a picture from my personal Facebook page,” Hill said. “I didn't know her, didn't know personally. She was not a friend of mine.”

Hill added: “She used her state cell phone to send that picture to her colleagues on their state cell phones, telling them: ‘Look who this is. Look who her husband is. Her husband is Mark Robinson.” The employee told colleagues that Hill had misled her about her husband’s identity, Hill alleged.

The person who purportedly circulated those images was DHHS Child Nutrition Assistant Joyce Bonner, according to Hill. Bonner was later in charge of reviewing Balanced Nutrition. The case was assigned to a different specialist in March 2023, DHHS said.

USDA’s rules prohibit discrimination on the grounds of political beliefs. Hill thinks Bonner's conduct violated that rule.

Bonner didn’t respond to requests for comment. Kelly Haight Conner, a DHHS spokesperson, said the agency operated “under normal federal requirements in regard to scheduled compliance reviews for Balanced Nutrition.”

Balanced Nutrition had been undergoing a review by the department to make sure it remained in compliance with federal standards, department records show.

In a March 1 letter, the DHHS asked Hill for a broad array of financial documents, including bank statements, tax records and internal records of transactions. The agency also sought agreements with sponsoring organizations, board of director’s meeting minutes, meal count records and more.

In the letter, DHHS informed Hill that their meeting would take place April 15. On April 2, Hill informed her clients that she intended to shutter the organization.

WRAL previously reported on inconsistencies in Balanced Nutrition’s tax paperwork, including how it reported compensation.

Hill said she contacted DHHS when she was told of the images and said that her husband had nothing to do with her organization or the federal program that funded it. “I was doing this way before anybody knew his name,” she said.

“We felt like we were being targeted from the beginning,” she added.

Robinson, who hasn’t worked for the nonprofit since entering office, has been criticized by conservatives as hypocritical for condemning government spending while his wife and other family members have derived income from an organization whose sole source of funding is the federal government. Since its founding, a number of family members have worked for it as board members or employees.

The state is paying Robinson more than $157,000 this year for his work as lieutenant governor. Hill, who founded Balanced Nutrition in 2015, has made hundreds of thousands more from the nonprofit.

Spokesmen for Robinson’s campaign and the lieutenant governor’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tyler Brooks, a Greensboro lawyer representing Balanced Nutrition, didn’t respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

“Balanced Nutrition has aided community partners in providing hundreds of thousands of nutritious meals to some of North Carolina's most vulnerable populations,” Brooks said in a written statement earlier this month. “Balanced Nutrition is proud of its accomplishments and is actively working to ensure a smooth transition for each of its partner facilities, as it turns the page to a new chapter.”

‘My life has gotten extremely busy’

Hill has long been a regular presence with Robinson on the campaign trail. The lieutenant governor often credits and applauds her for supporting their family over the years; they previously faced financial struggles that led to Robinson facing civil and criminal legal trouble. He has embraced that history on the campaign trail, saying it makes him more attuned to challenges facing regular people.

Running for governor is a more intense task than running for most other political offices, including lieutenant governor. In early April, Hill contacted the daycares she works with to let them know she’d be shutting down soon to focus on her husband’s political campaign.

“Some of you may or may not be aware that my husband is the Lt. Governor of North Carolina and is currently running for governor of North Carolina,” she wrote in an April 2 email to partners. “With that being said, my life has gotten extremely busy over the last few years and those obligations no longer allow me the time to be a sponsoring organization.”

Some of Robinson’s former opponents in the GOP primary had attempted to use the nonprofit against him. Yet it stayed open through the primary, despite those lines of attack from a fiscal conservative point of view. Robinson won the primary with 65% of the vote. Hill’s email made no mention of any political pressure from fellow conservatives who have criticized the nonprofit.

Robinson’s resounding win in the March primary hasn’t stopped his intra-party critics from continuing to bring up the nonprofit. Chief among them is Brant Clifton, an outspoken conservative blogger from Southern Pines who runs the Daily Haymaker website: “It’s a curious career choice for a man who is a vocal and frequent critic of the social welfare state,” Clifton wrote in late March.

Family employees

The nonprofit has been a family affair. Hill and Robinson’s son Dayson Robinson has been a part-time employee since 2019. Their son-in-law, Danzeto Cephas, was listed as an unpaid board member in the early years of the group. Individuals who the Daily Haymaker has identified as Hill’s mother and sister have also been involved.

Tax filings show the organization paid out more than $700,000 in salaries and wages from 2018 to 2022, the most recent publicly available data — ranging from $80,000 to $173,000 annually.

The only employees listed in tax records during those years were Hill, her son, and Cassaundra Spinks — a woman the Daily Haymaker has previously identified as Hill’s mother. Hill appears to have earned the majority of the wages — a combined $319,000 in 2018, 2019 and 2020, which is more than three-quarters of the group’s total salary payout in those years.

But the tax documents are also inconsistent year-to-year in how they report income. In more recent years the group has begun reporting only the total amount of salary paid, without indicating who made what.

There are also inconsistencies in what’s being reported in other documents. Starting in 2021, when Robinson took office as lieutenant governor, Hill began stating on the tax forms that she was making $0 from the nonprofit. But in separate ethics forms filed with the state, Robinson has reported that Hill has made at least $5,000 from the nonprofit every year since 2020.

And the group’s tax filings show it has continued to pay out wages, just with few to no indications of who was paid, or how much they received.

WRAL State Government Reporter Will Doran contributed to this report.