Utah charity is probed over $40 charity calendar of ‘sexy’ HOMELESS men after family said they felt ‘pressured’ to pose for it
A Utah charity is under investigation for a calendar featuring “sexy homeless men” after a former volunteer criticized the treatment of a family who said they felt pressured to pose for it.
The Nomad Alliance, a charity based in Salt Lake City, produces a calendar every year called “Sexy Nomads,” filled with photos of bare-chested drifters living on the streets.
The organization claims it aims to raise awareness of the number of homeless people on the streets and gives money to those who take part in the calendar.
According to the charity, the experience can be uplifting for the men who take part, but advocates see the calendar as exploitative.
Utah officials are also now investigating a complaint from a former volunteer at the charity about the treatment of a family who said they felt pressured to pose.
The charity produces a calendar every year, called ‘Sexy Nomads’, filled with photos of bare-chested men living on the streets
Charity founder Kesniya Kniazeva, pictured here, has denied the allegations about the family
The charity had offered to help a husband and wife and their four young children living on the streets, setting up a GoFundMe for them, raising $30,000.
Moriah Mills, the children’s mother, said the GoFundMe was the idea of charity founder Kesniya Kniazeva and raised more than $36,000.
According to Mills, Kniazeva then started “talking about getting a house,” which Mills said “didn’t make sense” for the family because they had no income.
As the donations continued, Mills claims Kniazeva asked her husband to pose for the calendar, with the couple feeling like they couldn’t say no to her.
Mills said The Washington Post: ‘He was forced to take those photos. He didn’t want to do that.’
She added that the family has yet to see any of the money donated to them, while her husband is now in jail for violating his probation.
Charity founder Kesniya Kniazeva denied the allegations to The Washington Post, telling them the situation “underlines the difficulty of our work.”
She said: “It was never a condition of working with them to be on the calendar.” Kniazeva also told the post that they do not plan to use her husband’s photos.
Kniazeva added, “We are trying to be good stewards of the donations, consistent with the intent of GoFundMe.
‘This money was not just intended to leave a nice trailer on the street. This was intended to get the family off the streets.”
Zhon Johansen, pictured here, has taken on the task of photographing the men for the upcoming calendar
Former volunteer Carol Powell filed a complaint with the state about the group’s alleged mistreatment of the Mills family.
Powell said she complained about the “exploitation of the Mills family and the sexualization” of the husband “who was forced to pose for the Nomad Alliance Sexy Nomad Calendar.”
The Department of Workforce Services has since confirmed that a complaint has been made against the charity.
The idea behind the calendar was Kniazeva’s after he founded the charity in 2020, and has since used unconventional tactics such as ‘Sexy Nomads’ when dealing with social services.
She said only 35 copies of the calendar were sold at $40 per calendar, but she argued that the project has functioned more as their calling card.
She told the Post that she hands them out to local and state politicians, to police officers who regularly patrol camps.
Kniazeva said: ‘All publicity is good publicity. I wanted to do something to highlight the beauty and humanity of these people, especially when I see how often they are humiliated and ignored and treated as an invisible people.”
She told the outlet that the idea to feature homeless men on a calendar came from her own experience with modeling and homelessness.
The concept for the calendar consists of models posing, describing their lives and how they became homeless.
Nude calendars have become a popular way to raise money for charity in recent years.
The idea originated in England in 2000, when the Rylstone Women’s Institute posed nude to raise money for a cancer center. That calendar inspired the Helen Mirren film Calendar Girls.