The founder of Casa Ruby — a former nonprofit resource center and shelter that housed and helped immigrant and LGBTQ youth in D.C. — was sentenced to 33 months in prison in January after she pleaded guilty to wire fraud, according to a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) release.
Ruby Corado was sentenced for diverting at least $150,000 in emergency federal COVID-relief funds intended to support the Casa Ruby shelter to a bank account in El Salvador for personal use, according to the DOJ release. After her prison sentence, Corado will serve two years of supervised release. She is also required to pay $956,215, the amount Casa Ruby received in pandemic relief, in restitution to the Small Business Administration, the release states.
Casa Ruby provided services to more than 6,000 people each year across its D.C. shelters from 2012 until its closure in 2022, the organization’s website stated, including case management and mental health support to LGBTQ youth and immigrants.
Casa Ruby case managers praised the shelter in 2018, telling Street Sense it helped get homeless youth off the streets and provided them a place where they could be themselves, something that is still needed in the city. The 2025 Point- in-Time (PIT) Count showed LGBTQ youth ages 18-24 made up 38.4% of all homeless single youth, a 9% increase from 2024. Without Casa Ruby, only a few shelters specifically tailored to LGBTQ youth remain in the District.
The Wanda Alston Foundation — a transitional housing program for transgender and LGBTQ youth in the District — was appointed by a D.C. Superior Court judge to fill the gap in services that Casa Ruby left in 2022. In October, the Wanda Alston Foundation stated LGBTQ supportive homeless shelters and transitional housing facilities throughout D.C. were operating at full capacity, even after the organization recently expanded.
Nick Harrison, a lawyer who provided pro bono legal services to the Wanda Alston Foundation as they navigated the receivership of Casa Ruby, said Wanda Alston was selected because it was a similarly situated organization, also serving LGBTQ homeless youth. Harrison and the then executive director of the Wanda Alston Foundation, June Crenshaw, were responsible for assessing what assets Casa Ruby had left and how to best tackle the gap in services it left behind.
“The organization had been looted by Ruby Corado before we got there,” Harrison said. “There was very little money in the account, maybe $1,000 or something like that.”
Harrison said many different shelters in D.C. came together to figure out what services they could provide to fill the gap left by Casa Ruby, but it had served a specific population other shelters could not completely cover. An organization like Casa Ruby is still missing in the District, Harrison said.
“They had a large Spanish-speaking population, large Latino population, large transgender population that took advantage of their services. And so there is no organization that sort of sprung up that had the same mold as Casa Ruby, nobody that could take over everything that they had,” Harrison said.
According to Harrison, Casa Ruby’s main challenge was that board members and community members who were supposed to be monitoring the shelter’s finances and holding Corado accountable were not doing so.
“It’s really the board members and the community members who would have been the ones to sort of vouch for her and say, ‘yes, this is going well,’ or ‘no, she needs to make adjustments,’” Harrison said. “And that’s where the collapse or the failure really happened, is that they never did that.”
During her sentencing, Corado begged for leniency, admitting she had mishandled some of the $1.3 million loan she received from the federal government, but claiming she meant to invest it into a new shelter for transgender women in El Salvador. Corado said she regrets these decisions now, the Washington Post reported. Corado is from El Salvador and left the country as a teenager to come to the District. Her sentence may result in her deportation, according to the Post.
“I got caught up in my mission to help others. But I am the first one to hold myself accountable,” the Post reported Corado said in court.
Corado and her legal team appealed the sentence the weekend following her conviction.
Casa Ruby was plagued by years of financial issues and irregularities. Despite receiving over $9.6 million in grants from the D.C government between 2016 and 2022, Casa Ruby closed its doors in 2022, according to court documents from a separate case involving Casa Ruby.
According to the court documents, Casa Ruby closed as a result of financial misconduct by Corado, who used Casa Ruby’s funds to benefit herself and her associates, diverting money from programs for homeless youth. During the summer of 2022, investigators with the D.C. attorney general’s office examined the nonprofit’s management, financial oversight, and allegations of improper use of District grants and charitable donations.
“This financial misconduct ultimately resulted in Casa Ruby failing to pay its employees, failing to pay its vendors, and failing to pay rent at the properties it operated from until the time it was evicted, leaving
vulnerable populations unserved,” court documents state.
After Casa Ruby closed its doors in 2022 and the organization’s financial irregularities came to light, Corado sold her home in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and left the country for El Salvador, according to the DOJ release. Corado was arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in March 2024, when she returned to the U.S.
This article originally appeared in Street Sense’s Jan. 28, 2026 edition. It was updated from the print version to include additional information about the Wanda Alston Foundation’s recievership of Casa Ruby.
