Drive Clean Indiana: Archetype of the Populist “NGO”

Drive Clean Indiana (DCI), also previously known as South Shore Clean Cities, is a smallish nonprofit based out of St. John, Indiana, that touts itself as a champion of green transportation. The organization is the only Indiana member of the Clean Cities Coalition, a program of the Department of Energy established in the 1990s to subsidize the alternative fuels industry by giving a handful of qualifying regional nonprofit coalitions large government grants that they can hand out to help local governments, businesses, airports, and so forth to replace diesel and gas fleet vehicles with “cleaner” alternatives.

As a member of the Clean Cities Coalition, DCI has distributed grants ranging from $100,000 to $1,000,000 to help all sorts of companies—from mega-corporations like Delta and BP to smaller family businesses like Ozinga Concrete and Pitt Ohio—purchase propane and electric-powered equipment to replace older diesel models. The family business that DCI seems to have helped the most, though, is its own.

Legacy Environmental Services

In 2023, DCI reported total annual expenses of just over $2.4 million. Payments to a management company called Legacy Environmental Services accounted for $673,349, just over one-fourth of all expenses. Legacy Environmental Services (LES) isn’t just any management company though. LES is a “full-service environmental consulting firm” owned by Carl Lisek, executive director of DCI, and his wife Lorie Lisek, a member of DCI’s executive leadership. The LES website shows that the firm also employs Ryan Lisek and Kyle Lisek, Carl and Lorie’s sons, alongside three junior employees outside the family.

Since 2011, DCI tax forms show that LES has been paid roughly $5.3 million in management fees to run the nonprofit. The LES website also shows that the company is contracted to manage Wisconsin Clean Cities, another nonprofit member of the Clean Cities program that has received numerous large federal grants. Wisconsin Clean Cities tax forms show that it has paid LES $2.1 million in management fees since 2011. That means, since 2011, LES and the Lisek family have raked in $7.4 million in revenue from the Clean Cities program. Since 2021 LES, with its seven employees (four of them Liseks), has been pulling down roughly $900,000 per year in consulting fees from just those two nonprofits.

Now, it’s important to clarify that using a privately owned management firm to run a nonprofit is neither uncommon nor illegal. Many nonprofits use this arrangement to make bookkeeping and payroll easier, but the ones that do are often heavily scrutinized for it, and rightly so. It’s an opaque structure that allows management to avoid disclosing how much they are paying themselves out of the nonprofit’s coffers. And nonprofits, especially those funded largely by tax dollars, are supposed to be transparent on personal benefits and salary. It’s also important to say that the DCI and Wisconsin Clean Cities are careful to disclose on their Form 990s that Carl and Lisa own the firm and to clarify that the board of directors is ultimately in charge of approving all fees paid to LES. They’re not hiding it.

Undisclosed Relationships

What the Form 990 does not disclose is that LES has repeatedly been hired as consultants by several companies that then received DCI grants.

For example, the LES website makes a great deal of the firm’s relationship with a company called Ozinga Concrete. The website lists Ozinga as a client, saying:

Legacy Environmental Services has a long-standing relationship with Ozinga, through our work with Legacy as well as Drive Clean Indiana and Wisconsin Clean Cities. Through grant writing and acquisition, Legacy has assisted Ozinga in its quest to convert its fleet of 500 heavy-duty ready mix concrete trucks in multiple locations from diesel to compressed natural gas and to expand its compressed natural gas business.

In 2023, DCI granted Ozinga Ready Mix Inc. $423,742 to buy new cleaner equipment, most likely for one or more of the 500 concrete mixers LES bragged about helping them obtain. The arrangement seems to be, Ozinga paid LES to consult on “grant writing,” submitted the grant request to a nonprofit run by the same firm that wrote it, and viola, the grant was approved. The real kicker, though, is that Rich DeBoer, executive vice president of Ozinga, is listed as a board member at DCI, the same nonprofit that gave his company $423,742. The financial relationships between LES and Ozinga or between DeBoer and Ozinga are not disclosed in the conflicts-of-interest section or anywhere else in the 2023 Form 990.

Other Associations

Also listed as a grantee on DCI’s 2023 Form 990 is Freight Equipment Leasing LLC. This company received a $215,249 grant but no address, tax ID number, or other identifying information was provided—only a vague name. A search of the INBiz Indiana corporate registry shows that a company by that name is registered to Robert E. Taylor of Pittsburgh, who is the treasurer of a trucking company called Pitt Ohio.

The evidence strongly suggests that Pitt Ohio has also retained the consulting services of the Lisek family. First, Pitt Ohio is a dues paying member of DCI. DCI sells membership subscriptions to companies looking to improve their ESG scores and learn more about obtaining and maintaining green fleet vehicles. A diamond-level membership is $10,000 a year, platinum is $5,000, gold is $3,500, and so-on down to associate membership for just $500 per year.

“Let us assist with your Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Strategy,” the membership application reads. These dues, presumably, help pad the hefty fees paid to LES, and Pitt Ohio is listed as a platinum member. Pitt Ohio was also recently named one of the top “green fleets” in the nation by Heavy Duty Trucking magazine in 2023. Ryan Lisek nominated the company for the award. Finally, Pitt Ohio was also announced as the recipient of a further $266,960 grant as part of another large wave of grants from DCI in 2024. Included in that round of grants were $965,466 for Lafeyette Limo, a platinum member of DCI, and several large grants to entities affiliated with the city of Gary Indiana, a bronze member.

Drive Clean Indiana as an Archetype

A cynical person might look at the situation and conclude that DCI is offering choice consideration for piles of government grant money to companies that have paid money (directly or indirectly) to the consulting firm of the executive director and his family. A more trusting person might conclude that the grant-writing and consulting services LES offers clients are standard practice in the small industry that has blossomed at the intersection of the nonprofit and government sectors and that nothing untoward is happening. Without more evidence, making any direct allegations would be irresponsible, but the appearance of impropriety is a problem, and it’s a common problem among nonprofits funded by the government.

The story of DCI and the Lisek family illustrates the reasons for the growing distrust of the nonprofit sector. Much of the current populist sentiment against nonprofits comes from distrust of nongovernment organizations (NGOs) as they are frequently, and over-broadly labeled online. There is no concrete definition of “NGO,” but it is typically used to identify any nonprofit that regularly receives a substantial portion of its funding from the federal government. Hatred for them is so diffuse in the online populist movement that “NGOs” has rapidly become one of those workhorse terms for anonymous villains such as “the Man,” “the system,” and the ever popular “they.”

DCI is a remarkable case study because it readily displays almost every trait of the besuited NGO archetype that has come to be so hated.

First, NGOs are usually nonprofits funded generously by the government. Obviously, DCI checks that box. But DCI is more than just government-funded, it is also indirectly the product of a specific piece of legislation or regulation (the Clean Cities Coalition) that outsourced work desired by the government to a nonprofit whose sole purpose seems to be performing that work. The outsourcing of government work seems to be the core characteristic of, and grievance against, NGOs. If an outside organization must be created specifically to accomplish a thing, such as handing out federal grant money to other groups, then why not just do the thing in-house, many ask?

The answer to that question is the heart of the populist objection to NGOs, more than even suspected fraud and self-dealing. Some will answer that the government is using NGOs to secretly do things it can’t be seen to do itself, like censoring U.S. citizens or toppling foreign regimes. Others answer that government employees and legislators like to outsource government work to NGOs because it becomes less transparent and easier to launder the money back to themselves or their friends. Still others answer that NGOs are being used to give other donors to the nonprofit—the name or George Soros is most often invoked—insight and influence over the use of government resources. All the other objections to NGOs seem to come downstream from the implied belief that outsourcing work to nonprofits diminishes the people’s control over the government and its money, and that this outsourcing should be avoided.

DCI is the perfect example of pointless NGO outsourcing. It seems to exist solely to be the middleman for handing out government grants. It didn’t exist independently at first and then take on the role of middleman as the occasion arose. It was created in 1999 specifically because the Clean Cities Coalition program existed, and it had no organizations in the state of Indiana to receive the grants.

The second reason people hate NGOs is because there is a popular belief that they are often used as money-harvesting devices for the wealthy and well connected. This is where the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) mantra of “waste, fraud, and abuse” comes in. A lot of this hatred is based on rampant speculation that hundreds of NGOs are using daisy chains of enormous complexity to launder government cash into the pockets of politicians, bureaucrats, and billionaires at a massive scale.

A nearly equal amount of the hatred stems from the evidence of Form 990s that have gone viral online showing immigration resettlement groups, universities, homelessness nonprofits, and “community organizing” groups paying dozens of staffers with incomprehensible titles hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. DCI showcases that perfectly. The Liseks appear to be leveraging their control of government grant money to extract consulting and membership fees from companies looking to cash in while raising their ESG scores, and then there’s the size of the consulting fees being paid to the family office. From 2020 to 2033, the fees paid by DCI have been between $510,000 and $740,000 every year, while the fees from Wisconsin Clean Cities have been between $150,000 and $230,000 for a combined average of just over $800,000 per year for four years. Whatever way you slice up the overhead and expenses, $800,000 per year for a consulting firm leaves room for a comfortably large salary for each of the Liseks, especially in Indiana.

The third reason people loathe NGOs is because they are commonly understood to be doing things that are wasteful or frivolous, usually in a leftward direction. The horror-figure of the NGO that is often invoked in online diatribes is often a cold money-hungry sociopath, but sometimes it is a bleeding-heart liberal that foolishly throws money to anyone that will wave a rainbow flag or hug a tree. This impression of NGOs is reinforced by the insane grant descriptions that pundits and congressmen are so fond of reading out with raised eyebrows in viral videos. Transgender operas in Colombia, Arabic translations of Sesame Street, equitable electric vehicle charging stations—these are the realm of the bipolar NGO just as much as brutally efficient money laundering and global domination. Sometimes, though, the NGO is a mix of both, and DCI epitomizes this most loathed form of the amorphous villain. While the executive director and his family appear to cash in by callously helping corporations boost their ESG scores for fees, they also boast about their participation in programs such as:

• “Empower workplace charging,” which “promotes workplace charging for electric vehicles (EVs) while prioritizing equity and inclusivity,” and
• The “GOVEIN: Close the Gap Tour, — a multi-stop roadshow dedicated to building awareness and support for expanding electric vehicle charging infrastructure across Indiana.”

While the group stops short of the climate-hawkishness that is in vogue among so many other advocacy groups, most people wouldn’t consider DCI’s work a common sense or politically neutral use of government funds. It appears to be motivated by both silly left-leaning virtue signaling and grifting cronyism, and that makes it the perfect model of the NGO.

Defining NGO

Drive Clean Indiana exhibits everything that populist social media pundits and armchair investigators mean when they say “NGO.” It’s not a terribly important organization in the grand scheme of things, but it is an amazing case study that can give some form to a very ill-defined term with very specific and often contradictory connotations. NGO was not a political term of art even a year ago, but it surged in popularity as DOGE began its work in February 2025, and a great many people were probably left in the lurch trying to figure out what the talking heads really mean when they say “NGO.”

For a definition, start by looking at the Drive Clean Indiana.