On September 1, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell announced $1.15 million in citations against Adult & Teen Challenge Northeast, a Brockton-based Christian residential addiction treatment program.
According to the Attorney General’s Office, men in the organization’s Brockton and Worcester programs were required to work without pay between August 2017 and August 2025. Some were sent to outside for-profit companies through a staffing operation the organization called “Labor Source,” doing landscaping, office cleaning, moving, snow shoveling, and food preparation. Others were required to raise money for the organization, working the phones and soliciting donations outside supermarkets, coffee shops, and other businesses.
Over roughly the same period, 2017 through 2024, the organization reported about $58 million in donations on its federal tax returns.
About $850,000 of the citations is restitution for participants. The rest is penalties to the Commonwealth. The organization’s CEO says it strongly disagrees with the citations and plans to contest them.
The exemption they relied on
Massachusetts minimum wage law does not apply to work performed “by persons being rehabilitated or trained under rehabilitation or training programs in charitable, educational, or religious institutions.” That’s G.L. c. 151, § 2.
Adult & Teen Challenge argued that everything its participants did fell under that exemption, whether or not the work had anything to do with their recovery.
The Department of Labor Standards disagreed. In a June 25, 2025 determination letter, the first of its kind in Massachusetts, the agency looked at whether the work was tied to each participant’s treatment plan, whether it was voluntary, whether it replaced paid workers, and who actually benefited. It found the work was mandatory for everyone regardless of their individual treatment plans, that it displaced work someone else would have been paid to do, and that it benefited the organization and its clients more than the participants.
The agency put it plainly: “If one of TCNE’s clients needs landscaping work or snow shoveling done, the program participants do landscaping or snow shoveling, regardless of whether that task has any rehabilitative benefits for the participant.”
The letter also noted that the organization had stopped its outside labor program after COVID and never restarted it. The agency read that as a sign the program was never really about rehabilitation. If it were, the agency reasoned, the organization would have found a way to bring it back even if it no longer made money.
The chairman who was also the lawyer
Bradford Martin Jr. has chaired the Adult & Teen Challenge board on every tax return the organization has filed since 2013. Its 2024 return lists him as an independent, unpaid director.
He is also an attorney at Fitzgerald Law, P.C. in East Longmeadow. On May 16, 2025, Martin and the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division jointly asked the Department of Labor Standards to decide whether the exemption applied. In that proceeding, the organization took the position that any work done by participants in a rehabilitation program is exempt from the minimum wage, regardless of whether it has any connection to recovery.
The agency rejected that argument, warning that an exemption that broad “risks exploitation of a vulnerable population.”
The public record doesn’t show whether Martin or his firm was paid for that work. The organization’s 2024 return reports no legal fees. The same return lists all ten voting board members as independent, including the organization’s paid president.
The tax return also doesn’t show who decided that residents would work unpaid. The board has legal authority over the organization and sets the president’s pay. Under the Massachusetts Wage Act, a corporation’s president and treasurer are treated as employers and can face personal liability for certain wage violations. A board chair is not automatically in that category. The citations in this case were issued against the organization.
What the tax return shows
Adult & Teen Challenge files a Form 990 with the IRS every year, and those returns are public. The most recent covers 2024 and was filed as an amended return in March 2026. Here is some of what it shows:
- Donations: $5,972,073 in contributions in 2024, and about $58 million from 2017 through 2024.
- Fundraising: The return does not mention residents raising money. The section of the form that asks whether an organization used phone or in-person solicitation was left blank. The organization wasn’t required to complete it, because that section only applies when an organization pays professional fundraisers more than $15,000, and it reported paying none in 2024. Total fundraising expenses were $515,829.
- Work program: The organization reported $3,341,027 in revenue from a “work program,” treated as income related to its charitable purpose. It also reported that residents received more than 295,300 hours of “vocational training.” The return does not explain what the work program revenue consisted of.
- Leadership pay: The president, Rev. Pasco Manzo, received $284,860 in total compensation in 2024: $180,360 in reportable pay plus $104,500 in other compensation. The return indicates the organization provides a housing allowance or residence for personal use.
- Assets: Net assets were $23.7 million at the end of 2024, up from about $8 million at the end of 2016.
Why it matters beyond Brockton
Adult & Teen Challenge Northeast operates centers across New England and New Jersey. It is also part of a national network that claims about 220 residential programs in more than 20 states. The Massachusetts action covers only the Brockton and Worcester men’s programs.
The Massachusetts ruling doesn’t bind other states. But the core question, whether a given task is treatment or a job, comes up anywhere these programs operate. Federal law points the same direction. In Tony & Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor (1985), the U.S. Supreme Court held that people working in a religious foundation’s businesses were employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act, even though they were paid in food, clothing, and shelter rather than wages.
None of this is a judgment about whether faith-based treatment works. The question is narrower: when a program sends people out to shovel a paying client’s parking lot or collect donations outside a grocery store, is that recovery, or is it labor? Massachusetts has now answered that question for the first time.
If you were in a program like this
Being in treatment does not strip you of your rights as a worker. If the work you were required to do was not genuinely part of your rehabilitation, you may be owed wages.
In Massachusetts, the minimum wage is $15 an hour, and most workers are entitled to earned sick time. Workers who sue over wage violations can recover triple damages plus attorney’s fees. There are time limits, generally three years. The Attorney General’s Office has said it will distribute the restitution in this case to affected participants.
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