Email from Kiona, HOPE Works Advocacy Services Director, to the Chittenden Advocacy committee on December 18th:
To my colleagues, fellow advocates and friends,
I am writing to you from my personal email address since I am committed to the work stoppage of all HOPE Works staff, and because I no longer have access to my HOPE Works email account, but I do believe you deserve a follow up email from HOPE Works staff.
I am writing to you as an advocate, who has committed almost a decade of my life to HOPE Works and the survivors that we serve.
Most importantly, however, I am writing to you in a fully human way and hoping that you will be able to receive this message as something highly imperfect yet highly imperative; not just to me, but to all of us as a network of advocates and support providers working to create the community within which we want to live.
It will come as no surprise to those of you who know me and how I do my work, that I have a mountain of thoughts and opinions I want to share and that it has been extremely difficult to be limited in my conversations with every one of you about what has been going on at my organization. It has been very painful to watch the ways in which, by opting out of untenable working conditions (which I feel very fortunately to be able to do,) I am also opting out of some critical opportunities for direct, transparent and open communication.
There is no doubt the task force and the advocacy committee members would like to have that as little harm come to survivors of sexual violence as possible. My hope is that the tenor of any conversation about meeting at/with HOPE Works to achieve this goal would only be one of extreme concern for how to wrap around the advocates/survivors who have been so harmed by their leadership that they can no longer participate in the coordinated community response work that have been the life force of for years.
I know everyone can only operate on the information that they have, and since I am not in a position to give more information outside of a very intentional and collective timeline, I am going to do something deeply vulnerable, as opposed to “professional,” ask you to just trust me.
Trust me that when I (me, Kiona) say that I had to literally walk out of my work, that I love, and risk losing my connection to HOPE Works permanently, because of the controlling and manipulative tactics of my organizational leadership, that I am not doing so frivolously, self-righteously, or stupidly. Trust me when I say that I have gotten to this point only after months and months of deeply patient and compassionate direct appeals for change and support from organizational leadership, only to be met with intimidation, minimization and direct threats.
Trust me when I say that HOPE Works staff are on the right side of history in this moment, and I implore you to be with us if you can.
I have been so grateful for the individual reach outs many of you have sent. I know it is a risk to even show the slightest public support to the side with the least institutional power. I deeply respect all of your choices about how to or not to address this whole thing with me. And what I ask is that, if possible, you keep this question at the forefront of any engagement with HOPE Works going forward from today: How it can be that an entire staff of brilliant and dedicated advocates can, in complete collective unison, say that great amounts of harm is happening in the shadows of their organization and that they are willing to risk their livelihoods to shed light on the situation?
If you can ask that question in every room you’re in that’s even remotely connected your collaborative work with HOPE Works, you will be a adding an essential support energy to a narrative that some would rather silence.
Please reach out to me if that would be helpful or if you have questions. Please avoid doing so if it feels too risky or fatiguing. I’m down for any of it.
And thanks so much,
Kiona
Email from Kiona, HOPE Works Advocacy Services Director, to the Chittenden Advocacy committee on December 26:
Sending this updated to keep folks in the loop. I am sad that I don’t have better news to report...
The entire staff desperately wants to come back to work and live out the version of HOPE Works that the community is asking for.
The entire staff is also prepared, as painful as it may be, to walk away from HOPE Works if it means walking away from a place that selectively disregards the needs of survivors and completely devalues the work of its staff.
It is simply not that case that all 9 of the 9 people who work with our current executive director, and who show up day in and day out to hold the pain and trauma of others, are in complete collective agreement about her harmful and increasingly ineffective style of leadership and are making their experiences up.
These conflicts began as conversations about how to be more inclusive of queer and trans survivors, how to be more validating of black and brown survivors, how to be accessible to poor and working class survivors. These conflicts began as conversations about how to sustain the wellbeing of an increasingly diverse and dynamic and talented workforce, bringing important and often overlooked perspectives and lived experiences to our organization.
These conversations ended, first with our executive director and then with our Board, in devastating manifestations of the racism, classism, queerphobia and other oppressions that we, as a staff, are committed to uprooting from the sexual violence movement.
There absolutely is a place for direct, compassionate, and honest accountability work to happen within our agency. Every attempt by staff to practice this kind of accountability work over the last year has been met with defensiveness, dismissal, lies, and threats to our livelihoods if we do not stay silent.
And while so much of this has come as a surprise to you all, I can share that almost three months ago HOPE Works staff sat in a room with their Board and executive director and asked them how they were going to reconcile the level of harm and toxic control staff was experiencing. The response was the same one you are receiving now: they told us everything seemed fine from their perspective and that they would stand behind their executive director no matter what we said was happening. At that meeting I can remember saying directly to the Board that the situation was untenable and that staff were getting to the tipping point of what they could bear. After that meeting we received an email from the Board saying not to contact them about these issues any more.
It has been very painful to see the recent messages and press releases coming from the HOPE Works Board, (who are by their own account completely out of touch with our work,) saying that we have simultaneously conducted ourselves in rash and unthinking ways that abandoned survivors, and also that services are somehow still uninterrupted. I wonder if they would feel comfortable telling that to the survivor that I shared a deeply heartbroken and empathetic but understanding look with as I walked by her in the hospital last Friday. Or to the frantic call center operators leaving messages on staffs cell phones as a last ditch effort to keep survivor calls from going unanswered on the hotline. It is an agonizing time for all of us, and conveying that everything is fine is a further example of how little value for our work our leadership has. Everything is not fine.
But we are not abandoning survivors by deciding to tell the truth to those who have power over us, or by choosing to care for ourselves in order to care for others. We are in fact doing the opposite, and living out the ideals and goals we share with survivors everyday. The survivors and community partners who know our work know that we would not be here in this moment if it were unwarranted. It has been a life giving experience to hear from them (you) and receive their (your) support throughout all this.
At this point we have unfortunately not heard from HOPE Works leadership about when they will make it possible for us to return to work. A number of options for doing so have been put forward by us and the Vermont Network about how to get going, but so far none have been accepted. They do not seem to share the level of urgency we have for resuming our services to the fullest extent.
Please feel free to touch base with me if needed. And thank you thank you thank you for all of your support and kind words and willingness to ask questions throughout all of this.
I hope folks are getting in some holiday and end of year cheer this week, I know I’ve enjoyed a bit of unplugging with family and friends.
Thanks again for all of it,
Kiona