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As of today, January 4th, the entire staff of HOPE Works have submitted a collective resignation to our Interim Executive Director and Board of Directors. This moment in our journey is filled with so many emotions - sadness, grief, relief, exhaustion, loss, hope, anger, the list goes on…

There will be some who question whether this resignation has negatively affected our ability to enact the changes we have requested to see at our beloved organization. To this we ask that you consider instead how many opportunities the Executive Director, Cathleen Barkley, and Board of Directors have squandered away in the past weeks, months, years to make a different choice.  Their actions, and inactions, have shown us time and again that they do not in fact share the vision we have for building a better organization. They have prioritized the optics of their public relations efforts over the basic humanity requested by staff to engage in a collaborative process. They have demonstrated that they have no intention - nor did they ever - of participating in this work with sincerity, empathy, or integrity.

Central to our message this entire time has been that the majority of staff of HOPE Works are also survivors. We have simply asked to be heard and believed. This experience has been incredibly triggering and upsetting on a number of personal and professional levels and we are so thankful for every community member, service user, and community partner who has reached out to say “I believe you. I hear you. I see you.” Words that are so necessary and lifegiving to hear as survivors of sexual violence. Thank you.


With this choice, we, the former staff of HOPE Works, are choosing to orient towards safety. We are choosing to use our energy to move towards new ways of doing anti-violence work, work that should always center survivors on the margins. We are choosing to no longer spend our energy within an institution that has told us that anti-racist, trans inclusive, and queer ways of doing this work are unacceptable. We are choosing, as survivors of sexual violence, as Black people, Chicanx people, as trans people, as queer people, as mothers to say no to the master’s tools and yes to manifesting new ways of being in this work.

 

We are immensely GRATEFUL in this moment. We are grateful for the unbelievable amount of support, care, empathy, and love extended to us by our community. We are grateful to our community partners that are working so hard to bring accessible and essential services to survivors.  We are grateful for the deep level of connection and solidarity this group of staff feels toward each other. We are grateful to have powerfully chosen to step away from those enacting abuse and oppression. We are grateful to have prioritized our own safety and wellbeing despite efforts to keep us in silence.  We know that when we choose our safety we choose survivor safety.

 

We know that this decision will be received in many ways, and recognize that others in our community may also be experiencing similar myriad emotions in response to our resignation.

 

Please know that our vision for this journey is, and will always remain, in service of a better manifestation of anti-sexual violence work. A vision that includes a safe workplace, accessible to ALL staff and survivors - especially those who have been historically and systematically marginalized in this movement - an organization free from abuse, harm, bias, and toxicity. Thank you for standing with us in this vision.

 

If you want to learn a little about how we got to this point, please read our grievance that we have shared on this page.

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.  --Audre Lorde

Our requests to return to work:

1) Victim-survivor support services resumed by reinstating Lucy Basa as Victim Advocate.

2) Executive Director be removed from her position and our Advocacy Director and/or Associate Director immediately be appointed to protect programs and services.

3) Community and survivor trust in our services and agency reestablished by HOPE Works Board of Directors working with the Vermont Network to ensure that culturally competent, survivor centered community members are appointed.

To support the 9 staff members financially during this work-stoppage:

Gofundme

Our Open Letter to the Community

On December 12th 2018 an employee and invaluable advocate for survivors of sexual violence was singled out and fired unjustly by the HOPE Works Executive Director, in an attempt to intimidate and threaten all staff for speaking out against harmful decision making by organizational leadership. This termination adds to a long pattern of isolating and pushing out numerous staff members in an effort to maintain an oppressive and controlling organizational culture at HOPE Works.

 

Up until this point, the staff at HOPE Works have been able to find ways to support each other and provide empathetic, responsive and survivor driven services, as well as engage in comprehensive coordinated community response work with numerous allied organizational partners. Although this is not an employment resignation by staff, we are sorry to now be in a position to inform all those we wish to work with that HOPE Works’ Executive Director has created an unsafe environment within which we are attempting to do our jobs. We are currently engaged in an all-staff work stoppage.

 

Over the past year it has acutely come to the attention of the staff that our Executive Director (and the Board that supervises her) is at best apathetic and ill-equipped to lead us in carrying out the mission of HOPE Works, and at worst is actively working against a staff comprised almost entirely of survivors, BIPOC, and queer & trans people committed to doing the very best version of this work possible. We have constantly been faced with the question of how to engage in a community accountability process with our ED and Board in a way that doesn’t compromise the trust the community has in our ability to serve survivors. This message is our latest attempt to engage in open, compassionate and accountable communication with all those in the HOPE Works community.

 

The entire staff of HOPE Works is sitting in a lot of fear, sadness, and confusion about being told we are not valued enough to be supported in our work. Words cannot express our deep commitment and dedication to the survivors that we serve. We want to acknowledge the impact that this information will have on survivors, those who have accessed services, and those who have personal relationships with the leadership of HOPE Works. We cannot promise to make the sharing of this information less painful or difficult, but we can promise to continue to support our mission with love, integrity, compassion, openness, and humanity.

 

The timeline for any interruption to our operations you experience is tied to the investigation of complaints filed by HOPE Works staff to the Civil Rights Division of the Office of the Vermont Attorney General, and a formal grievance process conducted by the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. We will know more about how anyone at HOPE Works can proceed once organizational leadership have responded fully to these processes. If you have any questions or thoughts you would like to share here are a few options for whom to contact:

 

HOPE Works Executive Director, Cathleen Barkley: cathleen@hopeworksvt.org

Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence: karents@vtnetwork.org

 

Sincerely,

HOPE Works Staff

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