public statement<\/a>. Fallon\u2019s attorney sent another cease-and-desist letter, this time to to the Sierra Club, demanding\u00a0that it remove references to Fallon. The Sierra Club declined to do so.<\/p>\n\nSeveral members of the Iowa chapter\u2019s volunteer executive committee\u00a0pushed back on\u00a0the Sierra Club\u2019s decision to cut ties. At least two committee members resigned in protest because they thought Fallon\u2019s denials had been\u00a0insufficiently considered and that the Sierra Club had failed to communicate with the\u00a0committee effectively.<\/p>\n
The toll the process took on Pearson\u2019s mental health led her to leave her position at the Sierra Club in the spring of 2020. She told The Intercept, \u201cIt\u2019s incredibly important for organizations to do everything in their power to make spaces safe for the volunteers and the employees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cruz said that the organization\u2019s response to Pearson\u2019s complaint would have been improved by reforms now being enacted. As for the volunteer committee members that left in the wake of the dustup, Cruz said generally that dissent against some moves was inevitable. \u201cWe know we will lose some people who feel threatened by reforms within the organization,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are not making these changes in order to drive people away, but we fully recognize it may happen as a consequence of Sierra Club standing firm in our values and committing to build a safer, more fulfilling organization for our staff and volunteers.\u201d<\/p>\n
New Tensions in an Old System<\/h3>\n
The Sierra Club\u2019s volunteer leadership system, with its roots in Muir\u2019s era, helped to create rifts that divided the organization internally along racial, gender, and generational lines.<\/p>\n
In the organization\u2019s structure, each state has one or more chapters, whose staff is overseen by a powerful, agenda-setting all-volunteer executive committee elected by dues-paying members. Because the committee roles are unpaid and a person must be a dues-paying member to fill them, the executive committees are most welcoming to people with money and time to spare, including, according to staff and volunteers interviewed, a disproportionate number of white retirees. At times, the older, white volunteers\u2019 environmental commitments differ from a movement that is shifting toward a focus on environmental justice.<\/p>\n
Disagreements over issues like mission orientation and diversity in the Sierra Clubs arose in various chapters in recent years. In one instance, a Colorado chapter was riven by disagreements over the disparity of power along gender lines, and recriminations followed. Following a lengthy investigation, several volunteers were suspended. The moves did not come quickly enough to prevent those who had raised the issues from resigning in frustration. Cruz touted the Club\u2019s accountability moves but acknowledged that the process had taken too long. He said policies were being put in place to speed up such inquiries.<\/p>\n
Other tensions have emerged inside the organization over racial and ethnic dynamics. The Sierra Club has disproportionately lost staffers of color. A retention study put out by the group in 2017, following pressure from staff, showed that on average 19 percent of people of color employed by the Sierra Club each year between 2011 and 2015 left the organization that same year, compared to a turnover rate of 15 percent for white\u00a0staff. The difference was even starker for Black employees, who had an average turnover rate of 23 percent. The number of Indigenous people employed by the organization was so small that the turnover rate meant little at all. The Sierra Club has not shared updated data with employees.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery single thing, in my view, that Sierra Club has done in service of their Black and brown employees was hard fought by the union.”<\/blockquote>\nIn interviews with The Intercept, former employees of color said that Sierra Club policies failed to sufficiently addressed tensions. Instead, staffers turned to the Club\u2019s employee union. \u201cEvery single thing, in my view, that Sierra Club has done in service of their Black and brown employees was hard fought by the union,\u201d said Forster. The union, which had\u00a0officially been called the John Muir Local 100,\u00a0jettisoned\u00a0the founder’s\u00a0name three years before the wider Sierra Club.<\/p>\n
Larry Williams, who is Black and the former union president, said the union intervened when bias complaints were ineffectively\u00a0handled. The executive summary of the Ramona Strategies report noted the pattern: \u201cFeedback indicated that even well-known misdeeds of certain individuals have both historically and currently been overlooked, minimized, or tolerated because of their contributions to the organization or the movement.\u201d The report authors also noted that in some cases \u201cbad actors actively took steps to punish those who complained or otherwise assisted in bringing concerns about their conduct to the fore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams, who left the Sierra Club three months ago feeling that he had no room for advancement, told The Intercept that he faced such consequences. \u201cI and others have been demonized and suffered a lot of blowback for speaking up about things,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause of that, my career was railroaded at the Sierra Club.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cruz acknowledged a lack of trust between management and the union and said policies were being put in place to improve the situation. He said retaliation would not be tolerated. \u201cWe have a strong policy that does not allow retaliation for participation in the union,\u201d Cruz said. \u201cIf people feel they are being retaliated against for participating in the union, we need to know about it immediately in order to address it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cruz said that among other changes, the Sierra Club is already making moves to significantly increase its human resources staff and develop a new conflict resolution team. Volunteer leaders will no longer manage any staff, he said, pledging that the organization will communicate better with staff. \u201cSierra Club leadership has been and will continue to be committed to doing the hard work to acknowledge and address systemic injustice inside and outside of our organization,\u201d he said. \u201cThat transformation is also reflected in our work internally to build a more inclusive workplace and organization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brune, the outgoing executive director, said he was proud of the work he had done at the Sierra Club, but acknowledged that more\u00a0was needed to improve the company\u2019s culture \u2014 something he said the incoming leadership would address. \u201cThe Sierra Club is a nearly 130-year old, white legacy organization that is in the middle of a transformation to become more equitable and just,\u201d he said in a statement to The Intercept. \u201cThe progress that we’ve made has been both significant and insufficient \u2014 there’s so much more to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The post Sierra Club Executive Director Resigns Amid Upheaval Around Race, Gender, and Abuses<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n\nThis post was originally published on The Intercept<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The century-old environmental giant is trying to deal with its failures and the changing times, according to an internal report.<\/p>\n
The post Sierra Club Executive Director Resigns Amid Upheaval Around Race, Gender, and Abuses<\/a> appeared first on The Intercept<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":206,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[393,118],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281244"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/206"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":281564,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281244\/revisions\/281564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}