The Letter

Dear Members of the Board of Directors:

The undersigned represent 50 current and former staff, volunteers, clients, community members, and community partners as well as former board members and fundraisers.

We understand the board has been in very difficult positions over the last several years navigating turbulent situations with revolving leadership. There has been a pattern among recent executives demonstrating qualities and behaviors that are proven to result in negative organizational outcomes. This letter is being written to shed light on how dire the current situation is and to insist on a change of course. Should the current leadership remain in place, the Center is unlikely to survive as a resource in the community after nearly 50 years in existence.

The current executive director, Ellie Perez, as supported by the CFO/Director of HR, Christina Rosales, consistently demonstrates qualities and behaviors of poor management and toxic leadership:

Poor Management

Perhaps the most dangerous concern is Ellie's ignorance and incompetence in management. In her years at the Center, Ellie has yet to spend the time or energy needed to garner a solid understanding of the basic operations of the different departments or the specific roles of individual staff members. There are a wide range of essential activities that must be addressed on a regular basis for an organization to remain in compliance and function appropriately. However, as numerous staff have left due to the toxic leadership, their duties were not well understood, and many of these essential tasks have been left neglected. Staff members who have already been forced to do untenable amounts of work due to leadership's naivety, are then asked to take over the roles of staff who have quit or who've been shortsightedly "let-go". This has led to crippling and unsustainable conditions where staff burn out, and critical operational responsibilities fall through the cracks.

Manager meetings have no agenda, and all-staff meetings are directionless and unproductive. There is abundant disorganization at the top with poor planning, last-minute arrangements, poor workflows, poor book-keeping, misappropriation of funds, and poor communication—all of which have led to misunderstandings around expectations, late payments, double-booking of spaces, and last-minute cancellations. This leaves staff, clients, and community members feeling yanked around, lied to, frustrated, and disrespected.

The mistreatment of clients and community partners along with an ever-darkening reputation has resulted in refusal by some to do business with the Center. Their incompetence in oversight, finance, grant responsibilities, and overall management has led to the loss of partnerships, fundraisers, donors, and grantors. Ellie's lack of knowledge about the Center and her poor communication skills shine through awkwardly in her inability to answer direct questions from government representatives or other potential benefactors making new partnerships difficult to form.

Toxic Leadership

Hostility and Abuse: Ellie has demonstrated verbal and nonverbal hostile behaviors — including intimidation, threatening, shouting, public humiliation, belittling, judging, dismissing, and mood-driven volatility. She has been condescending to subordinates and is prone to passive-aggressive remarks and tactics.

Defensiveness: Suggestions, feedback, and respectful disagreement have been consistently met with defensiveness, immediate pushback, and threats—not only toward staff but also toward clients and community partners. Productive dialogue and collaboration have been repeatedly shut down. Her behaviors have fostered an environment where leadership cannot be questioned, and mistakes cannot be openly discussed or learned from.

Controlling and Domineering Conduct: Ellie has demanded approval for decisions that would typically be made by staff or managers despite her lack of awareness of basic operational needs. She consistently signals distrust and exerts reflexive opposition to the suggestions of others regardless of their expertise, demonstrating negativism and psychological reactance. She has also repeatedly changed job expectations selectively to cause undue hardship for individuals with whom she's had tension. When asked by a community member she'd offended who her supervisor was, she responded with "I'm my own boss."

Fabricating Offenses and Blaming: Ellie has been quick to blame others for perceived missteps with limited evidence, and the reactions have been punitive rather than solution oriented. Her strategy has been to shoot first and ask questions later or never. She has often sought to find errors with the work of others, exaggerated wrong-doing, and where there were no wrongs, she has manufactured accusations.

Gaslighting and Reality Distortion: When Ellie has been proven wrong in her initial accusations, she has insisted her concerns were something different, then doubled down on those new assertions. She has announced decisions only to later backtrack and deny the original statements were ever made. She has made statements telling staff they can come to her for anything but will be condescending and visibly irritated when staff come to her in person.

Withholding Recognition: As staff, volunteers, and community partners have gone above and beyond to pour their time, passion, energy, and expertise into the projects and programs keeping the Center alive, they are deeply valued among their colleagues, but their efforts go largely unnoticed or unappreciated by leadership. Recognition is often replaced with criticism of perceived missteps. In the occasions where recognition has been offered by leadership, the delivery has come across as disingenuous and hollow, and subsequent actions have suggested alternative feelings.

Disregard: Various approved initiatives which were heavily poured into by different staff or community partners were ultimately ignored. There has been a lack of follow-through disconnecting Ellie's words from her actions.

Her interpersonal verbal communication skills are lacking, and she has relied heavily on AI/GPT for her email and written communications making her seem uncaring and out of touch in her work relationships.

She shows disregard for her employee's wellbeing and has made statements that work-life balance should not be a consideration when planning trainings or schedule changes.

Bigotry and Discrimination: Bigotry is defined as "prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group". Ellie has demonstrated this in the form of ageist, classist, racist, anti-ally, and anti-effeminate demeaning and belittling comments as well as unequal treatment of individuals seemingly on these bases. She has actively worked against the acceptance of non-disruptive unhoused community members and has made disparaging comments seeming aloof to the correlation between queerness and the risk of housing insecurity.

Favoritism, Unfairness, and Hypocrisy: Rules, criticisms, and recognition have been applied selectively. For example, Ellie has insisted without evidence that some employees cannot be trusted to complete their work from home, while others, including herself or a few in her inner circle are free to do so. She has taken offense to certain attire worn by certain staff, but excused the same attire worn by others. In public announcements, she has called out thanks and recognition for some people involved in a project while excluding individuals who had greater contribution, but who she does not value.

Tone Deafness: Ellie's main concern in her limited interactions with staff is control, but she asserts without any depth of knowledge for what she is controlling or how it operates. Therefore, her decisions and task requests have been tone-deaf and out of line with the priorities of the departments resulting in dysfunction. She has hyper-fixated and inflated minor concerns such as subjective tidying concerns, where items are placed or stored, staff clothes and accessories, etc. to staff members who are performing the workloads of 3-5 people balancing significantly more critical priorities.

Ellie has had a counter-productive fixation on her subjective view of "professional" attire. She subscribes to stereotypes rooted in problematic cultural elitism that restricts personal expression, results in physical discomfort, and imposes a financial burden on staff. This fixation is tone-deaf in an LGBTQ Center where personal expression of staff should be normalized to foster an inclusive, warm, safe, and welcoming environment for all LGBTQ+ community members.

Inhospitality Toward the Community: Over the years Ellie has overseen a shift in the identity of the Center. Events and programs that elevated marginalized and underserved communities were dropped or allowed to expire. She has contributed to a severe lack of focus or intention to create programming to uplift those who are most in need. In contrast, Ellie has worked to expel and disenfranchise the unhoused and has been inhospitable to the youth, their families, and other system-affected members.

Many parents of trans children felt Ellie's treatment of them was demeaning and disrespectful. She also worked in various ways to downgrade the Center's support of these families. Instead of working together to navigate a path forward, address concerns, and find solutions—offers for collaboration were dismissed. Trans kids and their families need to be embraced and defended now more than ever. The Center should be the first place where they can find support, but they were made to feel the Center is no longer a welcoming and safe place for their families as long as its current leadership remains unchanged.

Divisiveness and Ill Intention: Departments and staff have been systematically isolated and efforts to improve cohesion have been denied. Staff who raised constructive suggestions or concerns, were treated as troublemakers, and ultimately "let go". The mishandling of firings has resulted in significant harm to staff and vulnerable clients. There is concern that the timing and approach to "letting go" individuals was not just negligent, but intentionally cruel. Based on the repeated nature, poor rationale for approaches, along with witnessed events and tensions leading up to firings, there is concern that these were not just handled poorly but were intentionally conducted out of spite, malice, and discrimination.

Multiple attempts were made to communicate with Ellie and Christina the direness of the situation and offer an opportunity for positive change. The proposal was initially rebutted with Ellie stating, "It's not my job to spread cheer". Then any efforts towards meaningful change were short-lived, and toxic behaviors have resumed.

Ellie's involvement in the "safe spaces" initiative has been ironic as she has been actively creating unsafe spaces for queer people. One former staff member described it like this:

"On its own, the stickers and statements are a welcome sight to those seeking safe spaces in a world becoming increasingly hostile towards the LGBTQ+ community, but underneath that honorable veneer lies a level of abuse that has caused many who have been hurt by Ellie's bullying to have a visceral reaction, causing us to feel as though businesses that display those stickers are anything but a place where we are welcome."

Despite Ellie's continued abusive conduct, many have found it impossible to come forward with their grievances. Grievances are typically handled through an organization's human resources. Christina Rosales is the sole individual at the Center appointed with HR responsibilities and is known to be a close friend of Ellie's. She is also implicated in the same behaviors of defensiveness, poor judgement, lack of transparency, blaming, leading with negative assumptions, hypocrisy, and tone-deaf poor management decisions. When Christina, as our CFO/Director of HR, was asked about the policy or protocol to formally provide management and upper management with feedback, she admitted there did not seem to be a formal policy. She assured that she would talk with Ellie and look into it. That was in 2024, and this has yet to be addressed.

The Impact

Ellie's conduct has been textbook toxic leadership, and we know from the literature that toxic leadership produces psychological distress, burnout, PTSD, anxiety, depression, cardiovascular problems, sleep disruption, suicidal ideation, absenteeism, high turnover, loss of institutional knowledge, brand damage, reduced productivity, loss of organizational commitment, negative growth, and organizational collapse. We have seen all of these devastating impacts just short of collapse.

To the physical and mental health effects, many have been made ill with complaints of headaches, nausea, abdominal pain, tremors, chest pain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and mental breakdowns as a result of their treatment by Ellie and the toxic environment created at the Center. Many have had to seek therapy, and we have clearly seen high absenteeism, dramatically high turn-over, detachment from the mission, and negative growth as a direct result of her leadership.

For many LGBTQ+ staff, clients, and volunteers, the Center was meant to be a refuge — a place of belonging after years of abuse, bullying, discrimination, and rejection from an unaccepting world. Instead, they found the same harm, from the very leadership entrusted to protect them. This has been a profound betrayal of the very people this organization exists to protect.

What We Know About Effective Leadership

Many letters and grievances have already been submitted by numerous individuals to the board, Insperity, government representatives, commission and chamber representatives, journalists, and lawyers. Articles were written and serious red flags were raised about Ellie's toxic qualities prior to her official designation as executive director. It is extremely unfortunate that these were not taken seriously to avoid the situation we are in today.

The vast majority involved in the writing and signing of this letter were not involved in the previous initiatives, and many were unaware of the previous articles written to highlight Ellie's dangerous and inadequate approach to leadership. The statements of the previous articles and letters are verified by our collective personal experiences.

Ellie must be replaced as executive director.

This has been a déjà vu. So how do we avoid another?

We need to be intentional in our choice of successor. We must be resolute in appointing an executive director with positive leadership virtues. Research has shown us what qualities are vital to foster a thriving organization. These include integrity, compassion/empathy, humility, listening, strong communication, vision, gratitude, open-mindedness, kindness, adaptability, empowerment, self-awareness, optimism, courage, engagement, accountability, inclusivity and shared governance. Being an effective leader demands a higher degree of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and intellectual intelligence. Effective Leaders motivate and inspire, foster trust, and lead by example.

One study proved the highest performing teams are the ones with the greatest psychological safety who felt comfortable expressing their thoughts and ideas openly.

A major meta-analysis comparing all modern leadership forms found that servant leadership accounted for the largest proportion of positive organizational outcomes and produced profound trust, commitment, satisfaction, engagement, and productivity among employees. The defining feature of a servant leader is prioritizing the growth and wellbeing of their team and clients over their own interests.

The result of effective leadership is retainment of talent and inspiring more productive staff. It generates commitment from organizational members which results in a sense of shared purpose. These leaders work to bring about transformation by generating visions, missions, goals, and a culture with strong values allowing the organization to serve its purpose to the highest degree.

We are collectively demanding this change in leadership and direction.

Once the torch has been passed, the transition in leadership could be a powerful opportunity to re-introduce the Center to the community. We should apologize for past mistakes and commit to meaningful change that re-prioritizes the populations that need us most. In both word and action, we could prove integrity, competence, and compassion. This could be a meaningful chance to repair our reputation with partners, funders, clients and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. Moving forward, the Center could be a place where all community members feel welcome, safe, and supported.