First and foremost, I want to say I don’t want people read this as an inditement of one person or even several people. I want people to read this and follow me on a path towards solutions for what our community needs and how systems have failed us. I think often people can read essays about organizations and get really riled up against said organization and fail to push further to ask, how does this happen and what do we do?

This post is about my experience working at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. It is a meditation on grief and distrust in the non-profit system to do what our communities need.

“Something feels off,” I said to my friend when asked how my interview at the center went. I was interviewed by the founder of the center and another soon-to-be colleague. I wish I could tell you now, exactly what felt off but overall the tone felt colder than my other interviews. I was interviewing at a few organizations in the valley. And despite the gut feeling, when the executive director called me to offer me the job I felt compelled to accept it right away. I had been driving to a partner’s house and on the side of the highway I cried with joy.

For years I had dreamed of working at an LGBT center. After college, I applied at William Way and the Mazzoni Center but had never gotten offered a job or made it far in the interview process. I told the executive director on the phone, “This is what I’ve always wanted.” I can tell you now today, it is only what I thought I wanted. From that moment forward, I put my whole self into this organization.

I was over-joyed to start at the center and so I didn’t know how to feel when, on my first day on the job there was an over-two-hour long pride festival debrief meeting in which employees expressed frustration, hurt, and pain about how they were treated on the day of that year’s Pride festival. Apologies were made by leadership and so I convinced myself “they’re going to do better” and “this is a one-time thing.”

Quickly, I learned that wasn’t true. Slowly, in the coming months, my co-workers started to share more of their experiences with what they felt was sexism, racism, bullying, ableism, transphobia, and an overall toxic work environment stemming from multiple directions. I learned more and more information I found troubling about the center and the power it holds in the community.

Throughout this essay I will at many times not be as specific as I want to be because our community is small and giving too many details people would very easily be able to tell who and what I’m talking about. I know this is frustrating because vague claims can feel untrue. In the end, these are my perceptions. I’m sure there are a wide variety of perspectives on everything I talk about. It’s also less about one action than it is about the sum of them.

Besides internally, I struggled externally as someone who was a key point of contact with community members in my former role as Supportive Services Coordinator. I had community members call me when they were homeless. When they couldn’t afford meals. When they were scared and lonely. To those asks, I tried my best to respond but found little resources I could give folks. The Lehigh Valley does not have enough resources. The few organizations who do this work are overworked and underpaid and furthermore, under resourced. Then, the center had really very little material things to offer. People in charge of me at the center would tell me “There’s nothing we can do” and to keep “sharing resources.”

It just feels incredibly insulting to a person who’s unhoused and trans to send them the numbers of some shelters, knowing full well that those shelters don’t have openings and most of the shelters won’t be safe for a trans person. On my own, I tried to work harder. I tried to learn best practices for 211 calls and how to help people articulate the gravity of their situations.

I am someone who has been homeless. I have lived out of a car and in parks. I cannot imagine in that situation, someone working for a million-dollar organization telling me that organization had nothing to give me, especially an organization claiming to represent my identity.

As queer folks we know full well our community is suffering. We need our rent paid. We need food. We need help with medical care. We need money. We need economic justice. Instead, organizations like the center meet that need with programs that either give people hoops to jump through to get a small amount of money or do not pay them at all. I think there is definitely value to what is organized by the center, but I don’t think it addresses the biggest issues impacting our community.

It’s even more complicated because this is what the nonprofit industrial complex calls on us to do. Donors don’t want to give people money (which is absurd to me???). Donors want flashy rooms they can put their names on. They want “innovative programs.” All of this without addressing the root cause of inequalities usually being the fact that people have lots of money because they’ve extracted value from our communities through our labor and our land. Then, the same people who hurt us get to decide how a meager amount of that money comes back to us? Can you see how terrible and sad that is? This is the system organizations like the center are navigating.

My work at the center continued. In just my first month I saw the impact specifically people’s experiences with feeling the center was racist towards them had on the community. So much pain and injustice has occurred at that nexus. I know I’m speaking about the past but harm like this doesn’t just evaporate. It’s harm with roots in broader systems of oppression, especially white supremacy.

Then, personally, I experienced what I feel was transphobia and ableism both from community members and from co-workers. I worked hard to navigate complicated conversations with folks and was still often met with unkindness. My heart broke over and over and over and over. I had a romanticized idea of “community.” Now, I see “community” as vital and crucial and also deeply and necessarily messy. At the time though I didn’t have the emotional skills to cope with that.

Fast forward to our founder leaving in March of 2021 and I had come to a point where I was trying to make more changes at the organization. I started a committee to talk about accessibility issues. We had begun some new groups and I was encouraged by what I’d seen growing. Overall, I think I did great work but what caused the growth wasn’t me, but more and more community members feeling welcomed to lead and build the community at the center. These people, not just me, were what made these program successful in my opinion.

The best way to describe my relationship with the center is through the abuse cycle. There are always these honeymoon periods where you are infused with hope. “This is going to be better” and “We can make this better” and then somehow it always still falls apart.

We entered a period at the center of having an interim director. I saw similar patterns under that leadership.

Starting that December 2021, just about one person left or was let go from the center at least every month up until the present. I admired and cherished many many people who have left the center. Some left or opportunities but many others in painful and heartbreaking ways.

There is so much I want to share that will not fit in this essay but these cycles of pain and then promise repeated.

In the summer of 2022 there was an incident that I personally feel was racist that happened at the center when a staff member threatened to call the police on a black staff member who was being fired. I was then in a role managing community programs and working with a co-worker to create community programming. The incident caused a ripple effect of hurt and injustices not only to the person it was directed towards but then outwardly to the community. The way leadership talked about rightfully concerned and hurt black and brown members of our community sickens me to this day.

Trying to mediate this situation, I went to all leadership, begging them to take the pain the community felt seriously. I talked to my supervisor. I talked to the executive director. I feel I got little to no response and so I took this issue to the board, hoping they would hear me and move us towards a larger discussion about the issue. Instead, I was met with a response that me reaching out was inappropriate and not a matter to be discussed. This will become a theme throughout my time here and is something I think people need to know. Organizations have a way of depersonalizing very personal interactions. For example, firing someone can become a procedure and not an interaction between humans. This is something I’ve learned from reading about abolition and transformative justice practices. So much harm in our world doesn’t rise to the level of something we consider is worth taking action on. This leaves so many people unserved.

This is something I will never understand as an autistic person. I feel people at this organization have always treated me like I’m trying to play some kind of game when I criticize our actions when really I have just been deeply invested in this organization. At the center I feel conflict is discouraged. There feels like a tone of fear of open conflict. I didn’t reach out to try to go over someone’s head, I reached out because I hoped those people would hear me and lead us into a deeply needed conversation around racism at the center.

This incident also sparked a unionization effort at the center.

Staff started a group chat to talk about the feelings of unrest and I felt a deepened sense of connection to my co-workers. We presented a document to request recognition of the union to leadership, with only one member choosing to identify himself in the process. From that moment, I feel like I saw the mask come off of this organization.

The board voted to not recognize the union. Overwhelmingly, I feel that leadership took the effort to unionize personally, including a meeting where I felt like we talked to as if we were unruly children and not a group of thoughtful adults who were trying to organize a better future for the center. Ultimately, the promise of a new executive director and changes in staff roles I think ultimately are why efforts to unionize unraveled.

I think unionization is an important action an organization can take. Unions solidify the power we have in numbers. Why wouldn’t an organization founded on social justice principals want to endorse that? I will tell you why. It’s because most organizations don’t actually want collective power. Again, this isn’t just the center. This is most nonprofits and it isn’t even always because of who is in the driver’s seat. The landscape of nonprofits breeds this behavior and encourages it.

In the coming months, I watched how everyone heavily involved with the union effort left. From my viewpoint, I felt many were pushed out. The reality is probably a complicated mix of factors, but it’s something I thought about often. I feel like multiple people were pushed out as our new executive director moved into her role.

I witnessed what I consider bullying towards the employee who identified himself in the unionization effort. Day after day this hurt me. He had taken a risk to try to make a better center and was met with what I consider cruelty.

Through all of these changes I had the cycle continue for myself. I would get heartbroken and then something would give me hope and I would think “things are going to be different.” I don’t know if they have been truly different. I have seen positive changes made. I have seen negative changes made. I have seen important strides in some areas and harmful ones in others.

Through my whole time at the center I’ve struggled as a trans and disabled person. If you look at who leaves this organization, it’s most often folks of color, disabled people, and trans people. Over and over I would wrack my brain, wondering, “what can I do to make this place safe.”

I left because I have no idea. I won’t pretend like I have firm solutions for what the center needs.

I fully believe there is personal responsibility at play in this and that is something that I’m not here to work out. What I am here to point towards is the systems that perpetuate this cycle.

When I first started at the center, I felt confused why so many LGBTQ+ people loathe Bradbury-Sullivan Center. I saw this in Facebook comments and heard it in conversations at other organizations. Leaving, I completely understand.

The center symbolically and sometimes directly positions itself as the voice of LGBTQ+ people in this region and sometimes nationally. This is something done without the community’s consent which I acknowledge is a nebulous concept but one I think is worth exploring. Often the center will say things like “this is the only safe space LGBTQ+ people have.” We often perpetuate this idea center exists in a desert of spaces for queer folks. This is just blatantly not true and flies in the face of so many smaller less-funded groups building affirming and celebratory spaces for community to thrive in the valley.

This is just one example of harm I feel the center creates through our messaging. I believe we talk the talk but we don’t walk the walk. I think we keep our community at arms length for the majority of the work the center does.

In our new mission and vision statement the team drafted we say we want to “center our most marginalized” and I don’t think that is something the center has ever done in it’s history. I don’t think we know what that means outside of vague notions of identity politics. To do so would be to shift the whole structure of the organization.

To name some examples of efforts I’ve tried to make towards this am, I have not received support when I brought up needing to more directly tie our work to abolition in a concrete and tangible way. We have incarcerated and formerly incarcerated siblings who don’t just need our metaphorical support but direct actions to fight against the police state bent on making people disposable. I have tried multiple times while working at the center to get supports up and going for folks with substance use disorders.

It would feel great if I could say, “I’ve always fought for these things and the center just sucks” but the reality is that the nonprofit system works in a way that wears you down. I do not think I’ve been as radical in my work as I’d like to be. I regret not pushing harder. I regret not being louder and more vocal but the pressure to keep going and juggle an exorbitant amount of roles and tasks at the center makes it very easy to enter a survival mindset and not one focused on a future.

I’m now going to move forward more to talk about my experience since entering executive leadership at the center which happened March of 2023. I want to note that I was the only trans member of executive leadership and the only autistic person.

I entered in a rocky place as Director of the Education Institute. The person in the role before me, Liz Bradbury had moved on from the center, in a way that disturbs me but that I don’t know the details of. That situation itself is a microcosm for the ways institutions swallow the details of interpersonal interactions and collapses nuance. I think it’s an example of how people are made disposable.

There were months we didn’t follow-up with training contacts, and I spent my first weeks scrambling to complete a grant and trying to rebuild relationships with community.

It felt like the same cycle over again. Me working hard to re-earn trust in the name of the center. And I did. I built great connections and got to do work that was deeply full-filling to me. It became clear to me though that I wasn’t able to bring in as much money as leadership had hoped I would in my position. I often would do trainings for much less than they are typically worth because this education is crucial and life-saving.

I just don’t think there’s any point in a non profit offering education only if the organization has to pay for it. I think getting paid for our labor is definitely important but the center is a million dollar nonprofit. We must be able to offer free training. And, often we do. We have some grant funding, just not enough.

In May and June and July of 2023 I brought my struggles with funding to leadership. I laid out the work I was doing and ideas I had for solutions. I proposed potentially seeking more grants. I asked for help developing this and I feel I did not receive that help. I explained I was struggling to balance all my roles and have time to be a human in my job and I was told to take more time off and relax more. This was what was always told to me when I expressed being overwhelmed. Ultimately, this feels like gaslighting to me because nothing was removed from my plate and not help to develop solutions was provided.

I was lucky at the center to have a lot of time off under current leadership. What I want to say though is that having vacation days is not useful if there’s so much work you can’t meaningfully take them. I don’t think there’s ever been a vacation day I’ve used at the center that I didn’t respond to something. True, this has something to do with the ways work you care deeply about consumes you and speaks to my own struggles with boundaries but I will say there’s also something in the culture of an organization that promotes this. I also don’t know of any colleagues who truly don’t look at work when they’re not at work.

Along with my own burn out, I witnessed co-workers’ burn out. I tried to help advocate for fellow directors and senior managers in meetings with leadership to be met with the same advice over and over again, to just “do less.”

Simultaneously, I saw the center spending what I consider an astronomical amount of money that I never witnessed us spending before and not on items or expenses I feel serve the broader community. This worried me. In leadership I often advocated for us to cut down costs where it might not be necessary but I was told as well as other directors were told to keep spending.

Because roles had moved around so much, the budgets we entered the year with were not usable. That’s to no fault in their creation but if an organization changes that drastically, I guess this is what happens. Still, I received one message that we had to stick to those budgets and another message to just buy whatever I needed and wanted to do.

Overall, in leadership, what I witnessed was timelines that were constantly shifting, a lack of clarity for the direction of the organization, and a lack of willingness to slow down or take critical feedback into account. I felt like I was wanted when someone needed a disabled trans person to speak on something but then when that feedback wasn’t what was desired, I felt discarded.

I also feel leadership failed to address an instance of domestic violence happening to an employee at the center.

Even before announcing my departure, I saw how leadership treated a new director different than me, looping her into conversations that I was not included in despite the fact that I’d been at the center longer than anyone else on executive leadership. She is brilliant and deserves recognition, but it added to this consistent feeling that I wasn’t taken seriously. I often blamed myself. “Am I too angry?” “Too disabled?” “Too neurodivergent?” I think there is clear favoritism at the organization.

Likewise in leadership I also found myself advocating for staff who didn’t feel safe to speak up about their concerns. Primarily the staff who voiced concerns about their treatment or the way the organization functioned were disabled staff or folks of color.

There is the phrase “kill the cop in your head” and what I want is “kill the cop inside the nonprofit system.” Kill is not referring to violence but to destroying the parts of yourself who want to respond from a carceral and punitive mindset. Despite the ways the center has begun to strive to be radical, I still see that “cop” showing up in our policies and hierarchical structure. Very few people make all important decision that impact the team. We speak radical politics in meetings and then draft internal documents rife with legalese and language that is disproportionally weaponized against folks of color and disabled folks.

In a recent code of ethics document it’s even stated we’re not to speak of disagreements. I ask who does this policy serve?

All of this takes us up to this summer and the pride festival. This pride festival was a truly beautiful day. I felt connected to community. I felt the festival was well-organized. It was a very long day but not entirely unreasonable for any one staff member. Even amidst struggles in an organization I think we should pause to recognize moments of joy like this.

That being said, I think the spending at the pride festival was extravagant at times. We did everything to the highest degree possible which is beautiful but also, I feel, might not have always been the best use of our funds which we have to use to serve folks all year round.

Leading up to pride, I had fed myself the narrative “once we get through this, things will be so much easier.” It was what I held onto to keep going.

In the first senior leadership meeting after pride we were going full force into a Dorney Pride Night with about a month to plan. I remember thinking, “Does it ever stop?”

I think I felt most upset about the urgency and lack of planning that characterized events like this. There is always something else we need to push for and that we end up spending a lot money on with little to no money coming back to us. I voiced concerns like this.

A sharp turn happened though when during one leadership meeting in September I was told we were laying off our youth department.

Here is where I feel disappointed in myself. When presented with this information. I said that I could understand the center’s reasoning. We do not have a large grant supporting youth programs and we needed sustained funding to continue. I should have pushed more. I should have asked more questions. I should have advocated harder.

That is the thing about being part of a hierarchically structured org. I was making the best money I made in my life which was 65,000. It’s an amount of money I couldn’t have fathomed like a year ago. I just wanted to do anything to keep things going. I didn’t want to think too deeply about the situation. Of course, I hurt about it. I hurt for my co-workers I loved who got laid off and I hurt for the community that we shut our efforts to serve youth.

Even after that, we continued to spend as an organization. Every time I asked, “Can we afford this?” I was told “Yes yes yes.”

Nonprofits never “have any money” but there is a difference between not having much extra funds and having zero funds. Zero funds is where we landed. I don’t know or understand where all the money the org had went. I know that we had money in our reserves when we started the year. I know that in my time at the org, this had never happened before. I was told this two days before it was shared with all staff. As executive leadership, I feel it is deeply not transparent to not inform the directors of your organization where finances are in a tangible way. I was told we were cutting hourly staff to 32 hours and closing the center one day a week. Leadership took pay cuts. We laid off three more staff and cut another staff’s hours down even more. From my perspective, the organization has, for this whole year, never had a solid plan for fundraising. I can see how this has caught up to the organization.

As explanation for this leadership has said this financial situation occurred because we approved a deficit budget. When we were presented with the deficit budget we were told the only thing putting us over budget was legal fees we’d incurre in the event staff went through with a unionization effort.

At the end of this meeting, there was a point made to say that my work in the education institute would be able to help bring in some of the funding we need.

I’ve done LGBTQ+ trainings for about ten years now. I’ve seen the “market” grow and change. I can tell you that right now there’s a market saturation for these trainings and as we are living in a recession and time of overall economic crisis, organizations don’t have a lot of flexible funding to spend on these trainings. I spent every day at my job reaching out to organizations and cultivating connections to businesses and other non profits across the valley. I still found myself coming up short of the mark. Plus, a lot of lgbtq+ orgs give trainings for free.

I was asked how I planned to close a 40,000$ gap in my department’s budget which was mostly because we went from a part time trainer to full-time trainer. My salary in the institute was 65,000$. Again, it’s the most money I ever made in my life. I feel guilt for that salary because so many of my queer siblings don’t make enough to get by. In my role, I was just trying to make enough to cover myself at the organization. As a side note, ALWAYS always always talk about your salary with your peers. It’s important for understand the interworking of an organization and for helping peers and yourself make sure you’re getting paid fairly.

I couldn’t do it anymore. This is when I said enough is enough is enough. I couldn’t make peace with being asked to work more when I already worked so hard and on top of that, I didn’t feel like I was making the impact I wanted to.

All of this leads me to the point that I feel shakiest about telling you. I don’t think you should donate to the center if you want the most impact for your money getting into the community. I love the people who work at the center. They are my friends and former colleagues. The work they’ve done is often astounding and brilliant and kind. All of that is true and I also think the systems we have to work within prevent us from making the deepest impact.

Recently staff was told we were going to resume full time (40) hours in January because of a 500,000 donation from someone’s will. Places like the center will always receive donations like this. I think about how much good that 500,000 could do in the community and I feel again like the system is broken. That could be groceries and rent and medical bills.

Give money to your friends. Give money to mutual aid networks. Give money without having to see a program outcome or fancy professionalized pitches. These systems are what keep our families unfed and fighting to survive. Give without getting a tax write off. This is the kind of redistribution of resources that will lead us to a place where we don’t have to rely on these restricting funding sources and organizations that have to present themselves as palatable to the gaze of a select few rich folks.

This work will not be easy. It will be messy and scary if we devest from the nonprofit system. It’s not something can or should happen overnight. I also think there are nonprofit organizations that are more ethical than others.

I wish I could offer you some kind of closure to these meditations. Instead, though, I’ll offer you some of my favorite moments from working at the center.

My former co-worker Gabby Hochfeld and I had the opportunity to put on some really beautiful events. One night we got to welcome Alvaro Duran, an activist from El Salvador to speak on queer rights and justice in his work in the faith community. It was moving to hear him. I loved and cherished how he spoke of how even the acronym “LGBTQ+” assumes a very western lens. He talked about words from his indigenous ancestry that he connects to most in terms of identity. We gathered after and talked to so many wonderful community members.

Gabby and I also helped curate our art galleries. One of my favorite shows was by Grayson Colbert, a trans artist. So many community members came and the reception was an evening of pure queer joy.

One spring we also organized a foraging event with Rain Black, also a former employee of the center and my partner. People of all ages came and we picked mushrooms and learned about native plants. It was such a beautiful afternoon.

Rain Black and Kiir Rutabaga’s art gallery show Vile Beauty was also a really amazing reception. Both of their work played wonderfully off each other and I really believe Rain is one of the most innovative and visceral artists I know. I felt heartbroken for him and all survivors when the center decided to censor one of his pieces from the show because it discussed the direct words used by his abuser. The center directly allowed his abuser to remove the pieces from the show. Out of an interest of confidentially and respectability, I find that often organizations can act as shields for abusers. I believe I have seen the center operate in this way multiple times.

With Liz Keiser and Braden Hudak I had the opportunity to film so many fun snippets for the center’s social media. They are brilliant, kind, and professional people. The center would not be what it is without their communications expertise. I loved filming new quick queer history snippets with Tiersa Curry, who is a brilliant steward of local history.

Being part of the CORE fellowship has been extremely meaningful to me. It’s pushed me to think deeply about white supremacy and how it functions as the center of so many forms of oppression. I’ve been honored to work alongside other local organizations trying to make a most equitable and just Lehigh Valley.

I’m also grateful that being part of the center helped give me the tools to start Prism a neurodivergent community group. I’ve never felt more seen and celebrated than when I’m in a room with fellow neurodivergent queer folks. The group is a space of healing and love and I’m rejoiced every meeting. I’m glad I’ll continue to run that group under a new name “Radiant” outside of the center under a new name since the center has decided to keep the name. (Please email me if you want to join!)

And lastly, I’m happy for all the relationships the center led me to with coworkers and community members I will always hold dear. Please, email me or message me. I hope to continue the connections built in this phase of my life.

The advice I would leave you with is to get your hands dirty. Sit with one another. Witness each other’s pain and joy and love. Write poetry. Paint your emotions. Sing in the streets. Engage each other in difficult conversations around justice in our world and take action. Don’t be satisfied with the sliver we’re afforded. Always ask for more. If you are a nonprofit worker, don’t let your dedication to a cause justify an organization undervaluing your labor and coercing you into compliance. Organize with your co-workers.

Also… are you interested in starting a Lehigh Valley queer and trans mutual aid collective? I am but I don’t know how and what our focus would be but if you want to… email me. Let’s talk. Let’s dream together. My email is robinfgow@gmail.com. I have an interest survey too here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjXdWN2X4guMZ__DKZhs-5o9kGW3iJI1ZgeUIzqdKplvoMtg/viewform