By Rain Black

I am writing this because I feel so frustrated with systems “designed for the greater good” failing to even meet basic standards of protecting the community they serve.

I am a disabled, autistic, mixed indigenous trans person and it is my opinion that people like me, especially those of us experiencing or who have experienced abuse are not welcome, centered, or protected by the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center. I held a position of power at this institution as their Senior Development Manager and was, in my opinion, pushed out of the organization by an increasingly hostile work environment. I feel this was also compounded by impossible goals, lack of staff and support, zero protection from my abuser in the workplace, and lack of accommodations or understanding around autistic people.

While this is my story, it isn’t the only one that occurs at the center and it won’t be the last given that, in my opinion, nothing meaningful was done in my case and I continued to experience episodes of abuse from my abuser during and after employment. I am honestly so tired of being hurt by this place which is supposed to be a safe place for people like me. 

For my story, I need you to know a few facts that might impact your understanding of the events that take place:

1. There was a domestic violence policy in place prior to Krista Brown-Ly’s employment that was removed. 
2. One was adopted again after fellow workers fought for it after my situation and me leaving the center. 
3. Ashley L. Coleman said it was a “personal issue” rather than something that needed to come up in a leadership meeting, when Robin Gow tried to bring up the need for a domestic violence policy. 
4. My complaint under the domestic violence policy and the code of ethics policy were closed because the events occurred prior to the policy’s inception 
5. Pennsylvania has an at will policy for employment which has been utilized many times at the center for far less. 
6. Ashley told me many times that Krista does not do anything unless she approves of it and can’t act unilaterally. 

I hope this information informs your understanding of my story and my opinion of what happens in it. I will also be including any and all evidence I have. 

When we were interviewing Ashley for the Executive Director position, I was so hopeful and excited. She talked about wanting to be a radical queer organization that centered our most marginalized members. She talked about restorative justice and how we would change things together. Ashley talked the talk, but I feel her actions did not align with those ideals that she espoused. 

Krista, while not the head of the organization, I feel had been acting as such prior to Ashley and influencing how things were responded to. An example is a Black neurodivergent person was fired and she recommended to our interim ED to call the police during this firing. Her exact request was to “call the city liaison,” which if you don’t know is still the police. She has not apologized collectively to staff during when I worked there for endangering any of us or what many of the staff and myself feel was a racist event. An apology was requested multiple times by myself and others. 

She made working with her incredibly difficult, as I was the grants manager and she worked primarily in finance and HR at the time, and would make any collaboration or request for information difficult and unpleasant for me. She would also take mundane events as personal attacks, such as another employee asking me if I wanted to move offices and them offering to tell her about it or people taking it upon themselves to do something kind, like Ashely telling our facilities technician that my door was broken.  The reason I know how she felt is that she told me herself in a one on one meeting moderated by Ashley that I requested because of these repeated issues and disagreements.    

Another piece of information which may or may not be related is that Krista in that meeting with me and Ashley told me that she felt personally attacked by my union involvement and that she felt negative feelings about me because of that. She also engaged in ableist rhetoric about me during that meeting. She said that she interacted with me the way she did because of my union involvement when she felt that I didn’t qualify to be in a union. At that time, I was a grants manager and had no employees underneath me. I managed grants and not people. I also wrote the inclusion and exclusion policies for the union and was the only one who identified themselves to management because I wanted to shield other people from retaliation. At some point Krista was given access to our union chat and also brought it up in that meeting. She called me rude and unprofessional while being visibly angry and raising her voice significantly during the meeting. I sent a follow up email to Ashley as I felt that Krista had engaged in prohibited activities regarding union retaliation, and I don’t feel as though I am the only one that experienced this retaliation either.

The center also recently adopted an anti-bullying policy and it mentions 21 behaviors as prohibited, I feel I experienced all but 4 of the types of bullying identified on the list from Krista. 

During this time, I had been experiencing increasingly violent and frequent episodes of abuse from my then partner, who still works at the center, and I communicated this to Ashley on multiple occasions. These episodes became more frequent after he cheated on me but had been present through our entire relationship. I had to flee my home twice during the year it took me to escape the abuse and was unsuccessful both times due to manipulation from my ex using my dog Gomez and not having a sustainable option for housing. I was eventually successful in getting him to leave my home at the end of July 2023, though I weathered a lot of verbal, financial, and emotional abuse during that time. I spent much of that last 2 months either out of the home at friend’s homes or locked in my bedroom with my dog for our safety. 

The first time I fled, he showed up unannounced to the first location and also texted me the entire time I was gone saying that my dog Gomez missed me and various promises to change. I felt guilty for leaving my dog behind, which was not my choice, so I went back. 

The second time, Ashley was taking a smoke break sitting on one of those large cement plant pots near the center towards the post office and I was trying not to break down. I told her I wasn’t safe, and I needed help. She talked me through staying with someone who he did not know where they lived and she asked if she could tell Krista, to which I said yes. I also shared my location with her and talked to her periodically while I was at this friend’s house. This friend was a previous employee of the center. Ashley also said that I could leave early from work so that I could grab my dog and a few things and run without him knowing I was gone. This was so he couldn’t follow me to where I was staying. He left me alone for a moment, but I received a wall of text about how he would change, and I just wanted to sleep, which I hadn’t been able to do since leaving. 

That’s a common occurrence for me during stressful times in my life, I can’t sleep because my mind races replaying the things that happen to me to try to process them. I don’t understand why people are abusive and I spent a long time trying to understand. I have also experienced those sorts of nights because of how Krista treated me that day at work or a rude email I would receive at 10pm at night from her. At this point in time, I thought Ashley was helping me, both with Krista and my abuser. 

Because of my ex’s abuse, I had also experienced a number of non-verbal episodes leading into workdays which occurred because of sustained verbal and emotional abuse late into the night. I had to borrow an iPad to communicate with others during meetings because my abuser took my voice from me. This, unfortunately, will not be the last time this occurs, but it happens more figuratively.  

My ex, once he no longer lived with me, continued to have to work directly with me, as I was the Senior Development Manager and had no staff at any point during my tenure besides a part-time grants manager who I got shortly before leaving. My abuser was the only one besides myself trained in any of the development procedures. I feel no meaningful effort was made to make different arrangements or protect me. When I would have to work with him, and it was one-on-one he would insult me. As an example, during one occasion, he told me what a horrible sight it was to see me. He would also sit with the lights off next to my office, even though we work on different floors and none of his duties required him to ever use those offices as there were available rooms on his floor. I reported these events, but at this point, I had given up on Ashley or Krista doing anything and I had decided to leave the organization. 

During my last two weeks, Krista and Ashley had no conversations with me about my work or sustainability of the position. It felt almost as if it was being ignored that I was leaving, so I just finished out my last two weeks. I kept my head low and endured anything that happened. Ashley hugged me on my last day and told me I was the center’s joy and that I would be missed. This was the first time she had spoken to me the entire two weeks and it felt hollow to me. I tried to move past it and just forget the center.

I still had a joint gallery show planned at the center that I felt might repair some of my feelings about the center and I had five pieces about the domestic violence I had experienced that fit together with a caption explaining the feelings surrounding the pieces and their meaning. They allowed my abuser to take my pieces off the wall and hold them in an undisclosed location. 

I asked my fellow artist in the gallery show to help me find them and then Robin and I tried to talk to Krista at the end of a meeting Robin had with her. She told us that they had taken down things before, and I reminded her that captions had been altered once and I was there when that happened. It was because they were transphobic, racist, and ableist, which wasn’t what was happening. She said we would look at them together and we tried to schedule a meeting. She did not schedule a meeting with either of us and she went into Robin’s office between his meetings to look at the pieces and caption. She and Ashley refused to meet with either of us and told both Robin and I that there would be no discussion. 

I was told via email that I was harassing him. 

To you the reader, I would ask, how do you harass someone with their own words? With describing feelings and events that you experienced? Any identifying information had been removed from the caption and the pieces prior to hanging them, so again I ask you, how do you harass someone with their own words and actions? I am sure they are not nice pieces for him to view, but discomfort does not equal an attack.

I responded to Krista that harassment has a legal meaning and implication of a sustained series of events. As my abuser had done that to me during our relationship and during my employment there, his taking down my piece would constitute that. Krista then stopped using the word harassment.

As an aside, this also happened during domestic violence awareness month which I don’t think was planned, but just makes this situation worse. 

The pieces that were not allowed in the show included elements of my abusers’ own words and the caption of me talking a bit about my experience and my story. It was anonymous and included no identifiable information. Because they were not allowed in the show, I posted them on my Instagram and talked about them at the reception because I wanted to take back some of my power in this situation. 

I tried one final time to give the center a chance to do what I feel would be the right thing in any of this. Once they adopted their new code of ethics and their domestic violence policy, I made a formal complaint under them.

After my leaving the center, Robin, while he still worked there, was told that nothing happened because I made no formal HR complaint. This was said even though there was no mechanism in the handbook for this, this was never communicated to me, and at this time, there was no domestic violence because it had been removed. I had expressed multiple times, verbatim, to Ashley that I was experiencing abuse in the workplace and at home. I expressed that I didn’t feel safe and that I was coordinating with Robin to not be alone in my office by myself as that is when my ex would invade my space, corner me in my office, and start fights at the workplace. 

I filed the complaint because I want to try to ensure the safety of my fellow community members because my ex is a facilitator of community groups in addition to being an administrative contact for donors and other community members. People who go to the groups are potentially vulnerable to him because he is in a position of power and “deemed safe” by the center due to his employment. Do you, my dear reader, not automatically trust that people employed at nonprofits and other social service areas have your best interest at heart and will not harm you? This trust is dangerous for an abuser to hold.

I don’t think any of this is just about me, I think it sets a dangerous precedent.

My complaint was closed and I feel no meaningful interventions were done. It was denied because the policy didn’t exist during the abuse that happened at the center. This reason for denial was overheard by someone who still works there, so I am certain it will be refuted, but which is it? I didn’t report it the right way or there’s no policy?

At every turn the center failed me and it sets a precedent to not come forward. The bar for getting an organization to do any action is so high that your abuser will be allowed to not only continue their abuse, but it will be sanctioned as allowable. In my case, the only thing that actually gave me any protection was my coworkers and trying to not be alone in the center. This is an incredibly dangerous practice and mindset as for people like me, trans autistic feminine disabled, our abusers kill us. I was just lucky.

My abuser is up for a promotion, still has access to vulnerable people in the support groups and I feel has received no repercussions for his behavior in or outside of the workplace. By being allowed to remain a part of the center, the center is implying that he is safe and has authority amongst the LGBT community. This is literally how abusers find another victim and they might not be lucky the next time. I do not mean to be alarmist, but the risk is real and we see this reflected in domestic and interpersonal violence statistical data.

I have known no peace at the center and it continues to haunt me now that I am on the outside. I desperately want to stop talking about the center, but I feel compelled because my silence has never kept me safe and I feel like if I scream this from the rooftops, someone might be spared what I went through. I believe that dragging unjust practices out into the light allows them to fend for themselves versus them thriving in the darkness.

I would ask that if you believe me, my story, and care about domestic violence, reach out to the center and ask them to do better. Ask Ashley and the board to ensure the safety of those who visit and expel abusers from their walls. All of them.

Email Ashley and the board and tell them to stand by survivors of domestic and interpersonal violence. Tell them that your safety matters. Not for me, but for all of us that have experienced DV/IPV because there are so many of us.

Four out of ten (37.1%) of the respondents to the 2022 PA LGBTQ+ Health Needs Assessment had experienced this kind of violence. If the respondent was trans or gender non-conforming, that number goes up to 39.8% and if the respondent was disabled, the number goes up to 58.5%. If you represent an organization, I would recommend no longer working with the center until they change their practices and center survivors. 

I’ll leave you with one final question: 

If the center is not for us, not safe for us, who’s it for?  

Evidence

Kleintopl@moravian.edu – Liz Kleintop, board president

Acoleman@bradburysullivancenter.org – Ashley Coleman, Executive Director