First I’d like to thank Ula for raising the important issue of how employees in the animal movement are treated. Unfortunately, there is mounting evidence that these are not isolated cases. Former employees of other organizations like Animal Equality have reported similar disturbing practices, for example:
Thanks for the questions Eze. I encourage readers to also check out my answers to Ula and Daniela above, since they apply here too. I’ll focus here on your specific questions about how Open Phil addresses problems at grantees.
In general, when we learn of problems at grantees — like mistreatment of employees — we first try to learn more about the specifics of the situation. We then have a range of proportional responses we consider and adjust depending on how they go. This ranges from extensive discussions with grantee leadership to specific demands of them (e.g. that they adopt an independent board or investigate a particular case) to ultimately cutting off funding.
We have cut off funding to grantees that have proven unwilling to address major problems. But we do treat this as a last resort after all attempts at internal leverage and change have failed. We take this approach because we’re such a large portion of most grantees’ funding that us cutting off funding will typically result in them having to lay off employees, in some cases many. For this reason we often find that employees raising concerns with us don’t want us to cut funding to their employer (to be clear, this is not dispositive — it’s one consideration). In that case we also lose our leverage to insist on improvements.
I can’t get deeply into the specifics of any individual or organization. But I’ll say broadly that we have engaged extensively with Animal Equality leadership about the issues you’ve identified, and used our leverage to push for a number of changes there — and we’ll continue to do so. I would like to hear more about your experience and other cases you’re aware of — I’ve just emailed you about this.
I am also a former employee of Animal Equality. I just registered here anonymously because speaking out publicly will get me in trouble with the current AE-leadership that I can not afford to deal with financially or emotionally anymore.
With all respect – just from what I know, OPP has so much information about what is going on at Animal Equality – reading „I would like to hear more about your experience and other cases you’re aware of“ is very, very frustrating.
„We take this approach because we’re such a large portion of most grantees’ funding that us cutting off funding will typically result in them having to lay off employees, in some cases many.“
The number of people who where fired or have left AE because of the behavior of the current leadership is so high, that I do not think a complete cut of funding could have resulted in more lay-offs.
Thanks Charlie and Oat for sharing your experiences with Animal Equality. I understand your skepticism and I’m sorry to hear about how things have gone for you and too many others.
You’re right that we spoke with a lot of former and current AE employees in 2019. We heard concern about practices but also concern about the potential fallout of us just cutting funding. It was a tough decision, but we chose to use our leverage to push for changes rather than to cut funding.
I wish I could get into more specifics of the conversations with AE leadership, but think it would violate both their trust and that of a number of employees we spoke with. So all I can really say is that we’ve had ongoing candid conversations with AE leadership about our concerns and think they’re taking a number of significant actions based on our conversations, for example adding new independent directors to their board, making key personnel changes, and working closely with a consultant on management changes. But we’re continuing to monitor and engage on this—including continuing to welcome new information.
Hi Lewis, I am another former Animal Equality worker who prefers to remain anonymous for reasons already mentioned in the forum. I want to give more information and make a reflection on this issue:
- 85% of the team in Germany quitted the organization in the last months when the international board took over the control of the German organization. Most of the team opposed the management style and HR values of the international board. See here how ratings on the German anonymous employer review platform Kununu collapse over time, reporting the situation, when the international board took over management.
- Power continues to be held by the founders and their trusted people, some of them taking on other roles to make it appear as a more balanced management structure that does not exist. The systemic and structural problem will persist as long as large donors and the effective altruism philanthropists continue to allow this situation to persist.
- Predatory management, far from being isolated cases, the leadership model is based on coercion of employees. Hence, employees are afraid to speak up, as we have already seen here. A dissenting opinion means dismissal. It is common practice to motivate dismissals with professional law firms that advise on the best ways to fire “uncomfortable” people, without having anything to do with their performance.
- Fostering the culture of toxic competitiveness among organizations, as is known in some countries. Far from following the values and principles of effective altruism, the leadership model uses it to obtain funding, without sharing its values.
- Dismissals during medical leaves motivated by the predatory and toxic leadership model. Even victims of the predatory management taking medication for work-related anxiety episodes.
- It is common practice to sign non-disclosure clauses at the time of contract termination to prevent issues such as those described here from being known.
Far from being improved by the measures taken by Open Philanthropy Project (and other philanthropic organizations), the predatory management model imposed by the founders extends throughout Animal Equality’s international offices. As many prominent activists comment, “it’s an open secret.” If Open Philanthropy Project or other philanthropic organizations or major donors are not aware of this, it must be because they do not make the effort to know about it, not because of lack of resources. Something that is internationally known (a predatory and toxic model from top to bottom) is impossible that it cannot be managed by people with so many contacts in the environment.
As an example: after an employee satisfaction interview conducted in AE Spain in 2017, the results were so alarming that we know that the founders located in US expressed “you have to buy tickets for Spain”. Once they arrived there, they promised workers that they were coming to listen and solve problems created by the management in Spain (an AE founder). This made the workers express themselves freely, trusting the word of the founders located in the US. This was followed by the sudden dismissal of two key workers in Spain who had expressed the untenable incompetence of the Spanish management, something so well known internationally, that the former director of Spain was forced to retire from the management, although he still has full control of the decisions (same situation as with the current executive vice-president, who was just as well forced to retire from his previous position).
Everything mentioned here to improve the predatory model that the founders impose on AE does not do much to repair the harm done to dozens? hundreds? of victims of workplace harassment. Is this the best we can hope for?
Lewis, I would like to comment on your points in detail but I can not do that without jeopardizing my anonymity which I think it pretty clear. And I know that anything I could say OP already has been made aware of by several people. People have been treated and are being treated horribly and forced out of the organization after the changes you mentioned had been implemented. These are ongoing issues. Asking for more information at this point feels like people have been speaking out in vain so far. Reading things like this over and over again is really not helping the mental health of people who have been treated horribly but dared to speak out despite the risk.
Should people in positions of power who seem to have a track record of mismanagement be granted the same level of trust – and by extension protection – as the many, many people who are treated badly and people who want to hold people in power accountable? I can not imagine what more information could be necessary. How much worse do things need to become to justify more drastic action in your eyes? Animal rights advocacy is hard enough as we all know. But even without that baseline of stress – no one should be treated like a disposable human resource and be forced to witness unbelievably incompetent leadership being protected like this.
Quite honestly Lewis, what violates our trust in OP is seeing that after all the risk many of us took nothing has substantially changed. While you continue having “candid conversations with AE leadership”, AE leadership has not extended the same grace to its staff and has been anything but candid to its employees. As you confirmed yourself, OP has been aware of and addressing the problems with AE since 2019. You claim that significant actions were taken since, however, in 2020 what we actually saw was the issues escalating and not improving, culture becoming much worse to the point of affecting mental health of employees, leadership becoming much more authoritarian and despotic. To speak only about what is already public knowledge, in 2020 AE lost almost the entire Germany office and fired more than one employee on medical leave as retaliation. How then do you affirm that they are making significant changes? The said changes are clearly only on paper, and the discourse does not reflect the reality of the culture. People who are still working at AE continue telling us about the same problems, but they are afraid of speaking up since they know many of us already did and nothing has been done either by OP and others who we trusted would take action to hold the organisation accountable. As far as we know, independent directors joining the board aren’t actually that “independent”, but personal friends and very aligned with leadership. It is crystal clear to just about everyone who ever worked at AE that leadership is simply not qualified to manage the organisation. Unfortunately, OP’s continuous failure to act despite the piling amount of evidence received from multiple whistleblowers is part of the reason why so many of the most passionate and effective animal rights advocates are choosing to leave the movement and losing faith in effective altruism. We simply can’t in good faith believe that the most effective way to do the most good for animals entails continuing supporting organisations with such toxic culture. Still, donors like you keep pouring funds under the guise of effectiveness when we all know AE is anything but cost-effective unless you take their fraudulent metrics at face value, which you really shouldn’t.
Lewis, with all the respect but I want to point out how frustrating it is to see that OPP continues to overlook all these serious issues. As people have said in this forum, due to the leadership of Animal Equality, people are depressed, leaving the animal advocacy movement, unemployed, and/or sick. “Candid conversations” didn’t work and are not going to work with Animal Equality. What else needs to happen until OPP takes drastic measures?
Thank you for your response, Lewis, but you understand if many of us are very skeptical. Writing anonymously on behalf of a number of former Animal Equality employees from at least three different countries who were all forced out of the organisation or resigned due to our attempts to hold leadership to account for their horrible treatment of staff, lies, nepotism, and complete lack of transparency. OP reached out to some of us in 2019, following the departure of a number of Directors (both country EDs and international department Directors) and staff, to discuss the situation. Many of us risked our careers, reputations, and likelihood of retaliation by AE leadership to speak with OP in the hope that we could help protect employees still working at the organization. Some of us spoke with OP about this more than once, and many of us provided specific examples of extremely problematic behavior by leadership. OP assured us it would protect us as well as those still working at AE but failed to take any concrete action to hold AE accountable, thus putting at risk the whistleblowers who took the risk to protect others. But instead, OP continues funding the organisation and this financing and enabling the abusive behavior reported by dozens of employees from multiple countries. Meanwhile AE leadership continues to fire all of those who dare to raise their voices, badmouth former employees framing them as problematic and difficult (when not worse), promote to leadership positions those problematic individuals who are personally close to leadership, and refuse to have a truly independent board. There is a plethora of evidence showing how toxic culture has direct impact on performance and effectiveness, and how mismanagement wastes resources. For example, if you only consider the amount of money paid directly to employees being fired, it already sums up to hundreds of thousand dollars, not considering adjacent costs of hiring, training, loss of effectiveness due to high turnover, etc. it means that a lot of donations are literally wasted by mismanagement. It is hard to understand what’s the reasoning behind OP’s decision to continue supporting AE. We would love for you to explain that and collectively we would like to say that we expect funders to take more responsibility for the culture they are enabling through their donations.
First of all, I would like to explain that I have just registered on the forum to maintain anonymity and not to harm anyone.
Unfortunately, the case you give as an example of Animal Equality is not the only one of bad practices towards their employees. As a former employee of Animal Equality, I have witnessed on numerous occasions harassment at work, abuse of authority, lack of transparency, lack of democracy, falsification of statistical data and fraudulent campaigns by the international direction.
It is very sad, it would be good if finally the appropriate actions were taken so that these bad practices do not continue.
I was an employee of Animal Equality for years and I have witnessed several cases of harassment from the leadership. Retaliation and harassment are common practices in the organization. Unfortunately, Animal Equality is a dictatorship. If you are an employee and you disagree to some degree with the leadership you might be fired without any prior notice. Even people that exceed the goals and expectations for the role are fired without any previous bad feedback.
In order to avoid more retaliation for the current staff, I suggest that OPP requires a strict policy and process in which Animal Equality’s directors must follow in case they want to lay off someone.
PS: I am also writing with an anonymous name since I don’t feel safe showing my name.
First I’d like to thank Ula for raising the important issue of how employees in the animal movement are treated. Unfortunately, there is mounting evidence that these are not isolated cases. Former employees of other organizations like Animal Equality have reported similar disturbing practices, for example:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10161295462184852&set=pb.799184851.-2207520000..&type=3
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10161238998724852&set=pb.799184851.-2207520000..&type=3
Given all this, I’d like to ask:
What is Open Phil’s position on these issues?
What is Open Phil doing to actively address such situations?
What has OpenPhil done or intends to do about the harm this has caused to animal advocates?
Does Open Phil intend to continue funding these organizations?
Thanks in advance for your answer.
Thanks for the questions Eze. I encourage readers to also check out my answers to Ula and Daniela above, since they apply here too. I’ll focus here on your specific questions about how Open Phil addresses problems at grantees.
In general, when we learn of problems at grantees — like mistreatment of employees — we first try to learn more about the specifics of the situation. We then have a range of proportional responses we consider and adjust depending on how they go. This ranges from extensive discussions with grantee leadership to specific demands of them (e.g. that they adopt an independent board or investigate a particular case) to ultimately cutting off funding.
We have cut off funding to grantees that have proven unwilling to address major problems. But we do treat this as a last resort after all attempts at internal leverage and change have failed. We take this approach because we’re such a large portion of most grantees’ funding that us cutting off funding will typically result in them having to lay off employees, in some cases many. For this reason we often find that employees raising concerns with us don’t want us to cut funding to their employer (to be clear, this is not dispositive — it’s one consideration). In that case we also lose our leverage to insist on improvements.
I can’t get deeply into the specifics of any individual or organization. But I’ll say broadly that we have engaged extensively with Animal Equality leadership about the issues you’ve identified, and used our leverage to push for a number of changes there — and we’ll continue to do so. I would like to hear more about your experience and other cases you’re aware of — I’ve just emailed you about this.
I am also a former employee of Animal Equality. I just registered here anonymously because speaking out publicly will get me in trouble with the current AE-leadership that I can not afford to deal with financially or emotionally anymore.
With all respect – just from what I know, OPP has so much information about what is going on at Animal Equality – reading „I would like to hear more about your experience and other cases you’re aware of“ is very, very frustrating.
„We take this approach because we’re such a large portion of most grantees’ funding that us cutting off funding will typically result in them having to lay off employees, in some cases many.“
The number of people who where fired or have left AE because of the behavior of the current leadership is so high, that I do not think a complete cut of funding could have resulted in more lay-offs.
It seems at Animal Equality Germany alone enough people left just last year to justify drastic measures? https://www.kununu.com/de/animal-equality-germany-ev/kommentare
Can you explain what exactly has changed at AE since you have become aware of the issues?
Thanks Charlie and Oat for sharing your experiences with Animal Equality. I understand your skepticism and I’m sorry to hear about how things have gone for you and too many others.
You’re right that we spoke with a lot of former and current AE employees in 2019. We heard concern about practices but also concern about the potential fallout of us just cutting funding. It was a tough decision, but we chose to use our leverage to push for changes rather than to cut funding.
I wish I could get into more specifics of the conversations with AE leadership, but think it would violate both their trust and that of a number of employees we spoke with. So all I can really say is that we’ve had ongoing candid conversations with AE leadership about our concerns and think they’re taking a number of significant actions based on our conversations, for example adding new independent directors to their board, making key personnel changes, and working closely with a consultant on management changes. But we’re continuing to monitor and engage on this—including continuing to welcome new information.
Hi Lewis, I am another former Animal Equality worker who prefers to remain anonymous for reasons already mentioned in the forum. I want to give more information and make a reflection on this issue:
- 85% of the team in Germany quitted the organization in the last months when the international board took over the control of the German organization. Most of the team opposed the management style and HR values of the international board. See here how ratings on the German anonymous employer review platform Kununu collapse over time, reporting the situation, when the international board took over management.
- Power continues to be held by the founders and their trusted people, some of them taking on other roles to make it appear as a more balanced management structure that does not exist. The systemic and structural problem will persist as long as large donors and the effective altruism philanthropists continue to allow this situation to persist.
- Predatory management, far from being isolated cases, the leadership model is based on coercion of employees. Hence, employees are afraid to speak up, as we have already seen here. A dissenting opinion means dismissal. It is common practice to motivate dismissals with professional law firms that advise on the best ways to fire “uncomfortable” people, without having anything to do with their performance.
- Fostering the culture of toxic competitiveness among organizations, as is known in some countries. Far from following the values and principles of effective altruism, the leadership model uses it to obtain funding, without sharing its values.
- Dismissals during medical leaves motivated by the predatory and toxic leadership model. Even victims of the predatory management taking medication for work-related anxiety episodes.
- It is common practice to sign non-disclosure clauses at the time of contract termination to prevent issues such as those described here from being known.
Far from being improved by the measures taken by Open Philanthropy Project (and other philanthropic organizations), the predatory management model imposed by the founders extends throughout Animal Equality’s international offices. As many prominent activists comment, “it’s an open secret.” If Open Philanthropy Project or other philanthropic organizations or major donors are not aware of this, it must be because they do not make the effort to know about it, not because of lack of resources. Something that is internationally known (a predatory and toxic model from top to bottom) is impossible that it cannot be managed by people with so many contacts in the environment.
As an example: after an employee satisfaction interview conducted in AE Spain in 2017, the results were so alarming that we know that the founders located in US expressed “you have to buy tickets for Spain”. Once they arrived there, they promised workers that they were coming to listen and solve problems created by the management in Spain (an AE founder). This made the workers express themselves freely, trusting the word of the founders located in the US. This was followed by the sudden dismissal of two key workers in Spain who had expressed the untenable incompetence of the Spanish management, something so well known internationally, that the former director of Spain was forced to retire from the management, although he still has full control of the decisions (same situation as with the current executive vice-president, who was just as well forced to retire from his previous position).
Everything mentioned here to improve the predatory model that the founders impose on AE does not do much to repair the harm done to dozens? hundreds? of victims of workplace harassment. Is this the best we can hope for?
Lewis, I would like to comment on your points in detail but I can not do that without jeopardizing my anonymity which I think it pretty clear. And I know that anything I could say OP already has been made aware of by several people. People have been treated and are being treated horribly and forced out of the organization after the changes you mentioned had been implemented. These are ongoing issues. Asking for more information at this point feels like people have been speaking out in vain so far. Reading things like this over and over again is really not helping the mental health of people who have been treated horribly but dared to speak out despite the risk.
Should people in positions of power who seem to have a track record of mismanagement be granted the same level of trust – and by extension protection – as the many, many people who are treated badly and people who want to hold people in power accountable? I can not imagine what more information could be necessary. How much worse do things need to become to justify more drastic action in your eyes? Animal rights advocacy is hard enough as we all know. But even without that baseline of stress – no one should be treated like a disposable human resource and be forced to witness unbelievably incompetent leadership being protected like this.
Quite honestly Lewis, what violates our trust in OP is seeing that after all the risk many of us took nothing has substantially changed. While you continue having “candid conversations with AE leadership”, AE leadership has not extended the same grace to its staff and has been anything but candid to its employees. As you confirmed yourself, OP has been aware of and addressing the problems with AE since 2019. You claim that significant actions were taken since, however, in 2020 what we actually saw was the issues escalating and not improving, culture becoming much worse to the point of affecting mental health of employees, leadership becoming much more authoritarian and despotic. To speak only about what is already public knowledge, in 2020 AE lost almost the entire Germany office and fired more than one employee on medical leave as retaliation. How then do you affirm that they are making significant changes? The said changes are clearly only on paper, and the discourse does not reflect the reality of the culture. People who are still working at AE continue telling us about the same problems, but they are afraid of speaking up since they know many of us already did and nothing has been done either by OP and others who we trusted would take action to hold the organisation accountable. As far as we know, independent directors joining the board aren’t actually that “independent”, but personal friends and very aligned with leadership. It is crystal clear to just about everyone who ever worked at AE that leadership is simply not qualified to manage the organisation. Unfortunately, OP’s continuous failure to act despite the piling amount of evidence received from multiple whistleblowers is part of the reason why so many of the most passionate and effective animal rights advocates are choosing to leave the movement and losing faith in effective altruism. We simply can’t in good faith believe that the most effective way to do the most good for animals entails continuing supporting organisations with such toxic culture.
Still, donors like you keep pouring funds under the guise of effectiveness when we all know AE is anything but cost-effective unless you take their fraudulent metrics at face value, which you really shouldn’t.
Lewis, with all the respect but I want to point out how frustrating it is to see that OPP continues to overlook all these serious issues. As people have said in this forum, due to the leadership of Animal Equality, people are depressed, leaving the animal advocacy movement, unemployed, and/or sick. “Candid conversations” didn’t work and are not going to work with Animal Equality. What else needs to happen until OPP takes drastic measures?
Thank you for your response, Lewis, but you understand if many of us are very skeptical. Writing anonymously on behalf of a number of former Animal Equality employees from at least three different countries who were all forced out of the organisation or resigned due to our attempts to hold leadership to account for their horrible treatment of staff, lies, nepotism, and complete lack of transparency. OP reached out to some of us in 2019, following the departure of a number of Directors (both country EDs and international department Directors) and staff, to discuss the situation. Many of us risked our careers, reputations, and likelihood of retaliation by AE leadership to speak with OP in the hope that we could help protect employees still working at the organization. Some of us spoke with OP about this more than once, and many of us provided specific examples of extremely problematic behavior by leadership. OP assured us it would protect us as well as those still working at AE but failed to take any concrete action to hold AE accountable, thus putting at risk the whistleblowers who took the risk to protect others. But instead, OP continues funding the organisation and this financing and enabling the abusive behavior reported by dozens of employees from multiple countries. Meanwhile AE leadership continues to fire all of those who dare to raise their voices, badmouth former employees framing them as problematic and difficult (when not worse), promote to leadership positions those problematic individuals who are personally close to leadership, and refuse to have a truly independent board. There is a plethora of evidence showing how toxic culture has direct impact on performance and effectiveness, and how mismanagement wastes resources. For example, if you only consider the amount of money paid directly to employees being fired, it already sums up to hundreds of thousand dollars, not considering adjacent costs of hiring, training, loss of effectiveness due to high turnover, etc. it means that a lot of donations are literally wasted by mismanagement. It is hard to understand what’s the reasoning behind OP’s decision to continue supporting AE. We would love for you to explain that and collectively we would like to say that we expect funders to take more responsibility for the culture they are enabling through their donations.
First of all, I would like to explain that I have just registered on the forum to maintain anonymity and not to harm anyone.
Unfortunately, the case you give as an example of Animal Equality is not the only one of bad practices towards their employees. As a former employee of Animal Equality, I have witnessed on numerous occasions harassment at work, abuse of authority, lack of transparency, lack of democracy, falsification of statistical data and fraudulent campaigns by the international direction.
It is very sad, it would be good if finally the appropriate actions were taken so that these bad practices do not continue.
This is such a sad thing to learn :(
I was an employee of Animal Equality for years and I have witnessed several cases of harassment from the leadership. Retaliation and harassment are common practices in the organization. Unfortunately, Animal Equality is a dictatorship. If you are an employee and you disagree to some degree with the leadership you might be fired without any prior notice. Even people that exceed the goals and expectations for the role are fired without any previous bad feedback.
In order to avoid more retaliation for the current staff, I suggest that OPP requires a strict policy and process in which Animal Equality’s directors must follow in case they want to lay off someone.
PS: I am also writing with an anonymous name since I don’t feel safe showing my name.
I’m so sorry you went through this. I have also met a few people in AE that went through the same thing :(
this is really serious