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.
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.