Who Will Hold Appalshop Accountable?

Appalachian nonprofit Appalshop and its theater wing, Roadside, are silencing serious allegations of employee abuse. I’m one of the whistleblowers.

Author’s photo. Appalshop, Inc.

Content warning: psychological and physical abuse, assault, substance use.

My name is Amy Brooks. I’m a community-based dramaturg, arts producer, and writer. In 2018, I co-founded Cardinal Cross Arts Co., a team using interdisciplinary arts and rural-urban exchange to support and promote the work of Appalachian women. I am also a recovering survivor of Roadside Theater and Appalshop’s systemic — and widely silenced — employee abuse.

This statement is my testimony of those years of silencing and abuse.

I have many counter-narratives I could share: stories that show Appalshop’s positive impact and legacy of life-changing community engagement, including my own good experiences of this work. For two reasons, I do not include those stories here. They are amply available elsewhere, since Appalshop and Roadside are respected legacy organizations (you can see a loose timeline of their development here); and they are not the history Appalshop needs to reckon with in order to survive. If praise were dollars, Appalshop would have a much higher operating budget than its current ceiling. Restorative justice, not money or hype, is the resource in critical shortage at Appalshop. If my words help rally Appalshop’s community around that cause, I can sleep despite the sadness and rage I re-live in writing them.

I. CONFRONTING THE PAST

Founded in 1975 as the theater wing of Kentucky-based arts and media center Appalshop, Roadside Theater specializes in community-based play production, policy writing, and grassroots economic organizing. They are a well-known ensemble still officially or unofficially managed by two founding members in their 70s: a male former Artistic Director and female Managing Director, who (as of 2019, at least) has long hosted Roadside headquarters in her house in southwestern Virginia, far from Appalshop’s east Kentucky office building.

In my years serving as Roadside’s Program Director in that house (2016–2019), I witnessed — and sometimes, to my shame, participated in — misogynist, racist, homophobic, appropriative, and verbally abusive behaviors in the name of “community cultural development.”

Some of these incidents were public, but many happened behind closed doors. A senior Appalshop manager remarked to me early on that Roadside had “a history of burning through employees”; in my arrogance, I believed myself exempt. As long as I could compromise and endure, I would be the one to make a positive change in this ensemble—to usher us into the future. So I publicly parroted Roadside rhetoric championing white rural working class integrity. I privately withstood their often anti-feminist, anti-Black Lives Matter remarks. I listened to them deride the practice of women- and POC-majority organizations, including ones they had helped found, as “silly” and “a waste of time.” I promoted the work of white men who wrote about equity, but who stormed out of rooms when partners of color challenged their dominance. I helped our Trump-supporting constituents minimize the impact of their actions, deflect accountability, and default to economic reductionism. And I used my writing and presenting skills to help Roadside directors co-opt the historical language and organizing tools of BIPOC justice movements — tools like story circles — to funnel money and resources away from more progressive organizations of color and into our operating budget.

My professional opportunities flourished with my connection to Roadside and Appalshop. As an employee of a legacy cultural organization with a robust network of allies, funders, and collaborators, I profited by my proximity to power. For the first time, I was invited to speak on panels rather than spectating them. I had access to rooms filled with influential artists, economists, policymakers, academics, and funders. Moreover, my job ensured a living wage and healthcare during years when less privileged people in our region (and nation) were aggressively targeted for disenfranchisement, deportation, and denial of social services.

Then there were my supervisors’ delicious home-cooked dinners: simple, elegant meals replete with warm fellowship, flowing liquor, and delightful storytelling. We laughed, sang, and recounted stories of Roadside’s work among communities across the globe. On these evenings, it was easy to believe I belonged to a family of artists whom I could both love and respect. That our working relationships were rooted in the “authenticity” Appalshop advertises in its press materials.

But soon, in pivotal moments among Roadside leaders, I began to see that our work was also rooted in contempt and exploitation. When the Artistic Director and our male partners led presentations of our shared work, I often had to beg to be included. I had to fight my way into conversations, a humiliating spectacle. In almost every case, the work was published under their names only. I was told in private that my writing and strategic planning skills were “essential”; but I was ignored, undermined, or even mocked publicly. Roadside leaders and their accomplices — especially one male Appalshop organizer with a documented pattern of toxic attitudes to women and minorities— routinely co-opted my work, ignored my communications, or spoke over me in meetings.

“[T]he men from Appalshop were talking about equitable and inclusive processes, but not treating their female colleagues in a way that I would expect from an organization that prides itself on social justice. …It was noticeable to me from the very beginning that the women involved with the project were seen as unimportant, and not invited to speak or even sit in the front of the room to represent the organization. When the women on the team did chime in, the men who were leading the session appeared impatient with them and even sometimes annoyed that they were interjecting into the conversation…”

— from a 2018 written statement, submitted by a national nonprofit administrator who asked to remain anonymous

Roadside leaders refused to address my growing concerns about harmful, controlling behaviors in our project. “You’re always pulling some crap like this,” I was told when I advocated for myself. Or: “You want credit. It’s the first thing anyone would notice about you.” I was so shamed by this dismissal, it only belatedly occurred to me I had a right to credit for my own words, my own work.

Worse, I was chastised by the male Artistic Director if I dared to criticize any aspect of Roadside (whether programming- or personnel-related) to our coworkers at Appalshop. I was told in no uncertain terms that Roadside business stayed in Roadside. So, rather than filing grievances with far-off managers who seemed unconcerned with my bosses’ foibles, I focused my efforts internally. I documented my ethical conflicts in emails to the Artistic Director and our partners; I began to push back verbally at oppressive language and bad behavior within our team; I wrote and circulated parity contracts I hoped would provide us with community agreements for more equitable practices; I drew up an early plan that would eventually develop into a proposal for a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion board committee. Yet nothing changed. I had no allies within the organization.

Roadside’s fragile balance crumbled when I began discreetly questioning other Appalshop women about sexual and verbal harassment allegations I’d heard leveled at a former Roadside contributor (a man my supervisors had defended in the past, bitterly dividing Appalshop staff, and with whom Roadside was still indirectly connected). When I mentioned to our Managing Director that this person had a reputation for harm, she scolded and threatened me with ultimatums. She claimed I had “betrayed their trust” and swore she would cut me off personally if I continued asking questions.

Eventually, when I circulated a statement saying I was stepping down from a major organizing initiative, citing a hostile environment and lack of professional accountability, the female Managing Director told me not to come back — that I was no longer trusted or useful, and that I would be better suited to “contract work.” The Artistic Director, a man I had once believed to be my mentor, sat silently, arms crossed, refusing to speak. He never acknowledged me again, except in one terse exit meeting. I immediately transitioned to a generalist role at Appalshop. Appalshop’s Executive Director, a younger man than my Roadside supervisors, may have offered this position out of respect, pity, or in an attempt to avoid charges of retaliation.

Then, soon after he and the Managing Director pushed me out, the male Artistic Director was abruptly “retired” from Roadside.

His mysterious disappearance met with zero fanfare or acknowledgment from Appalshop.

What had happened? Appalshop’s Executive Director would reveal little, insisting that his board had barred him from discussing the circumstances of my former boss’s (not entirely voluntary) retirement with staff. “It’s related to your issues, but not something that directly impacts you,” he hedged. “You don’t need to worry about it.” After weighing this, I began my own detective work among external partners. And I applied for Roadside’s now-vacant Artistic Director job.

Still, I questioned what it was all worth, why I persisted. I was demoralized and struggling with PTSD symptoms—nightmares, fatigue, hypervigilance, volatility, and numbness—from years of workplace humiliation and anxiety. I felt like a failure to boot. In the aftermath of my exile from Roadside, Appalshop’s Executive Director had explicitly blamed me for “not going through proper channels” and “pushing too hard in the wrong direction.” (These charges will be familiar to many people, especially women, who have had the audacity to air workplace grievances.) On some level I knew investing more time and energy in Appalshop might be foolish; that its culture of top-down dysfunction was unlikely to change. But the sunk cost fallacy is powerful when we have bigger truths we’re afraid to confront.

In May of 2019, my pleas for information were answered by two trusted senior partners in the cultural sector. These allies confided to me that core Appalshop managers, and possibly its board, were concealing a #MeToo allegation written by a former colleague against the now-retired male Artistic Director. “Don’t stay there too long,” one ally said, looking me in the eye. “Appalshop is one of the least humane places I’ve ever seen.”

That night, I called a former colleague whose work I admired and whom I had grown to care for. She told me, “I’ve been waiting for you to call.” And she forwarded a brief statement she had written.

In this statement, my colleague detailed horrific long-term abuse by our former Artistic Director: psychological manipulation, grooming, gaslighting, a sexual assault while intoxicated, and a pervasive culture of sexual harassment.

Her written allegation, though measured and concise, remains one of the most shocking records of personal trauma I have ever read. Moreso because these words forced me to see that many of the things he did to her — with the crucial exception of sexual advances — he did to me too.

Within days, I withdrew my name from the final hiring round of the Roadside Theater AD position. I confronted Appalshop’s Executive Director about his silencing of these allegations — a silencing accomplished with private communications (though Appalshop board meetings are public), coercive non-disparagement clauses in staff contracts (one of which I signed myself, though it has since expired), and cease-and-desist letters served by the retired Artistic Director to national partners who had read, and begun to circulate, the statement alleging sexual abuse.

The cease-and-desist letters, I confirmed through an involved source, had worked. Early stirrings for accountability and transparency—stirrings begun by partners in universities and nonprofits who had scurried to erase all association with the alleged abuser by stripping him of awards, uninviting him from speaking engagements, and scrubbing their websites of his photos—were snuffed by fears of lawsuits.

Back in Kentucky, there was still time to act. “It’s not too late to do the right thing,” I told the Executive Director. “You need to address this. Make a public statement. At least discuss it with the staff. They have to know.” But my efforts were met with silence and deflections.

That same week, my contract was ended on the spot by Appalshop’s Executive Director. After nearly four years of high performance and loyalty to our organization, he ejected me from the building with no notice, thanks, or farewell.

II. STANDING IN THE PRESENT

What went wrong? How could all this be allowed within a supposedly progressive, humanitarian arts nonprofit in the 21st century?

To understand, you first need to feel the weight of respect, gratitude, affection — and yes, awe — that Appalshop has exerted in Letcher County, and the larger community-based arts field, for a half century. It is a ship steered, in turns, by inspired storytellers and self-mythologizing cults of personality. The Appalshop board was, and remains, stacked with its own staff members and community constituents. This blatant conflict of interest enfeebles Appalshop’s self-governance and makes objective oversight almost impossible. It allows staff at every level, from AmeriCorps VISTA workers to Executive Director, to indulge with impunity in behaviors like:

• public intoxication
• uncontrolled fits of rage
• fiscal mismanagement
• chronic absenteeism, even from important funding meetings and presentations
• sexually inappropriate words and actions
• hosting underage participants in unsafe facilities
• psychological, verbal, and physical bullying.

All of these I witnessed in my years at Appalshop.

Appalshop is where accountability goes to die.

Or rather, accountability may be leveled against one violator while another goes unchecked, depending on the agendas at play. This patchy ethic is entrenched by an all-white minority of founding partners who cannot (or will not) retire. Instead, they coast on acclaim from creative output of decades past, re-enacting petty power struggles and nursing grudges older than their protégés. And all the while, they profit from an endless influx of those vibrant, talented, and idealistic younger workers — the real backbone of Appalshop, though too often their labor and genius are co-opted or taken for granted.

The woman who spoke out against our former mentor is a clear example of such predation. She was human collateral damage to Roadside’s grind to self-justify and self-sustain its leaders’ power at any cost — a casualty to whom Appalshop is ultimately accountable.

Yet Appalshop and Roadside leaders have never acknowledged the harm done to my colleague, or to me. The economic development project my brilliant colleague co-conceived remains a major driver of Roadside Theater revenue, supported and promoted in Appalshop literature — but stripped of her name, and mine, and other women contributors’ names. Meanwhile he, the mentor who hurt and exploited us, remains enshrined in Roadside media alongside his enforcers.

And quietly—behind the scenes, just beyond the camera’s focal point—alleged abusers are ushered back into Appalshop’s fold. This whitewashing of Roadside’s harm is enabled by accomplices with whom the former Artistic Director continues to tour, publish, and teach. It is bankrolled by unwitting accomplices, like the major arts foundation at whose regional gathering I saw the man featured as a panel speaker in late 2019; and the ensemble theater coalition he and Roadside famously co-founded.

The whitewashing is enabled by our allies, too: artists and educators who, like me, cannot claim ignorance of Appalshop’s toxicity, but have long rationalized our association with Roadside Theater and its retired leader. People who tell themselves that—because he now operates largely behind the scenes—Roadside’s threat has been neutralized.

How can I blame these people, when for years I championed my mentor and his institution? There was grant money to be raised with him, and I was good at raising it. He had a lifetime’s worth of skill, stories, and labor to teach. So I learned. To my detriment, to my credit, I learned from him. All I can do now is fumble at unlearning him, healing from him, and telling truths I hope may restore a shred of my integrity.

III. PROTECTING APPALSHOP’S FUTURE

Appalshop’s Executive Director once told me that his main duty was “to protect the organization.” I didn’t fully understand, and still can’t guess, what he meant by this. Is “protecting an organization” a legal process? Is it investments that defend against financial ruin? A three-year strategic plan that satisfies funders’ criteria for “capacity” or “scalability”? IP branding and communication strategies? Firewalls and insurance policies?

Who is ultimately responsible for protecting organizations — and from what threats? If a great danger to an institution comes in the form of its own respected leaders, will we recognize it? And if we recognize that threat, where do our loyalties lie? Is the heart of leadership “protecting” a name brand…or is there a deeper calling still?

What must a leader risk in service to the truth about their organization?

Appalshop is not the first nonprofit called to account for worker abuse. But the gulf between Appalshop’s promise to our community — a promise of equity, worker control, a means of speaking truth to power — and its abusive reality is particularly cruel. In our hearts we expect betrayal from the coal bosses, the sham politicians, the reckless pill prescribers and parachute media hacks who exploit our vulnerability to trauma and addiction. But to be betrayed in this way by an institution that calls itself an “anchor” in the defense of me and you and working people in this region, one which celebrities have touted as “a beacon of decency and forward-thinking”…this is a betrayal too cruel to accept.

In the void of justice for harm done to its employees by the most powerful people in leadership, a worker-run organization like Appalshop inflicts trauma from the roots up.

Because its staff have an unusual degree of control over policy and governance, they should have an according responsibility to each other’s well being. That covenant has not been fully honored. Appalshop employees witness many kinds of inappropriate behavior to vulnerable colleagues and community members; they adopt varying degrees of resistance and complicity. While some staff thrive, more leave in droves, privately citing toxic work conditions and exploitative labor practices.

Of one such woman — a new hire who burned out fast and was ostracized for her professional and interpersonal problems — the Executive Director remarked: “Maybe she deserved to fail.” Rather than a prescribed course of evaluation and correction (he explained), rather than intervention by HR specialists, Appalshop relies on a trial-by-fire probationary ordeal. You sink or swim; you assimilate and earn respect. The outsiders, the “weak,” he seemed to imply, don’t deserve a supervisory safety net any more than they deserve a place at Appalshop.

I disagree. I say she, like me and my colleague who alleged sexual abuse, deserved better. And I say that Appalshop’s greatest asset — that exclusivity — is also its critical flaw. As what Bayard Rustin called a “community center of power,” Appalshop preserves and amplifies the authentic language, arts, and spiritual practices of Whitesburg; Letcher County; eastern Kentucky; and the larger central Appalachian coalfields among which I was born and raised. It also amplifies our systemic injustices; our tendency towards corruption and concealment; our geographic insularity, verging on xenophobia; and our ruinous generational solidarity with white patriarchs.

In the end, protecting an organization is about establishing boundaries to safeguard the physical, emotional, and professional well-being of the people who work there.

No matter how noble its mission, fine its artistic output, or enthusiastic its public testimonials, a nonprofit is only as credible as its employees are safe, respected and well paid. Not some employees—all of us. Our goal should be a workplace that reflects our core values from the inside out. Call it institutional integrity.

Appalshop has long demonstrated this care in its commitment to retirement, maternity, healthcare, and other benefits for its employees of every tier. Yet benefits alone don’t constitute restorative justice; they don’t redress past hurts, careers scuttled, or mental health compromised. Benefits don’t pay years of lost wages or hold alleged abusers to account. Institutional integrity is what compels leaders to take these action steps. That, and a healthy desire to survive.

Institutional integrity is critical to Appalshop’s survival. That the organization’s executive heads, board, and (certainly in the case of Roadside’s elder Directors) leaders have long concealed credible allegations of abuse and discrimination poses an existential threat to the organization, a threat which must be seen and addressed. Not by quietly “retiring” accused abusers with untainted legacies and robust pensions; but by naming the harm those powerful leaders have done along with the good — and preventing further injury.

Today I am calling on Appalshop and Roadside leaders to confront the harm they have done: to me, and to my colleague who alleged abuse years ago.

I will no longer sit in silence while friends, organizations, and peers I respect make themselves complicit in the sanitization of Appalshop’s public image, as I once did.

I deny the use of words like “justice,” “change,” and “leadership transition,” when surely we know enough about Roadside and Appalshop’s injustices to demand they make an inventory of their actions.

I stand in solidarity with Roadside and Appalshop survivors, many of whom carry heavy memories of disillusionment, loneliness, and moral despair alongside our fond ones of community and care.

Especially I stand by my friend, whose allegations of abuse have never been acknowledged by Appalshop or Roadside Theater. To tell her unequivocally: I believe you and it’s not your fault.

I’m nobody important in the long shadow of Appalshop’s history — Roadside’s history. By no means was I a perfect employee or a perfect mentee. But I deserved to be treated with dignity and humanity in my workplace just the same.

What I am today is a West Virginian woman with a voice Appalshop did not silence, and I’m here to use it. I am here to be heard after years of recovery. I am here to listen to your stories of silencing, shame, complicity, compromise, lies of omission, and lost potential in institutions like Appalshop and many others. More than anything, I am here to break the Appalshop/Roadside cycle of half-truths and propaganda with real stories of trauma, accountability, and love for our friends who struggled but survived.

Update: On July 24, 2021, upon learning that I planned to name Roadside and Appalshop in a #MeToo panel at the Hurricane Gap Community Theater Institute in Bledsoe, KY, Appalshop Executive Director Alex Gibson and Roadside co-Director Becca Finney (who replaced our male AD) issued the following statement to a closed group of participants:

“Roadside Theater chooses to withdraw from our leadership position within the Hurricane Gap Institute because we believe we cannot serve as regional leaders until we have modeled that leadership through transparency and accountability. We acknowledge that many of our regional partners were badly shaken by the events surrounding [male Artistic Director]’s departure from Roadside Theater and Appalshop. As we undergo this transition in leadership, Roadside’s new leaders — Becca Finney and Tiffany Turner — are working to reshape both culture and policy to ensure Roadside is a safe place to work. That work is ongoing, but much work remains to be done.

We look forward to collaborating more fully with the Hurricane Gap community when we are able to better model our values. We begin that rebuilding now by sharing some of the specific steps that we’re already implementing:

• Restructure Roadside Theater to better embody Roadside’s values of equitable ensemble collaboration.
• Announce the complete transition of leadership that has taken place both within Roadside Theater and Roadside’s Performing Our Future coalition.
• Issue a statement of accountability and transparency to national partners and funders regarding the leadership transition at Roadside Theater.
• Create a permanent Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Subcommittee of the Appalshop Board with unique authority to receive and respond to staff concerns regarding equity-related issues/incidents.
• Collaborate with the Performing Our Future coalition delegations to tell a complete version of the coalition’s origin story, which is as of yet untold.
• Contract with regional educators who possess expertise in gender-based power dynamics, so we might build a more healthy institutional culture.
• Contract with regional partners to facilitate restorative justice dialogues internally at Appalshop.
• Train Roadside Theater leadership in the principles and practices of Intimacy Choreography, for all future Roadside Theater productions.
• Host convenings with our regional theater partners to identify how we, as Roadside Theater, might better build trust and positive culture in our region.”

LET’S HOLD APPALSHOP AND ROADSIDE ACCOUNTABLE TO THESE PROMISES.

Please sign this petition calling for Appalshop and Roadside to honor the terms of their statement.

UPDATE (9/30/21): Read selected community responses to this article:

Appalshop, Abuse, and Reckoning: Community Responses

Amy Brooks is a 5th-generation West Virginian with a B.F.A. in theater from West Virginia University and an M.F.A. in dramaturgy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a co-founder and Lead Artist of Cardinal Cross Arts Co., a member of Alternate ROOTS, and an Intercultural Leadership Institute 2018–2019 Fellow.