To the DMG board of directors and the broader DMG community, past and present —
After much introspection over the past year and a half, I’ve come to the difficult conclusion that it would be best if I stepped down from the board of directors.
In the spirit of transparency and accountability — and in hopes for the future of this org — I want to share a difficult account of my experiences on the board. I offer this statement with deep respect and care for DMG and the relationships I’ve built within it, and hope that you can receive this with openness and trust that I speak from a place of love for this community.
I’ve been a board member since 2018, a community member since 2014. I am now halfway across the world, working as a games designer in a field that provides opportunity for endlessly fascinating applications, and still meet people out here whose career trajectories have similarly been impacted and whose lives have changed forever for the better by having been in community with DMG.
Over the pandemic I survived a debilitating and far too lengthy grievance process at my corporate workplace, which has recently ‘concluded’ in a place that somewhat leaves me better (largely in thanks to advocates not in the leadership circles responsible, as well as my own exhaustive efforts). I learned a lot over this time, re-calibrated my expectations of said corporate workplace, and found new resolve in the necessity of my own abolitionist political practice/rhetoric.
In the midst of that happening, came the dismissal and exile of the longstanding Executive Director of DMG, Jennie. This came out of claims of a breach of our conflict of interest policy, with claims of abuse, both internally and externally communicated as unresolvable and absolute. From what I gathered from community members I’ve spoken to since, this conflict was shocking as it was opaque, and in that especially confusing considering we specifically espouse care in our conflict resolution policies, as well as transparency as part of our politic. There was trust that we as leadership were handling it in a way that was appropriate, though still an unease from its ripples.
I could not wrap my head around our (the boards) shared response to the accusations that were being raised, and was confused about decisions we were making in redress, but I did not trust myself enough and my capacity at this time to show up to help navigate it. This was at a particularly tumultuous time in the world, and as adrienne maree brown writes in her essay We Will Not Cancel Us, it was a time where I saw communities around me struggle with holding each other. Given my own challenges at the time, I passed my vote up to the majority, signed the letters in support of the conclusion.
Ultimately, regardless of the pandemic, regardless of how I may have been ‘justified’ considering my personal circumstances at the time, I failed in my duties as a member of this board to stay critical and grounded within the situation enough to hold us to our conflict resolution processes as well as our anti-oppressive community practice. I want to apologize to the community, to my fellow board members, to Jennie. I am profoundly sorry for my complicity in the outcome of this situation, and I am sorry for how overdue this effort towards reconciliation has been.
Much of my work over the last number of years has been in regards to researching intelligent populations, and from this I’ve come to understand that exile is one of the most violent things to do within a social species. I do not believe that we took the steps to differentiate abusive behaviour from interpersonal conflict in order to properly enact an accountability process from which we could all learn from. I have no desire to deny the claims Izzie has made, but in order to take the appropriate steps needed to rebuild trust within the community — especially when a founder and pillar for the last decade is centered as the aggressor — we needed to have the rigour to fight fair with clarity and transparency for the community. I believe that in the unprecedented chaos of the world as well as the organizational shifts happening at that moment, we as a board tried our best to do what’s right, and in that moment what that looked like was protecting our new ED. I don’t know what we learned from this, as a board, nor as a community, for how we hold each other accountable, and that’s been a lingering reason that has led me to writing this. Nothing about this conflict was made visible or documented in any community-minded way and only individual recourse was considered.
I could get into my conclusions and hypotheses and the details of the conflicting narratives at the centre of this, but regardless of that all, I will say this:
In the handover of the role of Executive Director from Jennie to Izzie — which in itself one could expect to be a challenging time — either coincidentally or expectedly, flags were raised about a potential conflict of interest. In response to these flags, and without offering a processed opportunity to present our concerns to her, we cut contact with Jennie as an official body, and in extension as individuals, and ultimately all but asked our community to do the same.
We responded to this conflict with exile and public shaming, without clear naming of harm/‘pattern of behaviour’, or declared intention around pattern breaking, and in this failed to establish new and trustworthy boundaries with the community. We did not have the rigour to fight fair, or to be principled nor discerning in this conflict, and instead responded with punitive measures that at its heart is in conflict with what we espouse as our progressive rhetoric.
How we responded to this conflict was not in line with my vision of conduct within life-affirming movements, nor my understanding of any articulations DMG has made of how we envision the industry we are working to reimagine.
I came out of my own situation at work deeply disappointed in the opportunities to do better that were continuously squandered. Meanwhile, Jennie posted a call to action to the board nearly a year ago that has entirely gone unanswered. I offer this in hopes of making our first steps towards reparation. I ask that the current board members of DMG likewise do this reflection and either rise to the challenge of greater accountability, or to step down as well to make room for the necessary growth and healing. I ask this with love for the community, and faith in our collective love and care for each other.
I offer this statement in vulnerability and with hope, with my own trust in how we handle and navigate conflict being shaken, and knowing that I’m risking my own belonging. I do not believe this situation represents what we want for each other, or the futures we imagine. In order to move towards the world we’ve envisioned through our work at DMG, we need to be able to practice healing, mediation, and validation in the present. That is my hope for the future of this community.
I share my reflections here on how I fell short of these values in hopes that the rest of you will ask yourselves difficult questions about how and why we arrived here. Not from a place of judgment or righteousness — but because these are the ideals that our community has nourished since the start, and we cannot grow without them.