Email To Other Lights For Liberty Co-founders
This is a supplement to the piece I published on July 18th, “Why I’m Leaving Lights For Liberty.” In that piece, I mention that “via email, I threatened to quit unless several key changes were made.” This is that email (see comments below):
I sent it to the four other co-founders on June 28th. Though all four are public and have identified themselves in their Twitter bios as L4L co-founders, I’ve only left visible the names of the two women who have taken the step of making themselves public faces of Lights For Liberty on L4L’s Twitter and Facebook. I also included on this email the woman I call “the lawyer” in my previous piece, so as to keep her in the loop. She had quit earlier the same day.
After sending, I stepped back from interacting with the group for a couple days to see what they would choose (while continuing prep for the DC event individually). I tapped back in after I was told they were in agreement with what I wrote, when I saw that lineup power for our five anchor events was in fact being given to local organizations, and when they began actively inviting impacted people and people of color to join the national team and invited me to extend the invitation as well.
Unfortunately, no one from the “national team” established was ever added to the five-person group chat where daily and strategic decisions were made. Rather, they ended up more as a figurehead advisory board given no real power.
I see that Lights For Liberty has announced a Board of Advisors for their burgeoning nonprofit. This past Friday, Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin touted many of the names of those amazing and highly reputable people on her livestream, Resistance Live, as evidence that L4L would be led by impacted people and experts. My concern is that an Advisory Board’s role is typically to advise, not lead.
I wonder why, in their announcement on Twitter, L4L states that decision-making for the nonprofit will be “driven by” impacted people, immigrant organizations, and advocates, as opposed to “done by.”
Who will be making the final daily and strategic decisions? Who is the leadership who has agreed to do this unpaid? It appears that either:
- impacted people are being asked to contribute their labor free of charge, or
- leadership for this new immigration rights nonprofit will remain in the hands of four white women (which would be in line with an unfortunate trend).
Neither option is ethical.
As I helped create this platform, I am responsible for speaking out — not staying silent — when it’s being misused.
It’s not too late for the cofounders to step aside, perhaps place themselves on the Board of Advisors amongst those other brilliant advocates, hand decision-making power (in roles such as Executive Director, etc.) over to impacted people, and find a way to pay them. It’s also not too late to scrap the nonprofit plan and put their time and energy (and the money it takes to establish a nonprofit) into volunteering for existing nonprofits.
I hope to see these women do the right thing, for the greater good.
