An open letter to the Board of Directors of Pride Toronto

Click here to see our follow-up letter of January 26.

January 23, 2020

To the Board of Directors of Pride Toronto:

We, the undersigned, are current and past volunteer Team Leads who have collectively provided hundreds of hours of labour, without pay, to make one of the world’s largest Pride festivals happen year after year.

We do so out of deep love, respect, and dedication to our friends, family, neighbours, and members of the community. Even as boards of directors and staff members have repeatedly turned over, we volunteers have continued to serve as the backbone of this event. Our physical and mental labour are what we have to offer. Our resolute goal is to make each year’s Pride better than the last one.

Many of us have served in these roles for years; for a few of us it has been decades. Others among us have just begun our work with Pride in the past year, ready to commit to years of future service. What unifies us is the desire and drive to deliver a festival that can instil pride in every single member of our community.

And we have continued to do this each year, despite the ongoing cloud of controversy surrounding the makeup of the Board of Directors, our institutional relationship with both the police and the municipal government, and a relentlessly intense media focus.

We accept that our organization must address and resolve the difficult criticisms that finally received overdue attention during Black Lives Matter TO’s protest in the 2016 parade. We know that Pride must reconsider its relationship with the police. We know we must take decisive action to properly centre marginalized members of our community. We know that Pride has come to mean starkly different things to different members of our community, and that it can and must reflect both political action as well as communal celebration.

Pride is an enormous ship that by nature pivots slowly; we as its volunteer leaders know this, and we are constantly working to ensure this pivot continues in the right direction.

You, the current Board of Directors, promised increased transparency in your decision-making when you were elected. The members of Pride Toronto voted accordingly, embracing this commitment to transparency. Indeed, transparency was a focus of much of the talk in the recent Special General Meeting.

Transparency has been absent, however, in several recent actions of the Board. While it appears that the letter of the rules as outlined in Pride’s bylaws have been followed, the spirit of these actions leaves us frankly disappointed.

At the aforementioned SGM, a motion was presented regarding the election of interim Directors that took place on April 1, 2019. This motion affirmed that these elections did not follow the bylaws of Pride Toronto, which do not permit elections for “interim” Directors in one-year terms. The members that voted at the April 1, 2019 meeting did so in good faith, under the assumption that one-year “interim” Director positions were permitted. We elected four Directors under this good-faith assumption, and the only reasonable understanding of the vote result is that it reflected the members’ desire to elect the candidates for a one-year period.

Now, at the recent SGM, which took place on Tuesday, January 14, 2020 and excluded a significant number of members who were not notified about the meeting in time, it was proposed that these “interim” terms be reaffirmed as full three-year terms. Those who attended this SGM voted in favour of this affirmation, thus providing legitimacy to the Board as it is currently composed, including those who were elected less than a year ago as “interim” Directors. Few people, however, knew what was to happen the next day.

On Wednesday, January 15, 2020, Olivia Nuamah was removed as Executive Director of Pride Toronto. This news was not immediately shared with the membership of Pride.

On Friday, January 17, 2020, the deadline passed for anyone who wished to put themselves forward as a candidate for the Board of Directors.

On Tuesday, January 21, 2020, it was announced publicly that Olivia Nuamah was no longer Executive Director of Pride Toronto. No context was provided alongside this abrupt announcement. Any member who, in light of this news, may have decided to stand as a candidate for the Board of Directors was not able to do so, as the deadline for candidacy had already passed. It was also too late for any motion to be added to the agenda for the Annual General Meeting scheduled for Wednesday, January 29, 2020.

It is difficult to consider this series of dates without a deep sense of cynicism.

We do not dispute the Board of Directors’ power and prerogative to terminate the Executive Director as they deem fit.

We are deeply concerned, however, by the timing of this termination, the timing of the announcement of the termination, and the seemingly total absence of planning for this transition. No information has been provided regarding an interim Executive Director to oversee operations while a new ED is recruited. We have no way of knowing that important deadlines for major grants in support of Pride’s operations are being met, for example the Celebrate Ontario grant application deadline, which passed on January 21 and which brought Pride $250,000 in 2019. At a time when our financial situation has been stabilized after years of unsustainable deficit, failure to pursue available government grant money would call into question the fiduciary priorities of this Board.

We are also concerned that these events have taken place amid the disenfranchisement of a large number of volunteers who satisfy the requirements outlined in section 6.3 of the corporate bylaws and who should have automatically become full members of the organization. Pride maintains records of volunteer service, and should be providing these records to the Board for approval after each festival. Instead, volunteers are forced to complete a superfluous administrative step online before they are added to the membership registry. Missing this step has prevented many volunteer-members from receiving information about meetings, robbing them of a voice in governance and denying them the opportunity to take full advantage of their membership. Indeed, many eligible volunteers were never even notified of the online administrative step in the first place, thus guaranteeing their effective disenfranchisement.

And in addition to all of this, we have also learned of financial improprieties committed by members of the Board of Directors. Your response, hastily published in the wake of a damning newspaper report, denies none of the accusations. The media continues to report on the story. And still, we know nothing about whether the Director(s) in question have faced any consequence for their actions. It is now apparent that the Board continued to hide this serious breach from the membership over the past months, including at the January 14 SGM, where a motion on transparency was part of the agenda. Exactly when did you plan to demonstrate transparency regarding this incident?

As the volunteer leaders of Pride, we are accustomed to putting our heads down and carrying on with our work, regardless of changes that take place in governance. We have continued tirelessly in our roles, hoping that the endless conflict, legal manoeuvring, and controversy surrounding our organization will not eclipse the enormous good that comes out of Pride.

We have been reluctant to speak out publicly, but at this point we feel we have no choice. We speak with deepest concern, in one voice, as a group of people who have put our hearts and souls into making Pride a success year after year.

As the 2020 festival rapidly approaches, we demand that the Board of Directors immediately address the alarming lack of central operational leadership, in the absence of an Executive Director. We wish to work under a Board whose philosophy of leadership goes above and beyond simply satisfying the letter of the law, and whose notions of transparency serve the organization as a whole, rather than a narrow set of priorities. We need to feel confident that our Board of Directors takes their fiduciary responsibilities seriously, and can be trusted as stewards of this organization we’ve worked so hard to build.

Pride as an institution is not perfect, and it never will be. It will never satisfy every member of our community, and we will always get some things wrong. All we want, as the volunteer leaders of Pride, is the opportunity to continue our work, by constantly improving the festival and making it into something we can all be proud of, free from this constant cloud of controversy and chaos.

Signed by current and past volunteer team leads, who can be reached at prideto.teamleads@gmail.com:

Rai Allen
Amar Al-Sbayi
Robert Arnuco
Mark Babcook
Michael J. Bryant
Salvo Candela
Michael Cramp
Alexander Dow, EIT
Joanna Eaton
Joey Fascio
Roberto Gerrard-Martinez
Nathan Gibson
Davina Hader
Ben Hedley
Yuri Hernandez
Sandra Jeremiah
Zed K.
Benjamin Kent
Arielle Kersey
Justin Kusnir
Marc Lalonde
Catherine McGinnis
Ferdinand Ngo
Ruth Noble
Jose Patiño-Gómez
Marjorie Richards
Matteo Scurci
Sarah Sheikh
Edna Simmons
Tyler J. Sloane
Tristan Smith
Kevin Stephney
Tricia
Patricia Tucci
Taylor Vanderwey