image via CNN

Editor’s Note- Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudon (NLMH) is a grass-roots political organization whose primary work is ensuring affordable housing and utilities for all, especially low-income and BIPOC people living in the Hudson Valley, and “racial, climate, energy, and immigration justice.” After the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, which occurred at the very beginning of college student’s summer internships, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and protests against police violence and the carceral state became intensely scrutinized by the American government and most media outlets.

NLMH did recognize the movement for Black lives, adding references to it in their fundraising requests and phone-banking scripts, but interns felt that the organization which claims to be committed to racial justice should do more. As stated in the open letter, interns requested that NLMH should make their support of the principles of the BLM movement clear, should facilitate and lead conversations about what it means to defund the police and move towards racial justice, and to provide support for BIPOC interns who were most affected by these injustices. Together the interns wrote and signed an open letter which included grievances towards the organization, demands for vocal support of BLM, and suggestions for how NLMH can support their individual interns and the movement on a nation-wide scale.

Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson promptly fired the 60 interns who aired their grievances through a single email, jeopardizing the funding some of them received through their various colleges. Contra La Máquina formed in response to what they describe as the deviation of NLMH from their goals through the “Non-Profit Industrial Complex” that actively recreates harmful power dynamics and and inequitable workplace structures that they claim to be opposed to. The response to NLMH on the firing of interns and racial injustices from Contra La Máquina follows:

On June 26th, 2020, Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson (NLMH) fired 60 summer interns by way of a single email, leaving us shocked, bewildered, hurt, and putting several of us in financial jeopardy by threatening the stipends that some of us were receiving from our schools. 

We are a collective of community members and students from different racial, ethnic, socio-economic backgrounds who have all been harmed by NLMH. We have grown increasingly unsettled with the actions of the organization that we were once a part of, and have spent the summer putting together tiny pieces of a puzzle that seems to get bigger and bigger. In collaboration with community volunteers and a former organizer, the picture has become clearer. Together, we have chosen to transform this hurt into healing. In this open letter, we are writing to tell our story from our perspective, and ask Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson to engage in an accountability process for the harms committed. 

These are stories that must be told to begin any sort of accountability process for Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson. As we write this open statement, we are still in the early stages of envisioning what we want this accountability to look like, and we are extending an invitation to anyone to collaborate with us and see this process through. We open this up to the public as we were unsuccessful in holding NLMH accountable internally. We are telling our stories to offer readers a peek into our experiences as interns within this organization. 

Timeline

On June 3rd, 2020, NLMH’s summer internship program began, amidst global uprisings that emerged after the lynching of George Floyd, which had occurred just a week prior. Sixty interns (60) crowded into our first day of a 5-hour orientation via Zoom. During this session, there were only brief, superficial mentions of the state of the world, of the rebellions occurring in the streets, of the incredible work being done by Black communities across the so-called United States. The staff discouraged us from prioritizing actions taking place on the streets over our intern shifts and the work that we were doing for NLMH. Still, the organization had not released a statement publicly nor internally in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. We had received one communication from NLMH regarding Black Lives Matter, though it only addressed the movement tangentially—it implied that we should feel proud of the work we were doing for NLMH, because by default, the issues that the organization works on affect Black people too, and that we should capitalize on the movement for wealth redistribution and channel that into NLMH. 

Over the course of the first week of the internship, the way that NLMH related to Black people and the wider BLM movement began to upset and concern us. Many of the interns, especially Black interns, were grieving, hurting, and angry; we were emotionally exhausted and traumatized. Our requests to make space for the emotional turmoil of the moment with respect to Black interns and interns of color were repeatedly denied. We asked if we could hold space to center Black voices, if we could dedicate some of our political education blocks to highlighting the work of Black radicals and revolutionaries, and we were repeatedly told that we didn’t have time, or that this would have to be discussed with a higher-up, one of the administrators, first. 

For our internship, we were organized into smaller teams of 10 interns, with one NLMH staff member as our “team leader.” Many of the interns who were later involved in drafting the Intern Statement for Black Lives Matter were originally placed in the same group, where we first started talking and organizing with each other around our concerns with the disjointed way NLMH’s work and mission included Black lives. We brought up our issues time after time to the staff and administration of NLMH, through phone calls, through asking questions during our shifts, through submitting feedback forms—but even after all of that, our concerns were still not being addressed by the NLMH staff. 

We, as a collective of current interns dissatisfied and concerned with the way our internship was going, decided to write a list of demands to the organization about their response to Black Lives Matter. We were all invested in the work of NLMH and wanted to see the organization live up to the ideals they claimed to hold. We believed this to be our responsibility as people who were working to advance their mission to “build power for a Hudson Valley, New York State, and country that works for all of us.” From our intern handbook (excerpt below) which we had signed onto upon accepting the internship, we took on this extra work outside of our internship to “be a protagonist,” particularly around the organization and its mission.  

In the organization-wide Slack Channel, which included all interns and staff, we announced that we were working on a list of demands surrounding NLMH’s response to Black Lives Matter (or lack thereof) and made an open call to other interns to see if they wanted to be a part of our collective effort. Caitlin Munchik, the Development & Communications Manager, replied that she and other staff were “excited to see what we came up with.” (We lost access to this platform and do not have a screenshot of the thread.) Over the next few weeks, we met together for hours after our shifts, envisioning, planning, and writing.

On June 23rd, we sent our statement and list of demands to the staff and administration of Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, with 56 signatures from interns and former interns who were in support of the demands. The Intern Statement on Black Lives Matter is an 8 page document, and it holds 16 demands. 

That evening, NLMH staff member Molly Dolman responded to our demands on behalf of the organization. The email did not respond to the content of our statement, but instead communicated the unilateral decision to pause the internship, stating that we would all be having a meeting soon. 

In the meantime, we were given the option to attend one-on-one meetings with either Jonathan the Executive Director or Caitlin to “share our feelings.” Many of us felt uncomfortable at the prospect of having a one-on-one meeting with an administrator with whom we had not developed a relationship. The power dynamic in that situation was especially intimidating for interns of color, as the administrators are both white. Only a few interns signed up to attend those meetings. Some of the interns who had chosen to attend one-on-one meetings had even expressed feeling intimidated and gaslit by the staff. 

On June 24th, Molly Dolman sent another email on behalf of the organization saying they would be hosting a mandatory meeting on June 30th—it would be an hour and a half, and they would facilitate and craft the agenda without any mention of how interns would be involved in the planning process. 

A day later, June 25th, we sent another email communicating our uneasiness with the co-optation of our call for the town hall, which was originally requested by us in our third demand. We requested to be involved in the organizing process of the town hall, that Black interns voices be centered, that we dedicate more time to this meeting as it is a complex and difficult topic, that we allot time for healing afterwards, and that they provide an alternative space for intern testimonies rather than one-on-one. We envisioned it as an opportunity for us, specifically interns of color, to be heard by the staff, administration, and board of directors after feeling continuously dismissed throughout the many attempts to reach out about our concerns with the internship and the organization. We acknowledge that our tone within this email was blunt. We had reached a point of deep frustration with the organization, as every attempt to speak up about our concerns had gone completely unheard.

On June 26th, NLMH sent an email to all interns with the subject line: Update on your Internship, firing all 60 summer interns in one blow. In its contents, the entirety of the staff accused us of “power grabbing” within the organization. The email placed Latinx staff and the organization’s “member base” in direct opposition to the interns (and in doing so, tokenized them throughout the email and made blanket assumptions that interns were not members of Latinx or other marginalized communities). The email also accused us of acting without context or humility, and not knowing what was going on “behind the scenes” in the organization.

The email labeled us as “a group of college students who don’t live here and temporarily attend elite colleges locally,” though that is the exact demographic that NLMH targets and recruits for their internship programs. We perceived the hypocrisy in their attempts to assign us this identity as an attempt to discredit our frustrations while failing to reckon with the issue of representation within their own organization (Demand #7): an organization that has an entirely white administration (including executive director), half of which are graduates from Vassar College. 

The majority of the now former interns who have been organizing together as Contra La Máquina and who wrote the demands were not white, and not wealthy. In opposition to our requests for financial equity within the internship (Demand #11), NLMH copied staff from our academic institutions on the firing email, putting the financial stipends that some of us were receiving and relying on in jeopardy. 

After we were fired, we took much needed time to begin healing but gradually came back together as a collective to figure out how to process the recent events and heal together. We spoke with Ignacio Acevedo, the former Lead Organizer with NLMH and current Bard College student, who was forced to resign. Our group met with him and other former members of the Mesa Directiva (Leadership Table) of NLMH and shared our experiences working with NLMH. In a separate open letter, Ignacio shares his upsetting experience working with NLMH: 

“For me, as a person of color, I was looking for a place to feel safe, to feel valued, to feel heard. But in the end, we felt humiliated and underappreciated by the organization. We felt used…I couldn’t believe that a place that my coworker and I used to call home ended up traumatizing us and became yet another form of oppression. It felt as if we were being robbed in our own home.”

We ask that you please read the rest of Ignacio’s statement which can be found here.

In the writing of this open letter, we asked former interns to reflect on what their experiences were throughout this tumultuous process, and here are some of our words:

“I felt betrayed, deeply betrayed [by the firing email], I felt scammed and lied to, I felt so much guilt for introducing this org to so many family members and peers, from tirelessly fundraising for them one week & having them call us “family” to being easily disposable the next.”

“While I will not undercut the important accomplishments since the formation of the organization, the current organizational culture is toxic and is so hierarchical to a point that they will not engage with grievances or demands within the organization in good faith.”

“I no longer trust NLMH. From a labor perspective, the organization exploited 60 unpaid interns and fired us after we raised over $300,000 for them. That does not align with their supposed radical leftist politics.”

Wider Struggle

We are not alone. The hurt we have experienced is not exclusive to Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, but a pattern ingrained into the functioning of nonprofit social justice organizations. The process an organization must go through to be legally recognized as a non profit is defined by a long history of exclusion. Many organizations become legally recognized to access funding from the state and large foundations. The system of relationships between the state, foundations, and organizations is known as the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (or NPIC), and it has detrimental effects on organizing. 

Subject to the will of large donors and more powerful organizations, small nonprofits frequently drift from their original missions, becoming increasingly professionalized in order to meet arbitrary quantitative goals. One of the goals of our summer internship was to make a million campaign phone calls, instead of building relationships with impacted community members. This drift from relationship building to meeting quotas causes a total disconnect between the organization and its member base. 

During these phone banking sessions, it was made clear that low output of calls from individual interns would result in conversations with staff. This increasingly corporate method of organizing causes tensions and splits within the organization. When incorporated into the NPIC, nonprofit staff organize to preserve their salaries, and not necessarily for a more just world. Even as NLMH attempts to rely on grassroots fundraising instead of large foundation donations, they continue to drift from struggles on the ground.  

In addition to this mission drift, NLMH models toxic corporate culture that carries with it aspects of white supremacy culture, as defined by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun. Our story makes it clear that throughout our time with the organization, we felt a sense of urgency, an affinity for quantity over quality, and a paternalistic power structure within the organization. Through on-campus visits and recruitment, the white staff become the face of the organization. During some of these visits, white staff share the stories and hurt of Latinx immigrant organizers, tokenizing them and preying upon white guilt and white savior complexes. NLMH markets themselves to upper-class white students of private historically white colleges, catering to their experiences and fostering a space that is inequitable for people of color. These manipulative and exclusionary practices are part of the reason why we feel that a public accountability process is crucial. 

Accountability & A Call to Action

We seek to engage in an accountability process with NLMH and ask for the implementation of positive change, but as we are only one subset of people who have been hurt, we acknowledge that our experiences with NLMH are not all-encompassing. We invite any other members of the community or people who have also been harmed by NLMH to share their asks and their vision for what accountability within the organization would look like. We stand by our original intern statement, but we acknowledge the deep roots that NLMH has in the Vassar and Bard College communities and know that in order to hold the organization accountable, we need to reach outside of these spaces. 

We envision this as a collaborative process to be defined and shaped by the entire community of those who have worked with and been affected by the organization. As a starting point, here are some of the asks that we believe will help initiate the accountability process: 

• We request that NLMH dedicate more energy into including and centering Black and Brown voices and leadership, both inside and outside of the organization. This would require a shift in recruitment, away from targeting white and wealthy students at local elite institutions, and towards other community spaces within the Mid-Hudson, such as local high schools or other colleges.
• We request that NLMH be transparent and open with the community concerning the structural hierarchy of the organization (including the roles, responsibilities and levels of pay), the breakdown of how donations are used, and the state of diversity within the organization.
• We request that NLMH incorporate a public accountability structure within the organization that ensures their commitment to the community’s control of the organization. This could be an open space that includes NLMH’s staff, member base and the broader community to foster conversations about harm.

We are coming together as a collective with the purpose of building relationships between folks where division has been historically encouraged. We acknowledge how the word “community” is often manipulated and tokenized to concentrate power in the hands of a few while withholding that power from individuals directly affected by these systems of oppression. As such, we do not have a set “mission statement” or list of issues. Instead, we have used this time to begin ongoing conversations with our neighbors that we hope to continue. 

In the next couple of weeks, we plan to hold a virtual meeting to heal collectively, engage in dialogue around our shared experiences, and build meaningful relationships with members of our communities based on humility and mutual trust. Please follow us on Instagram @contra.la.maquina for more information. By entering into this process of accountability and healing together, we will create new bonds strengthening our communities and begin shaping a future as a collective.

Signed by,

Ignacio Acevedo, Former NLMH Lead Organizer and Current Student at Bard College

Luna Aros, Former NLMH Intern and Current Student at Vassar College

Bryson Carter, Former NLMH Intern and Current Student at Vassar College

Max Roberts, Former NLMH Intern and Current Student at Vassar College

Gabriela Sabogal, Former NLMH Intern and Current Student at Bard College

Estella Zacharia, Former NLMH Intern and Current Student at Vassar College

Mahalia Iwugo, Former NLMH Intern and Current Student at Vassar College

Anonymous Contra La Máquina Member 

Esmeralda Paula

Danielle Cowan

Skye Carter, Former NLMH Intern and Current Student at Bard College

Anya Bernstein, Former NLMH Intern and Former Student at Vassar College

Isaac King 

David Wiegn

Karina Curry