This is a story of seemingly unchecked power for the volatile CEO of a small grantmaker.  His behavior is targeted at a grantee who has been explicitly encouraged to become financially dependent on that organization, then hampered in attempts to find alternative funders. The issues came to a head in late 2023.

 

Derogatory statements and outbursts of temper have been the tip of an iceberg of belittling treatment. Behind them are written commitments that are then withdrawn, ignored advice and warnings from the grantee, statements by the CEO that can be shown to be untrue, a pattern of only confirming another month's funding at increasingly late stages, and the CEO's repeated assertions that he can terminate funding at will if the grantee is insufficiently appreciative of the partnership.

 

The CEO is Adrian Haro of The Workers Lab "TWL"). The grantee is the Beyond Jobs program within the MM4A non-profit. We are coping with this extraordinary situation thanks to a dedicated and professional team at my end. But doing so is time consuming, draining, and constantly upends our planning. Workers Lab have known for months I would need to share details of the problems if the behavior wasn't stopped. It is finally time to reveal what's going on.

 

 

Here's a primer about the 18 months during which TWL have been our majority, or only, funder:

 

 

A. The financial dependency issue

 

Before Workers Lab, we were funded by a diverse group of foundations, four national and one state. Some had funded us several times. (I am not naming them because they should not be associated with events listed on this site.) We already had our labor market platform operating in Los Angeles County and were well advanced in launch planning with public agencies in other regions.

 

I was then introduced to Adrian by a regional workforce director. As suggested, I shot a hasty video for his board in September 2021. That contributed to a March 2022 announcement in which they committed $1,000,000 to expanding our program further. The Workers Lab ("TWL") call these rapid acceleration projects "Design Sprints".

 

I was then persuaded to stop dialogue with other fundraisers. When the dangers of that decision became clear, Adrian blocked collaborative fundraising, making solo approaches much harder.

 

The following is extracted from email 4B, sent to Workers Lab's management and board on October 23, 2023, recapping why we are dependent on TWL:

 

1. From early into our relationship, your CEO started urging me to "leave the financing to me". By which he meant I should focus on implementation, not ongoing outreach to philanthropies. This made sense; TWL's brand and full-time fundraiser was far better equipped for the job, I had more than enough work pulling launches together.

2. As it became clear that TWL's work style was very different from ours, I became more worried about this reliance. In particular, the CEO's constant urging that I "slow down" to his pace rather than trying to push ahead and build momentum, was at odds with our view that the post pandemic moment should be seized.

   1. By about mid 2022 I was so concerned about our reliance on TWL that I determined that we had to resume fundraising. Both parties accepted this needed to be collaborative. I asked TWL that we do joint approaches to funders. This was tentatively agreed to, then rescinded by the CEO because, as he told me on multiple occasions, he believed "your messaging is crap".  

   2. His solution to this perceived problem: TWL's messaging consultant would build a slide deck that we would have to use to explain our project.

   3. Assuming that would be a quick process, and everyone would eventually realize the folly of somebody who knew next to nothing of our program dictating how we talked about it, I acquiesced. 

   4. The process took several months. Even the CEO was forced to agree that the slide deck eventually produced was not fit for purpose. His solution to that embarrassment: TWL's consultant had to be given more time to go away and do it again. That dragged on for even more months.

   5. As an insight into the opportunity that was catastrophically missed by this refusal to simply open doors so we could explain our own project, we can look at the one case where we did make a collaborative approach to a funder. I introduced your CEO to our Program Manager at [REDACTED] Foundation who had funded us on three separate occasions. He then spent several months working internally to achieve a $[REDACTED] investment in TWL last winter, including this Design Sprint. 

   6. TWL remains our almost only source of income. As you and Adrian know, last Spring I had to decide between driving our launches or building collateral and starting approaches to funders. The latter would have been counterproductive, funders want to see successful launches and I would be abandoning those to fundraise. To avoid this Catch 22, I gambled on TWL keeping us going at the current minimal level until around April 2024. As with other misjudgments I made about TWL, I defend the call. Sums squandered on your lawyers for example could probably have funded our Long Beach operations for a year. I underestimated TWL's capacity to misspend.

 

 

 

B. Unprofessional behavior within TWL

 

Through 2022 there was bewilderingly unpredictable periods of insults, fits of temper, mis-statements about our work, protestations of enthusiastic support and demands for loyalty from Adrian.

 

Also from the October 2023 email to TWL's board:

 

1. In parallel to enforced financial dependency, there [has been] escalating erratic behaviour by the CEO including:

   1. Attempting to instigate a policy that I as a white person not go to meetings without being chaperoned by a person of color. His explanation for this, varied between I remind attendees of slavery, and with my British accent I remind people of colonialism.

   2. Repeated statements intended to undermine me such as: "Everyone in philanthropy told me to avoid you". Under questioning this was revised to "Most people in philanthropy told me to avoid you". Neither statement has ever been evidenced despite repeated requests for details, even if anonymized.

   3. Thoughtful attempts by me to suggest ways TWL might be better organized, more collaborative, or work more efficiently for mutual advantage, were treated as hostile attacks provoking angry pile-ons.

   4. On multiple occasions the CEO flew into rages in which he threatened to pull the plug on their financial support to us, with no hint of due process, sometimes immediately. Grovelling emails were demanded as the price of deflating this rage.

 

 

 

C. My formal complaint

 

Alarmed by the destructive impact of Adrian's behavior, and having warned him multiple times about the consequences, I filed a formal complaint with TWL on in March 2023. While referencing copious emails to and from Adrian which captured the behavior, I did my best to make it conciliatory, making clear the only outcome I was seeking was an end to the behavior.

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The October 2023 email recap for TWL's directors and managers continued:

 

1. In March 2023, I filed a formal complaint about this behaviour and the destructiveness caused, with an accompanying e-mail, to TWL. I made clear:

   1. Any legal threat from the complaint to TWL was negligible. Action for workplace harassment by a non-employee rests on proving financial dependency of the individual on the offending organization. I work unpaid, so have no standing to make such a claim.

   2. I was interested only in recovery from the behavior: making sure its stopped and TWL worked with us to make up all the wasted opportunity and mis-spent time. I expected someone internally to direct the CEO to behave and that we would quickly come up with a plan to recover lost momentum.

2. Instead, I received a letter from a boutique Chicago law firm stating that they had been retained by TWL to investigate my complaint, the only alternative being some form of joint mediation, which my penniless organization would have to co-fund. Your lawyers' work compounded this project's problems. (See next section.)

 

 

 

D. Response to my complaint

 

I was surprised when Workers Lab engaged a team of expensive out-of-state lawyers to investigate my complaint. I expected a director or other TWL appointee to interview Adrian, grill me, then make clear we all had to work together professionally.

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I was even more surprised when, at the end of their investigation, the lawyers confirmed their primary focus wasn't looking into whether there had been unfair treatment, only whether any complained-of behavior put Workers Lab at risk of legal liability by breaching "protected characteristics" in California law. (Their legal risks were always negligible, I made clear in the complaint I wasn't in any position to sue.)

 

The Oct. 2023 email to Workers Lab continues:

 

Many organizations have a complaint filed about a misbehaving manager, realize their guardrails were weak, resolve the issues to the complainant's satisfaction, and move on. That is what I expected after filing my complaint last March. It, and the accompanying email, explicitly stated I needed the behavior to stop and TWL to conclusively get behind our project delivery, facilitate fundraising, and it could all be laid to rest in a couple of weeks. Instead, TWL spent enormous sums making their situation, and therefore our project, weaker.

 

A core issue is misuse of lawyers:

1. At the end of your lawyers' investigation of the complaint it became clear their terms of reference had been not “Is there behaviour at TWL that should be stopped?“ as I assumed but “ Is there a legal risk from this alleged behaviour to TWL or its CEO?" [See my e-mail exchanges with [REDACTED], lawyer, May 17, 2023] [THIS IS NOW Email 2E]

2. In the letter announcing their role as arbiter of my complaint, the lawyers went on to say that they considered my suggestion that TWL regroup itself around making up for lost momentum on this project as potential extortion, for which they might instigate legal action against me. This opening salvo in their "investigation" was never retracted.

3. Your lawyers' final analysis ignored or downplayed evidence offered. It is illegal to record meetings or calls in California to collect evidence; the highest standard of proof a complainant can realistically produce is emails describing statements or events sent to the other parties involved which are then not denied, recontextualized, or walked back. I systematically, contemporaneously, sent such emails, detailing what had happened, to your CEO and others who witnessed his behavior and statements. Even in the limited emails that your lawyers examined, that standard of evidence was regarded as inconclusive if the CEO had a different memory of events when interviewed by his lawyer months later. [See email above for details.]

4. While engaged in their investigation, the same lawyers were put in the driving seat of the relationship between TWL and us. An attorney attended our regular meetings, often insisting on working through lawyerly statements about what I should do. 

5. My emails about funding deadlines, resources, and so on to the CEO were forwarded to a lawyer. It was clear these lawyers had negligible experience of the world of low budget nonprofits. As one example I can share an e-mail from them which contains clearly contradictory points within just a few sentences about a crucial continuation of funding. When asked for clarity they refused to provide it, insisting that the mutually exclusive statements were not contradictory. 

6. A lawyer stopped attending our weekly meetings in around June 2023. But they clearly remained key to TWL's operation. Throughout summer your CEO has referred to “My legal team" who he was clearly relying on to make or approve decisions. 

 

 

I see TWL's handling of the complaint and associated evidence as crucial to understanding why our problems with their CEO endure. Their organizational culture seems unusually tolerant of Adrian's mercurial nature.

 

As I have written to their directors: "It's worth comparing TWL's response (to my evidence) with how Silicon Valley Community Foundation dealt with a comparable complaint of bullying there in 2018. SVCF is bigger than TWL, but TWL is [LINKED TO]  [REDACTED] so it has similar significance as a standard setter. 

 

Staff at SVCF reported a middle manager as inappropriately aggressive and demanding. The resulting investigation, by lawyers and the media, resolved everything eventually, representing a standard to which nonprofits able to afford copious legal hours could reasonably be expected to aspire. 

 

Some key differences between TWL's case and that of SVCF:

 

1. SVCF's CEO was accused only of turning a blind eye to the bad behavior, TWL's CEO led it.

2. SVCF's bullying was of the "you all need to work much harder" variety. Unjustified, but at least mission aligned. TWL's was utterly pointless. 

3. The misbehaving executive at SVCF was widely admitted to be high performing and effective in every respect apart from the bullying.

4. SVCF fired a first group of lawyers investigating the behavior, worried the firm might be perceived to be biased in favor of management. TWL's lawyers made explicit their priority was protecting management after announcing they were the only realistic option for any investigation.

5. When an exhaustive investigation was completed by the second, demonstrably neutral, lawyers SVCF published it openly. At TWL even the complainant (me) has not been allowed to see the report submitted to the board in response to my complaint. I was offered a verbal debrief by the lawyer, which I had to write up because he declined to even summarize in an email. The debrief revealed their ignorance, or dismissal, of key evidence. I believe it could defame me.

 

 

Given the caliber of TWL's board, it seems inexplicable that you have all collectively allowed your situation to become so dire. There is a clue to how it might have happened buried in the SVCF final report:

 

'Systems were not in place to ensure the Board received full and accurate information, including having direct access to non-leadership staff. Instead, Board communications typically were filtered through SVCF leaders, including the former CEO, who tightly controlled the information provided to the Board. As a result, the Board did not know the full nature and extent of the workplace misconduct at SVCF.' (Bottom of page 5).

 

It's just a hunch, but I suspect your board was assured that my complaint lacked substance. Was Adrian then allowed to shape the terms of reference for an investigation into his behavior? And is TWL's board refusing to talk with me another manifestation of the same perception? This cloak-and-dagger approach to investigating leadership wrongdoing seems incredible post-Weinstein." 

 

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E. The situation post-complaint

 

Adrian seems to have been emboldened by being let off by Workers Lab's lawyers (we don't know for sure he was exonerated; the report remains secret). Directors continue declining to talk with me, all communications have to go through the Adrian or one of the people reporting to him.

 

From fall 2023, Adrian began telling me I was "just a vendor to Workers Lab", while writing up reports of our program, using our research and findings, as if it was Workers Lab's work. 

 

Some specifics from the last months of 2023:

 

 

Competing against us

 

From early, 2023 Workers Lab. resources were channeled into launch of our labor market platform in Chicago. We were not involved, the project was led by New America Foundation overseen by Adrian apparently ignoring our learning about how to launch. They appear to have no path to viable launch by end of 2023 (that's no reflection on New America, these launches are really hard and they are having to learn from scratch).

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Financial brinkmanship

 

Meanwhile, our finances have been kept increasingly uncertain. The following is extracted from email 5B, sent to Adrian on Dec. 27, 2023:

 

1) Backlog payments

You have committed to paying us the $[REDACTED] of deferred payments from 2022 several times. On November 9th this year you committed in writing to doing so by end of 2023. Then on December 23rd, [REDACTED - NAME OF TWL STAFFER] emailed to say that was being changed to paying half the amount by end of the year with the remainder spread out over some unspecified future timeline.

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2) January disbursements

On Dec 11th I emailed you pointing out that a series of cancelled weekly meetings (accounted for by my leave and TWL's closure until Jan 8) means we have no deadlines for our now routine conversations about next month’s disbursements at the end of each month. I have explained many times how difficult it is for us to only get confirmation of next month's payments at the very last moment.

 

As one example; last month I explained that to have any chance of staying on course we needed confirmation of December disbursements by end of December 5th at the absolute latest (to inform decisions made at a meeting with British developers at 1AM your time on the 6th). Your confirmation arrived at 8AM your time on the 6th.

 

Is the silence on January disbursements another case of things being pushed to the last minute? Or are we to plan on TWL funding ending?

 

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Sudden need to restructure previous commitments, or failed communication about a funding deadline, can happen in any organization. It is so concerning when coming from TWL because (a) there is no embarrassment, warning, or explanation - it's just seemingly part of their normal way of treating grantees (b) it fits into a pattern of repeated belittling of a grantee's needs, concerns, priorities, abilities, and intentions.

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