The board of a major disaster-response nonprofit sacked its president after he pushed the organization to more thoroughly incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion in its work, according to a lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
Gregory Forrester, the former president of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, said the group’s board members damaged his reputation before firing him in December.
The National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster was formed in 1970 to coordinate government and private responses to hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and other natural disasters. The organization’s 150 members include state disaster-preparation and recovery organizations, charities, and religious nonprofits representing a wide variety of faiths.
The board members named in the lawsuit are Mike Manning, chairman, Mark Smith, and Warren Miller.
The three trustees hold prominent roles in other charities. Manning is president of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, Miller is the national disaster field coordinator of the National Baptist Convention USA, and Smith is executive director of recovery operations at the American National Red Cross. Forrester does not make any claims against those organizations in his lawsuit.
Push for Equity
Forrester details in the lawsuit efforts he says he undertook to push the organization to take racial equity more seriously. The organization, he said, has historically excluded Black people and other people of color and has different tiers of memberships that don’t provide smaller organizations full voting rights.
In June, he presented the board and the organization’s members with a proposal to create an advisory board to respond to the needs of small disaster-relief organizations led by people of color and to encourage those groups to become members with full voting rights. Forrester says he was thwarted by a recalcitrant board.
Following Forrester’s use of the term “white privilege” during an online panel discussion, the suit asserts that Miller chastised Forrester in a June email, calling his use of the phrase “disrespectful, offensive, and very insensitive.”
Miller also wrote that in using the term Forrester was “tone deaf” and that Forrester’s “failure to understand cultural and racial sensitivity was damaging to our membership.”
Forrester, who had been chief executive of the organization for four years, says the board members retaliated against him for comments he made to a journalist 2020.
‘Verbal Coaching Session’
After he was quoted in an April Bloomberg Green news story saying that federal emergency managers and nonprofits including the American Red Cross were unprepared to assist in disasters while the nation was in the grips of the pandemic, Smith wrote to other board members requesting Forrester be reprimanded because Smith thought the comments put his employer, the Red Cross, in an unfavorable light.
In response, the board recommended Forrester participate in a “verbal coaching session.” Subsequently, Forrester says, Smith relayed the recommendation, which was part of Forrester’s personnel file, to other leaders at the Red Cross.
The board members “deny all of the allegations contained in the complaint,” said Daniel Gomez-Sanchez, a lawyer representing Manning, Miller, and Smith.
The next step in the case will be a conference call February 16 set up by the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
