Former employees of Philadelphia FIGHT, an AIDS service organization, delivered a letter May 18 to the executive director demanding equal compensation for black and brown workers, especially bilingual ones; a fund for their professional development; and the firing of two officials, among other things.
About 10 people, including people who had not worked at the organization, attended the delivery. The letter said FIGHT has until June 1 to meet the demands of the Black and Brown Workers Collective.
Shani Akilah Robin, who worked as a manager of the Youth Health Empowerment Project at FIGHT before being fired in March, alleged the AIDS organization has a “plantation policy” of hiring black and brown frontline workers while maintaining a white administration and board.
“We are hired to create a veneer of diversity,” she said. “We need an organization fully on board with black and brown workers.”
Viviana Ortiz, a former CRCS-CLEAR counselor at FIGHT who was fired in April, contended the organization terminated four people of color in the last month for speaking out about worker conditions and ineffective outreach to communities of color. CRCS-CLEAR is a health promotion intervention program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Jane Shull, executive director, said in a statement, “FIGHT has a long history of supporting people’s right to make statements, and advocate for their needs, but not to disrupt programs that serve people with HIV and those at high risk. This incident actually stemmed from a personnel matter, and we can’t discuss personnel matters in the press.”
When asked how FIGHT would respond to the letter, Shull said she would not comment beyond the statement.
The statement further called attention to a video posted online by the collective that included footage filmed during some former employees’ time at FIGHT.
“We are making no statement whatsoever about the HIV status of anyone who may have been caught in the background,” Shull said. “But we think that people sensitive to issues related to HIV stigma and bias ought to take care not to post images on the Internet that include people who might have been clients of FIGHT without their permission.”
Shull is not one of the officials the Black and Brown Workers Collective wants fired. The group called for the removal of PrEP Director Caitlin Conyngham for “not being reflective of the face of HIV” and Director of Education Juliet Fink Yates for “hostile treatment.” Conyngham and Yates are both white.
Those who delivered the letter also argued that FIGHT does not do enough to reach communities of color, but receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control, city and state to specifically address HIV- and AIDS-related needs of those communities.
Asa Khalif, a member of the Black and Brown Workers Collective who has not worked at FIGHT, said FIGHT “refuses to go into the community and educate the community because they’re afraid.”
Abdul-Aliy Muhammad, who works at another AIDS organization in Philadelphia, said, “It’s more a business model than actually about engaging and healing.”
He noted race-based tensions exist in a number of AIDS organizations.
“This is not just about FIGHT,” Muhammad said. “It’s about the entire nonprofit industrial complex.”