San Diego LGBT Weekly has learned that Equality California will be laying off staff in coming weeks, and has lost some sources of revenue in the aftermath of soon-to-be-former executive director, Roland Palencia’s resignation, which preceded the group’s decision to stop seeking a 2012 ballot initiative to repeal Proposition 8.
EQCA has confirmed layoffs are in the works, but said San Diego would not be affected. A spokeswoman for the organization said layoffs had begun well before recent developments.
However, the organization’s communications director, Rebekah Orr, strongly refuted that layoffs are related to either Palencia’s resignation or EQCA’s decision to stop fighting for marriage equality via a 2012 ballot initiative.
“No one is being laid off due to policy positions,” Orr said during a telephone interview. “While some layoffs and layoff decisions were already made prior to Roland’s decision and prior to the announcement that Equality California would be shifting gears from a ballot initiative to educating people about our community, none of those have anything at all to do with either decision. Those rumors are completely wrong.”
San Diego is safe, according to EQCA staff.
“EQCA continues to consider San Diego a priority and I will continue to work in the community as well as in surrounding areas in Southern California,” said Brandon Tate-McWilliams, spokesman for EQCA San Diego. “I think that transitions are always tough and it’s easy for people to immediately assume that it is a negative thing, but the truth is that this moment is really a great opportunity for the organization. We have scaled down the organization, but the thing to focus on is that we have scaled down costs to allow us to really focus on our core work and use donor resources wisely.”
Roland Palencia, who will step down Friday, Oct. 14, was selected to succeed long-time Executive Director Geoff Kors in May of this year. His tenure has lasted less than five months.
Palencia’s resignation comes in the wake of a decision by the organization’s board to stand down from its mission to repeal Proposition 8, the 2008 measure that killed marriage equality.
“The decision about going – or not (going) – back to the ballot to overturn Proposition 8 was a gut-wrenching one,” Palencia told independent journalist, Rex Wockner. “Ultimately, I believed that initiating a signature drive could ignite something powerful in our movement here in California. This needs to be balanced with the responsibility of raising close to $2 million by December 2011 for the signature gathering alone; and maybe over $40 million to win this campaign by November 2012. Not a small task. Given the pending federal lawsuit, the economy, critical support among the base and a number of other factors, not winning this campaign could be a very disempowering experience.”
Palencia’s comments to Wockner (originally published at wockner.blogspot.com) stand in contrast to those released earlier by EQCA.
“Equality California serves a critical role in the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality in the State of California,” wrote Palencia in a press release. “Over the next year, the movement in California faces a unique set of challenges that demands leadership uniquely positioned to take those challenges head-on, strengthen the organization and bring together the diverse parts of our movement into a powerful force for change.”
In that statement, Palencia pledged to continue supporting EQCA.
Meanwhile, no staffing changes are scheduled for San Diego, the organization says.
While this publication’s sources say Equality California is losing contributors in significant numbers, Orr said zero dollars in major grant money had been pulled.
“We have had a very small handful of individual contributors who have said they would no longer contribute as a result of those decisions, but absolutely no mass yanking of grants or loss of institutional funding.”
In fact, Orr says, they group recently received a total of $50,000 from Bank of America, a corporate donor, while the rest of the funding was received through grants.
Locally, as anecdotal evidence that EQCA staff remain committed to marriage equality as a principal, if not as a ballot measure, Tate-McWilliams points to his own recent nuptials.
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