I absolutely have. The most recent example is a place I
worked at until a couple of years ago where I was the office manager and later
the assistant director. This was a residential facility for men with a history
of substance abuse, and it was intended as a place dedicated to recovery and
staying sober.
Within the space of about a year, both the CEO of the
non-profit corporation and the director of the facility both passed away, which
led to a major shakeup in leadership. The new CEO pursued a very different
agenda and had very different priorities than the previous one, and major
changes started happening. Necessities were cut. Essential property and
equipment were sold. Standards were lowered or eliminated. I spoke up about all
of those, every cut or sale or elimination that negatively impacted the
residents that we were supposed to be caring for and helping. My boss, the new
facility director, agreed with me, but the CEO wasn’t listening.
Eventually, we were asked to overlook or bypass admission
requirements. The CEO asked for an admission letter, signed by the director,
for someone we had never met or heard of. The normal process was for me to do
an intake interview with potential new admissions to determine their history,
medical status, and legal status before committing to bringing them in; this
was to make sure they didn’t have any medical conditions we weren’t able to provide
for and to make sure they didn’t have any outstanding warrants or pending court
appearances at distant locations (local appearances were fine) and were in compliance
with any terms of parole or probation. It was against policy to issue an
admission letter without conducting an interview like that, but the CEO
insisted on it anyway. My director instructed me, over my objections, to
prepare the letter and send it to the CEO.
Months went by and we completely forgot about that letter.
We issued several of those letter every week, which inmates at local jails
would often present at a hearing in support of their request to be released; it
wasn’t uncommon for us to never hear from that individual again, so it was easy
to lose track of any one letter. Then, one day, the CEO sent a guy over
unannounced to live on the property with us. The instruction wasn’t to admit
him, which would have involved having this individual live with the rest of the
residents under supervision without a cell phone or privileges to leave and
return at will. Instead, he brought a trailer with him and was allowed to live
by himself in that trailer and to come and go as he pleased. We had problems
with this person immediately: he barricaded himself into his trailer, came and
went at all hours of the day and night, behaved erratically, and things started
disappearing all around the property. But he was there at the direction of the
CEO, so there was little we could do about it.
Then, one night as I was getting ready to go to bed, one of
the staff came banging on my door. The individual I had been referring to had
apparently collapsed in the middle of the courtyard and needed help. By the
time I got out there, he had been helped onto a nearby bench and was having
trouble catching his breath. I started asking him questions about what had
happened and if it had ever happened before; at that point, I had already
decided to call 911 out of an abundance of caution, but as I was asking my
first couple of questions his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he fell
off the bench onto the cement. I immediately called for an ambulance while one
of the staff performed CPR, but by the time the paramedics arrived he was
already dead. It seemed obvious at the time, but it was confirmed later that he
had died of an overdose, and some of the residents confirmed that he had left
the property earlier and returned with a backpack, though we never did find out
exactly what he returned with.
This was someone our CEO had met while doing prison ministry
in San Bernardino, who had apparently agreed to do handyman and construction
work around the property in exchange for permission to live on the property for
zero rent. He had a history of drug abuse, which wasn’t disclosed to us because
he didn’t go through the proper admissions process. I watched him die on the
front porch of my office because the CEO bypassed normal policy to get free
work from someone he barely knew.
That was the beginning of the end for me. I stayed on for a
while after that, but the changes didn’t slow down; if anything, they ramped
up. More and more things were eliminated or sold off, more and more things were
prioritized over the recovery program, and gradually the facility became
something it had never been intended to be: a flophouse. A few months later, the
CEO was scheduled to make a presentation to the remaining residents about a new
direction for the facility, a direction that didn’t involve recovery or programming
but instead focused on revenue generation and a change in mission. That
morning, I resigned. In my role as assistant director, it would have been my
job to be supportive of this new direction and supportive of the CEO, neither
of which I felt I could do at that point. I packed up as much of my belongings
as would fit in my van and left, and that was the end of a long chapter in my
life.