Writing Prompt #2: Have you ever spoken up when you saw something going on that was wrong? Were you scared? What ended up happening?

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.