#Nonprofit Bylaws Best Practices

[lerniqlerniq]

Corporate Board Training - LERNIQ

Corporate Board Training in governance equips board members with the knowledge, clarity, and self-assurance they require to fully participate in organizational decision-making. Members of a board are taught the fundamentals of effective governance through a corporate board training program, such as board structures, bylaws, and resolutions. pondering whether to invest in Corporate Board Training for board members on governance.

Corporate Board Training for board members ensures that even the newest members of a board comprehend the fundamentals of their duties and the dynamics and culture of the organization. Group Corporate Board Training sessions also give board members a chance to get to know each other and form relationships.

Board members create a set of best practices tailored to their board’s mission and purpose during Corporate Board Training sessions. Board members bring a sense of camaraderie to the table as a result of their shared knowledge and experience after Corporate Board Training is finished.

Volunteering for board positions is a great way for career-minded individuals to get experience and make valuable connections. In addition, they bring new expertise to the table that is beneficial to the board as a whole. If new board members are ill-prepared for board expectations or unfamiliar with governance, their skills and insights may be lost.

Corporate Board Training in board governance serves as a refresher for previous board members and provides new board members with useful information that they can use to benefit the organization and their own careers.

Inclusion Successful boards include members with a wide range of skills, educational backgrounds, and lived experiences. The dynamics of the board naturally emerge as peers interact. When all board members acknowledge one another’s contributions, learn from one another’s differences, and remain true to the mission, board dynamics are positive and successful.

Board intelligence software analyses the skills and experiences of board members to ensure that everyone’s talents are utilized to their full potential. These tools keep peer interaction and board dynamics positive.

Finances on nonprofit boards Understanding finances is important, whether you are on a credit union board or just on a fundraising committee for a nonprofit. The fundamentals of fundraising, nonprofit finances, and revenue generation are taught in board governance training.

Facilitated Goal-Setting The president of the board’s primary responsibility is to facilitate the board by managing discussions and directing all members in the same direction. The majority of organizations use Robert’s Rules of Order as their parliamentary tool of choice. Board administration training ensures that all members of the board have a basic understanding of Robert’s Principles of Request so that executive meetings run smoothly and efficiently.

Boards meet to advance their missions through strategic action plans. Anything less is a squander of both talent and time. Board members improve their efficiency and effectiveness by learning how to think strategically and act strategically. Plans change; however, with vital reasoning, everybody in question will adjust as necessary without neglecting to focus on the mission.

[businessfirstfamily]

5 Best Practices To Writing Bylaws For Nonprofit Organizations https://businessfirstfamily.com/bylaws-for-nonprofit-organizations/

[lastsonlost]

And this is from Buzzfeed. Not Fox. Not Breitbart.

She’s The Public Face Of #MeToo In Science. Now Critics Are Speaking Out About Her Tactics.

Seven leaders of the MeTooSTEM group have resigned, citing a lack of transparency and the founder’s combative tweets.

An outspoken campaigner against sexual harassment in science is facing a crisis of leadership at MeTooSTEM, the volunteer organization she founded last year to support victims and hold perpetrators and institutions accountable.

Since November, seven members of the leadership team have resigned, citing concerns about the behavior of its founder, BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

In their resignation letters, former MeTooSTEM leaders said that McLaughlin kept them in the dark about key decisions and reacted with hostility when they asked about the small organization’s finances and legal structure. They also worried that McLaughlin had alienated allies through her combative tweets.

“There have been several instances where supporters of MeTooSTEM have been upset by the tenor of your tweets, up to and including blocking you or being blocked by you,” wrote Julie Libarkin, an environmental scientist at Michigan State University who has compiled a database of more than 770 academic sexual misconduct cases, and Tisha Bohr, a biology postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, in their resignation email sent in November.

“Some of them, victims themselves, have reached out to us for clarification and support ... putting us in an impossible position of trying to support victims as well as you and the movement,” the message continued.

The most recent three departures, on April 24, included the only two women of color on the MeTooSTEM leadership team. “We … felt that white leadership input was prioritized over our own,” wrote Deanna Arsala, a biology graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Vidhya Sivakumaran, a former biophysicist who now works for a health informatics company.

MeTooSTEM was formed after a string of sexual harassmentscandals involving leading scientists, amid growing recognition that sexual and gender harassment is a pervasive problem in science. The rifts within the organization come against the backdrop of a debate about how best to tackle these problems, as McLaughlin’s burn-it-all-down zeal clashes with efforts by some activists to work with the academic establishment to achieve reform.

“I am aware that BethAnn is a polarizing person. Much of her effectiveness has been in bringing truth to power and being in your face,” said Carol Greider, a Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University, who earlier this month agreed to serve on MeTooSTEM’s board. “And sometimes those approaches do undermine the effectiveness.”

McLaughlin declined multiple requests for comment.

Leaders who have stayed with the organization defended McLaughlin’s activism, much of which is not in public view, they said.

“In my experience, all ideas were welcome and supported,” Britteny Watson, MeTooSTEM’s business manager, told BuzzFeed News by email.

“On the whole, I have personally had positive experiences with BethAnn and MeTooSTEM. I have seen her consistently go above and beyond for survivors, especially for transgender people of color and people who are dealing with issues related to immigration,” said Johanna Folk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.

Folk added, however, that she can’t speak for anyone else. “My overall positive experience does not negate the concerns of others. All the people who left MeTooSTEM are ones I really look up to and value both personally and professionally. I am grateful for all of their work."

MeTooSTEM is not the first grassroots activist organization to face growing pains: Occupy Wall Street was riven by infightingamong its founders; the Women’s March was accused of anti-Semitism; Black Lives Matter has wrestled with debates over its future direction; and the March for Science, formed to protest the Trump administration’s science policies, added women of color to its leadership in 2017 after complaints that it was neglecting the concerns of minority groups.

McLaughlin is a particular lightning rod within the #MeToo movement in science because she has become its public face amid concerns that her combative approach may sometimes do more harm than good.

“There is a distinction between trying to speak truth to power and just bringing heat.”

“There is a distinction between trying to speak truth to power and just bringing heat,” said Kate Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana and an longtime advocate of women facing sexual harassment in science, who reached out to former volunteers after seeing their resignation tweets.

“What I’m hearing and seeing is heat being brought to women of color, heat being brought to grad students, and heat being brought to victims of sexual harassment,” Clancy said.

McLaughlin’s public activism grew from turmoil in her own career at Vanderbilt. Her application for tenure was put on hold after another Vanderbilt neuroscientist, Aurelio Galli, accused her of sending abusive tweets about him and other colleagues from multiuser accounts.

Galli had already been accused of sexual harassment by a former PhD student, who in July 2014 sued him and the university. McLaughlin later testified in support of a research collaborator from the University of Washington who in January 2015 alleged that Galli said, during a dinner at his house, that he would spend “every last penny” to make sure the person who accused him was ruined. (Vanderbilt settled the lawsuit brought by the PhD student in December 2014, and the judge dismissed her case against Galli.)

McLaughlin’s tenure application eventually restarted in 2017, but a faculty committee voted against her. She filed a grievance, which was rejected in February. (Galli has left Vanderbilt for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and filed his own lawsuit against McLaughlin for defamation in October 2018.)

McLaughlin rose to public prominence in May 2018, when she launched a petition asking the National Academy of Sciences remove members who had been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She followed up with a similar demand to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and later pressured the National Institutes of Health, the main federal funding agency for biomedical research, to stop giving grants to harassers and to exclude them from committees that help decide which scientists should get funded.

Through her acerbic Twitter account @McLNeuro, McLaughlin railed against “harassholes” and sparredwith scientific leaders including NAS President Marcia McNutt. In June 2018, she founded MeTooSTEM, initially as a website for women in science to tell their own stories about harassment.

She got results. In June 2018, the website RateMyProfessors.com dropped its “chili pepper” rating of professors’ “hotness” after a McLaughlin tweet criticizing the feature as “obnoxious and utterly irrelevant” was widely shared. In September, the AAAS announced a procedure to remove elected fellows involved in cases of sexual or gender harassment. And in February this year, NIH Director Francis Collins and other agency leaders cited McLaughlin’s activism in a statement that apologized for a failure to “address the climate and culture that has caused such harm” and promised: “We can do better. We must do better.”

Praise for McLaughlin culminated in November 2018 with the $250,000 MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award, which she shared with Tarana Burke, the civil rights activist who founded the #MeToo movement, and Sherry Marts, who has worked with scientific organizations and other nonprofits to make their events more inclusive.

But by that time, volunteers who had joined MeTooSTEM were starting to leave the organization.

First to depart, on Nov. 9, were the two scientists behind the @9replyguys Twitter account, launched to highlight the trolling and unhelpful comments that women often experience on social media. Scott Barolo, a cell biologist at the University of Michigan, said that he and the anonymous @shrewshrew, the account’s other author, were worried about a lack of transparency over the direction, structure, and finances of the organization.

“@shrewshrew and I became concerned that we were publicly associated with a fundraising organization that we didn’t understand and couldn’t get any information about,” Barolo told BuzzFeed News by email.

They were followed later that month by Bohr and Libarkin. “I left because I felt like attempts to organize structure and incorporate inclusive language were dismissed or ignored, that credit wasn't being properly allocated, and that differing opinions were often met with hostility both privately and publicly,” Bohr told BuzzFeed News.

“The things which people want (bylaws, structure, hierarchy, communication) are all critical,” McLaughlin replied to Bohr and Libarkin’s resignation email. “But those things do not have to happen now.”

Other leaders said that they pressed McLaughlin to give them designated roles. “When we tried to make long-term plans, BethAnn wasn’t really interested,” Erica Smith, a physics postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University Bloomington, who resigned in April, told BuzzFeed News. “We had a leadership team in name, but not really in practice.”

Smith, Arsala, and Sivakumaran left after a tense exchange of messages with McLaughlin after they asked questions about MeTooSTEM’s nonprofit status and finances, boosted by a GoFundMe launched in October 2018. The campaign has so far raised more than $78,000 toward a $200,000 goal. The money, according to the donation page, will be used to file for status as a tax-exempt nonprofit and to provide legal help for victims of harassment.

McLaughlin has also clashed on Twitter with activists who have disagreed with her. In August 2018, Anna Waymack, a humanities graduate student at Cornell University, responded to a McLaughlin tweet that told victims of campus sexual assault: “Title IX is broken. Go the the police.”

After Waymack argued that survivors should make their own choices, and pointed out that some have been further traumatized by the criminal justice system, McLaughlin cut her short with a one-word tweet: “Bye.”

“Being blown off like that was personally upsetting but also concerning because it replicates what the academy already does with that sort of dismissiveness,” Waymack told BuzzFeed News.

Last month, McLaughlin tweeted angrily at Hontas Farmer, a transgender woman of color who teaches physics at the City Colleges of Chicago. In a thread about student–faculty relationships, Farmer noted that it would be “unenforceable to forbid relationships.”

“Get off my time line with your pro-preying on students garbage,” McLaughlin responded. “Grown ups are talking. #STEMTrollAlert.”

That hashtag had previously been used to encourage allies to defend women scientists being trolled on Twitter. In response to its use against Farmer, one Twitter user tweeted an image of Jimmy Fallon in a wig. (The user later deleted the tweet, and apologized to Farmer.)

Farmer told BuzzFeed News that she has experienced worse attacks online, and she has continued to retweet McLaughlin after the incident. “I’ve dealt with people like BethAnn before. They’re very driven by what they believe and that sometimes makes them do wrong things,” she said.

McLaughlin’s strongly held beliefs extend to the current debate about how best to reduce sexual harassment in academia. Speaking at a meeting at the NIH on May 16, she condemned an effort launched in April called the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, led by the National Academies and involving more than 40 colleges, universities, and research institutions.

“Every single one of them takes this Action Collaborative as a gold ribbon that they have done something right,” McLaughlin said. “They have all done something terribly, terribly wrong, and they have the wrong people at the table.”

That position has put her at odds with advocates including Clancy and Greider, who argue that reform should involve leading institutions. “I disagree with BethAnn about that,” Greider said. “We can have disagreements about approaches and still go forward.”

The volunteers who have left MeTooSTEM said that they are still committed to its wider goals of supporting victims of sexual harassment. “I believe that STEM would greatly benefit from having an organization, or more than one, with the goals of fighting sexual harassment and discrimination,” Barolo said.

“My hope is that we can learn from this experience to make a stronger and more inclusive community intent on battling harassment,” Bohr said.

[thefunksoldiers-blog]

Mayte Garcia and Best Friend/Manager Caught In Charity Scam

Details about fees collected, dogs not delivered, shady tax reporting practices and questionable expenses. Read findings and see links: 

There is a cost to “foster” regardless of how long the dog remains. That fee is $500, this is non-negotiable. ASPCA, the Humane Society and other pet rescues do not charge such an exorbitant fee to foster a dog. In all cases, those organizations provide the foster family with all pet supplies, food, and veterinary care. Foster families are expected to give their time. If dogs are to be adopted, then a fee of up to $500 is charged and includes all shots, neutering, and administrative tasks associated with the adoption. These costs are industry standard.

Lack of communication exists where potential fosters and adoptive families have paid fees and arranged meeting times, sometimes driving hours, only to find they cannot reach anyone who is scheduled to meet them with the dog they will bring home, nor can they get through by phone or email. Some have lost their fostering fee this way. Donors have said they are unable to get receipts to file with their tax returns or to have on file in case of an audit to show their donation. Many complain the dogs advertised are always unavailable or dogs with costly medical problems that the rescue will not cover are offered in their place.

Mayte's Rescue is not registered to fund raise in CA. By law, all California charities wishing to fund raise must be registered with State Attorney General. This is a measure designed to protect donors and assure that monies accepted on behalf the charity are not “squandered through fraud or other means.” Furthermore, annual financial disclosures are required and should be turned in. Garcia's charity has not complied with this statute since it was granted charitable status in 2013. https://oag.ca.gov/charities.

IRS filings show charity has reported no income between 2013-2015, however various crowd funding sites show substantial amounts of donations. The founder has indicated on her website that fundraising is “ongoing”. The charity appears to only ever have six dogs on hand, though boasts many more on social media and at speaking engagements and adoption events. Many dogs are carted off to the pound, despite having people willing to pay to foster or adopt. It is unknown if these dogs are adopted or put down. However, given limited resources, many pounds are forced to put many animals down.

On at least one occasion a family chose a dog, they were told it was unavailable and to pick another. They did and it was communicated from Mayte that the second dog was going with her to an event versus a loving home. Staff/volunteers have asked businesses who offered a portion of their proceeds to the charity for copies of their tax filings which is not only illegal, but grossly inappropriate and an indication that the financial records maintained therein are nefarious at best or nonexistent. Specific requests were made to Kim Annicchiarico and Dave Buchansky, respectively.

Charity has no bylaws, articles, or annual reports for donors to view on their website as most nonprofits do. A written request for an annual report proved futile and was not issued a response.There are no minutes or scheduled board meetings. It is unclear as to who is on the Board of Directors as documents have listed Garcia's relatives in key leadership positions. However the executive leadership remains the same whether it is in the California records or Florida records, where the Charity first attempted incorporation (which dissolved in 2015): Mayte Garcia, President; Dave Buchansky (Mayte's best friend and self-proclaimed manager), Vice President.

It is said every dime donated goes to the rescue, but there's no accounting to reflect this claim. It is unclear as to who controls the money of it. Some say Mayte, others say her self-proclaimed “manager” Dave Buchansky, who has a history of legal actions taken against him for fraud. Another name that is also suggested as one accountable for the charity's financial records or point of contact is Kim Annicchiarico. Kim is not an official employee of the shelter, but an uber fan who got close to Garcia and has a history of bullying others through social media, adults and children. Rather than pointing to the rescue as the responsible party for delivering receipts for donations made directly to them, Kim will often tell individual donors to contact the several businesses and shops that have committed proceeds from their sales to the rescue for receipts. Not only is this against what is ethical and procedural for any organization receiving tax-exempt status, it also appears a way of releasing the charity from liability by stating an outside, third party is responsible. 

Any nonprofit with a handle on their records should be able to pull up a receipt for a specific donation at any given moment. It seems Garcia's charity is always struggling to locate these through others. If foster families are unhappy with the rescue staff and decide to no longer be involved, they can request a refund. However, in the past, refund are met by angry social media rants by the founder. Garcia assures foster families the rescue will cover the cost of food. Few have seen this actually be the case. According to CharityCheck101.org, in documents filed in December 2015, the rescue reported $0 in both income and assets. However, on a few crowd funding websites, it is obvious this is not the case: https://www.gofundme.com/maytesrescue and http://maytesrescue.com/

Dogs are constantly being brought in from Puerto Rico despite the problem of stray dogs needing homes and/or care in   California. http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2318416 and http://kmph-kfre.com/news/local/special-report-stray-dogs-in-fresno

Donors have been told their donations would go toward the purchase of a permanent shelter facility. Currently, dogs are sheltered in a residence that has not been zoned for commercial business nor inspected for the purpose of being an animal shelter. The physical address is: 18754 Lemay Street, Reseda, CA and is a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house purchased for around $470,000 in 2015. Garcia has maintained that supporters can physically go to the shelter. Some who have attempted to make arrangements to do so have yet to see their requests met. Currently, Josh Reyes, who runs the daily operations, resides there with at least 6 dogs in shelter. https://m.trulia.com/homes/California/Reseda/sold/2312999-18754-Lemay-St-Reseda-CA-91335

It seems Garcia is using her association with the deceased icon as well as her personal tragedy to raise money for a charity that ultimately lines her pockets and pads that of her friend Buchansky who left his position as an eye wear salesman in June 2016. Buchansky, himself, is not unfamiliar with litigation for defrauding the public: http://m.ripoffreport.com/reports/david-buchansky/morganville-new-jersey/david-buchansky-ebay-rip-off-artist-morganville-new-jersey-1130470

[shirlleycoyle]

The Quest To Save .Org From Being Ruined By Private Equity

Experts, consumer groups, registrars and activists are working overtime to prevent the .org domain system—and the internet at large—from being undermined by greed.

Last month the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the agency that manages the .org domain, announced it would be selling itself to Ethos Capital, a private equity fund with links to Republican billionaire families like the Perots and Romneys.

And last June ICANN—the organization tasked with managing all internet domains—voted to eliminate all price caps on .org domain registrations and renewals. Just six of the more than 3,000 public comments received by the organization actually supported the move.

A coalition of opponents say the decisions in concert risk undermining the entire purpose of the .org system, driving up costs for nonprofits and businesses alike, all while undermining the internet’s capacity for transformative change.

Article 19, a nonprofit that works to ensure that basic human rights are protected online, is taking a bird’s eye approach to the problem. The group has been working with the Danish Institute of Human Rights to assess the domain space for the last few years, and is hopeful the efforts can help protect .org.

The group’s efforts include conducting human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) of domain management organizations (like the Dutch Internet domain registry SIDN, responsible for the .nl domain) then working with those organizations to highlight where they can do better.

“We work with groups who genuinely want to make their businesses better but are unclear of just what needs attention,” Article 19’s Mallory Knodel told Motherboard. She said the group had already scheduled an HRIA of the .org sale in 2020, and has been working with both Ethos and PIR to protect transparency and help protect nonprofits moving forward.

But she noted that ICANN’s recent behaviors highlight broader internet governance problems that go well beyond the .org debate.

“The removal of caps and the sale have complied with ICANN's current accountability structures

and therefore if PIR is to be governed in the public interest, those mechanisms need to go beyond what are currently in place,” Knodel said.

Knodel said the group recently helped pressure ICANN to include some basic human rights protections in its bylaws at last month’s ICANN 66 meeting in Montreal.

“This means that we have governance with teeth by which we can evaluation policy development processes in ICANN going forward,” she said. The result, she said, would help shift domain name management “towards best practices that not only comply with, but champion, human rights and user centric approaches to governance.”

That should prove helpful, given registrars say ICANN hasn’t been taking criticism of its recent decisions seriously.

“ICANN has not been receptive to any community feedback on maintaining the price caps,” Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall told Motherboard.

When Namecheap and other registrars filed a formal complaint last summer about the removal of price caps (and ICANN’s apathy to public input), the organization responded with a collective shrug, and has given no indication it intends to back off the move anytime soon.

Registrars like Namecheap are in the early stages of potential legal action against ICANN for ignoring the public interest on price caps, a move Kirkendall said could create additional problems for the .com domain and its users down the road.

“Removal of price caps, along with the conversion of PIR to a for profit company, creates the perfect storm for unchecked price increases for .org registrants—many who have limited resources, and have spent significant time and money in branding a .org domain,” he said.

“Looking at the bigger picture, this also opens up the door for price caps to be lifted from .com and .net domains in the future which will affect many more people,” he added.

But the Internet Society (ISOC), which operates PIR, seems just as unlikely to budge on the sale to Ethos. Despite criticism that Ethos was able to buy .org management for a song thanks to a lack of competitive bidding or transparency, ISOC president Andrew Sullivan has suggested that nothing but a court order could stop the transfer, and opposition is “overblown.”

The Quest To Save .Org From Being Ruined By Private Equity syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[biofunmy]

BethAnn McLaughlin Started #MeTooSTEM To Fight Harassment In Science. Now Critics Are Challenging Her Leadership.

An outspoken campaigner against sexual harassment in science is facing a crisis of leadership at MeTooSTEM, the volunteer organization she founded last year to support victims and hold perpetrators and institutions accountable.

Since November, seven members of the leadership team have resigned, citing concerns about the behavior of its founder, BethAnn McLaughlin, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

In their resignation letters, former MeTooSTEM leaders said that McLaughlin kept them in the dark about key decisions and reacted with hostility when they asked about the small organization’s finances and legal structure. They also worried that McLaughlin had alienated allies through her combative tweets.

“There have been several instances where supporters of MeTooSTEM have been upset by the tenor of your tweets, up to and including blocking you or being blocked by you,” wrote Julie Libarkin, an environmental scientist at Michigan State University who has compiled a database of more than 770 academic sexual misconduct cases, and Tisha Bohr, a biology postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University, in their resignation email sent in November.

“Some of them, victims themselves, have reached out to us for clarification and support … putting us in an impossible position of trying to support victims as well as you and the movement,” the message continued.

The most recent three departures, on April 24, included the only two women of color on the MeTooSTEM leadership team. “We … felt that white leadership input was prioritized over our own,” wrote Deanna Arsala, a biology graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Vidhya Sivakumaran, a former biophysicist who now works for a health informatics company.

MeTooSTEM was formed after a string of sexual harassment scandals involving leading scientists, amid growing recognition that sexual and gender harassment is a pervasive problem in science. The rifts within the organization come against the backdrop of a debate about how best to tackle these problems, as McLaughlin’s burn-it-all-down zeal clashes with efforts by some activists to work with the academic establishment to achieve reform.

“I am aware that BethAnn is a polarizing person. Much of her effectiveness has been in bringing truth to power and being in your face,” said Carol Greider, a Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University, who earlier this month agreed to serve on MeTooSTEM’s board. “And sometimes those approaches do undermine the effectiveness.”

McLaughlin declined multiple requests for comment.

Leaders who have stayed with the organization defended McLaughlin’s activism, much of which is not in public view, they said.

“In my experience, all ideas were welcome and supported,” Britteny Watson, MeTooSTEM’s business manager, told BuzzFeed News by email.

“On the whole, I have personally had positive experiences with BethAnn and MeTooSTEM. I have seen her consistently go above and beyond for survivors, especially for transgender people of color and people who are dealing with issues related to immigration,” said Johanna Folk, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, San Francisco.

Folk added, however, that she can’t speak for anyone else. “My overall positive experience does not negate the concerns of others. All the people who left MeTooSTEM are ones I really look up to and value both personally and professionally. I am grateful for all of their work.”

MeTooSTEM is not the first grassroots activist organization to face growing pains: Occupy Wall Street was riven by infighting among its founders; the Women’s March was accused of anti-Semitism; Black Lives Matter has wrestled with debates over its future direction; and the March for Science, formed to protest the Trump administration’s science policies, added women of color to its leadership in 2017 after complaints that it was neglecting the concerns of minority groups.

McLaughlin is a particular lightning rod within the #MeToo movement in science because she has become its public face amid concerns that her combative approach may sometimes do more harm than good.

“There is a distinction between trying to speak truth to power and just bringing heat,” said Kate Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana and an longtime advocate of women facing sexual harassment in science, who reached out to former volunteers after seeing their resignation tweets.

“What I’m hearing and seeing is heat being brought to women of color, heat being brought to grad students, and heat being brought to victims of sexual harassment,” Clancy said.

McLaughlin’s public activism grew from turmoil in her own career at Vanderbilt. Her application for tenure was put on hold after another Vanderbilt neuroscientist, Aurelio Galli, accused her of sending abusive tweets about him and other colleagues from multiuser accounts.

Galli had already been accused of sexual harassment by a former PhD student, who in July 2014 sued him and the university. McLaughlin later testified in support of a research collaborator from the University of Washington who in January 2015 alleged that Galli said, during a dinner at his house, that he would spend “every last penny” to make sure the person who accused him was ruined. (Vanderbilt settled the lawsuit brought by the PhD student in December 2014, and the judge dismissed her case against Galli.)

McLaughlin’s tenure application eventually restarted in 2017, but a faculty committee voted against her. She filed a grievance, which was rejected in February. (Galli has left Vanderbilt for the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and filed his own lawsuit against McLaughlin for defamation in October 2018.)

McLaughlin rose to public prominence in May 2018, when she launched a petition asking the National Academy of Sciences remove members who had been sanctioned for sexual harassment. She followed up with a similar demand to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and later pressured the National Institutes of Health, the main federal funding agency for biomedical research, to stop giving grants to harassers and to exclude them from committees that help decide which scientists should get funded.

Through her acerbic Twitter account @McLNeuro, McLaughlin railed against “harassholes” and sparred with scientific leaders including NAS President Marcia McNutt. In June 2018, she founded MeTooSTEM, initially as a website for women in science to tell their own stories about harassment.

She got results. In June 2018, the website RateMyProfessors.com dropped its “chili pepper” rating of professors’ “hotness” after a McLaughlin tweet criticizing the feature as “obnoxious and utterly irrelevant” was widely shared. In September, the AAAS announced a procedure to remove elected fellows involved in cases of sexual or gender harassment. And in February this year, NIH Director Francis Collins and other agency leaders cited McLaughlin’s activism in a statement that apologized for a failure to “address the climate and culture that has caused such harm” and promised: “We can do better. We must do better.”

Praise for McLaughlin culminated in November 2018 with the $250,000 MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award, which she shared with Tarana Burke, the civil rights activist who founded the #MeToo movement, and Sherry Marts, who has worked with scientific organizations and other nonprofits to make their events more inclusive.

But by that time, volunteers who had joined MeTooSTEM were starting to leave the organization.

First to depart, on Nov. 9, were the two scientists behind the @9replyguys Twitter account, launched to highlight the trolling and unhelpful comments that women often experience on social media. Scott Barolo, a cell biologist at the University of Michigan, said that he and the anonymous @shrewshrew, the account’s other author, were worried about a lack of transparency over the direction, structure, and finances of the organization.

“@shrewshrew and I became concerned that we were publicly associated with a fundraising organization that we didn’t understand and couldn’t get any information about,” Barolo told BuzzFeed News by email.

They were followed later that month by Bohr and Libarkin. “I left because I felt like attempts to organize structure and incorporate inclusive language were dismissed or ignored, that credit wasn’t being properly allocated, and that differing opinions were often met with hostility both privately and publicly,” Bohr told BuzzFeed News.

“The things which people want (bylaws, structure, hierarchy, communication) are all critical,” McLaughlin replied to Bohr and Libarkin’s resignation email. “But those things do not have to happen now.”

Other leaders said that they pressed McLaughlin to give them designated roles. “When we tried to make long-term plans, BethAnn wasn’t really interested,” Erica Smith, a physics postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University Bloomington, who resigned in April, told BuzzFeed News. “We had a leadership team in name, but not really in practice.”

Smith, Arsala, and Sivakumaran left after a tense exchange of messages with McLaughlin after they asked questions about MeTooSTEM’s nonprofit status and finances, boosted by a GoFundMe launched in October 2018. The campaign has so far raised more than $78,000 toward a $200,000 goal. The money, according to the donation page, will be used to file for status as a tax-exempt nonprofit and to provide legal help for victims of harassment.

McLaughlin has also clashed on Twitter with activists who have disagreed with her. In August 2018, Anna Waymack, a humanities graduate student at Cornell University, responded to a McLaughlin tweet that told victims of campus sexual assault: “Title IX is broken. Go the the police.”

After Waymack argued that survivors should make their own choices, and pointed out that some have been further traumatized by the criminal justice system, McLaughlin cut her short with a one-word tweet: “Bye.”

“Being blown off like that was personally upsetting but also concerning because it replicates what the academy already does with that sort of dismissiveness,” Waymack told BuzzFeed News.

Last month, McLaughlin tweeted angrily at Hontas Farmer, a transgender woman of color who teaches physics at the City Colleges of Chicago. In a thread about student–faculty relationships, Farmer noted that it would be “unenforceable to forbid relationships.”

“Get off my time line with your pro-preying on students garbage,” McLaughlin responded. “Grown ups are talking. #STEMTrollAlert.”

That hashtag had previously been used to encourage allies to defend women scientists being trolled on Twitter. In response to its use against Farmer, one Twitter user tweeted an image of Jimmy Fallon in a wig. (The user later deleted the tweet, and apologized to Farmer.)

Farmer told BuzzFeed News that she has experienced worse attacks online, and she has continued to retweet McLaughlin after the incident. “I’ve dealt with people like BethAnn before. They’re very driven by what they believe and that sometimes makes them do wrong things,” she said.

McLaughlin’s strongly held beliefs extend to the current debate about how best to reduce sexual harassment in academia. Speaking at a meeting at the NIH on May 16, she condemned an effort launched in April called the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, led by the National Academies and involving more than 40 colleges, universities, and research institutions.

“Every single one of them takes this Action Collaborative as a gold ribbon that they have done something right,” McLaughlin said. “They have all done something terribly, terribly wrong, and they have the wrong people at the table.”

That position has put her at odds with advocates including Clancy and Greider, who argue that reform should involve leading institutions. “I disagree with BethAnn about that,” Greider said. “We can have disagreements about approaches and still go forward.”

The volunteers who have left MeTooSTEM said that they are still committed to its wider goals of supporting victims of sexual harassment. “I believe that STEM would greatly benefit from having an organization, or more than one, with the goals of fighting sexual harassment and discrimination,” Barolo said.

“My hope is that we can learn from this experience to make a stronger and more inclusive community intent on battling harassment,” Bohr said.

Sahred From Source link Science

from WordPress http://bit.ly/30YAdNh via IFTTT