Published on October 22, 2026

SQSH Organizational Transparency & Accountability Letter

In this letter, we admit and confront the mistakes we made as an organization and reflect on why we made them.

  • Since founding, we have struggled with burnout, overwork, under-funding, inadequate infrastructure and succession planning, crisis-driven personnel changes, and rapid growth.

  • We want to be honest about our struggles, be transparent about the outcomes of our organizational repair and accountability process, and share our learnings with our peers.

From Oct 2025 to Oct 2026, we worked hard to bring our practices into closer alignment with our values. Learn more about our efforts here. 

How we got here:

  • In 2019, SQSH was founded as a volunteer-run group with a $5,000 budget. 

  • In 2022, we hired our first full-time staff. 

  • In April 2024, SQSH hired 6 full-time staff and started multiple new grant-funded programs. Existing strains, workload imbalances, and new tensions were heightened as our staff team suddenly grew from 3 to 9. We did not have the infrastructure and skills to support successful onboarding, team cohesion, and role clarity, leading to breakdowns in communication and trust. 

  • In September 2024, we went through a period of rapid staff restructuring. In November 2024, SQSH released a public statement announcing the new structure, and received mixed feedback. 

  • In 2025, attempts at staff mediation started in March and broke down by July, sparking more burnout and internal conflict. Between July and Oct 2025, 6 of 9 staff members resigned. 

  • Between 2024 and 2026, our active volunteer pool shrunk by 50%. 

  • From previous staff and volunteers, we heard feelings of hurt, anger, sadness, resentment, and disappointment. 

  • Between Oct 2025 and present-day, we have been working hard to recover and rebuild as an organization.

Through these painful conflicts, we learned that aspects of SQSH’s systems, structures, and culture have been inadequate and contributed to staff and volunteer turnover. We take responsibility for the impact of: 

  • Growing too fast without adequate attention to organization-wide consequences 

  • Underdeveloped systems for feedback, decision-making, management, training, and conflict

  • Unclear roles and responsibilities

  • Unsustainable organizational workload, leading to burnout

  • A culture of low trust and accountability

In Fall 2025, we realized that living into our mission requires actively confronting our own internal needs for healing. 

  • We started to have uncomfortable conversations about difficult issues, own our own contributions to unsustainable dynamics, and work on improving our systems.

We needed to improve our culture, starting with re-establishing trust and prioritizing psychological safety. We used 4 main strategies:

Strategy #1: We started by setting clear behavioral expectations among all staff. This included: 

  • Strengthening trust through consistent care, curiosity, and connection

    • Creating “Get to Know Me” guides: defining what support looks like for each individual, and making that information accessible to team members

    • Ending meetings with appreciations; systematizing this practice across the organization

  • Creating internal accountability agreements, which include: 

    • Taking time outside of work to rest and heal

    • Reflecting on power dynamics

    • Using cooperation and agreements to meet our needs and goals

    • Embracing complexity

    • Regularly exchanging feedback

    • Talking directly to colleagues we have tension with

    • Having clear, documented roles, responsibilities, and decision-making authorities

    • Sharing challenging information openly and in a timely manner

  • Using a proposal process to create a solution-focused, collaborative approach to problems

  • Clarifying and communicating individual and organizational boundaries 

    • Coaching leadership to model consistent boundaries and expectations

    • Clarifying expectations regarding decision making and input

  • Defining the difference between giving input and owning a decision

    • Increasing the effectiveness of tools like temp checks

Strategy #2: Next, we developed staff’s people skills to co-create a culture of high trust and high accountability. We established mandatory staff trainings and practice sessions on topics such as:

  • Power and Accountability 

  • Exchanging Feedback

  • Decision-making

  • Time and energy management

  • Conflict

  • Collaborative budgeting

  • Emotional regulation and resilience

Strategy #3: Then, we right-sized our workload to our capacity to address burnout and sustainability. This included: 

  • Prioritizing our programs and narrowing our strategic scope through an intentional, community-informed process

  • Setting a sustainable organizational pace and workload

    • Setting realistic timelines

    • Explaining the rationale behind deadlines and giving time to negotiate

    • Rethinking our approach to project updates to increase efficiency (e.g. biweekly standups)

  • Clarifying individual responsibilities through role mapping

    • Mapping and planning staff roles for intentional transitions and more distributed org-wide leadership responsibilities

Strategy #4: Finally, we systematized our culture changes by changing our structures. This included: 

  • Adopting self management as our organizational structure

  • Improving our systems for information flow, hiring, and onboarding

  • Drafting a crisis scenario plan to put in place guardrails in the event of escalated conflict

We continue to do regular temp checks to assess progress towards our culture goals.

We invested in getting external support to make sure that we were making the necessary changes. 

By making these changes internally, we are building our capacity to better serve our community, by: 

  • Approaching relationships in ways that align with our values

  • Doing fewer things well and more sustainably

  • Creating a more focused impact, and being less stressed while doing so 

  • Being a learning, growing organization

We hope that making these changes in SQSH will result in the following tangible improvements for our community: 

  • High-quality services that are consistent and stable

  • Creative, tailored programming, delivered by a team that becomes more experienced year after year

  • Collaborative, fulfilling opportunities to volunteer and partner with SQSH

  • Authentic, meaningful interactions with our team

  • Clarity about what you can expect from SQSH

  • SQSH being more responsive to community input and needs

We recognize that our internal conflicts have rippled out and impacted the trust between SQSH and our larger community. 

  • Despite our imperfect and tumultuous organizational history, we want to continue listening and showing up for our community.

  • We will continue to share openly and directly about our organizational struggles, because we value building pathways to repair and trust with our community. 

  • We are committed to having ongoing conversation with our community and hearing from you.

For community members who have questions for SQSH, or who are interested in reconnecting and repairing with SQSH as an organization, we invite you to fill out this form:

We see that other groups grapple with similar questions of power, accountability, and growth. 

  • We hope that our experiences and learnings can be helpful for others. We welcome thoughtful dialogue with those on similar paths. 

Our team is fiercely committed to SQSH’s evolution and improvement. We embrace being a work in progress. We will continue to learn from conflict to build a stronger organization that our community can lean on. 

  • With a stronger organizational foundation under us, we are ready to refocus our attention on strengthening our programming, partnerships, and community engagement initiatives in 2027.

In Solidarity, SQSH Staff