Rashad Robinson, the head of Color of Change, at the non-profit’s 10th anniversary gala in 2015.
Mike Pont/Getty Images
Color of Change is one of the most high-profile social justice organizations in the US.
But some staff say it has been hobbled by strife, ineffective leadership, and little accountability.
Misconduct by senior leadership was often ignored or glossed over, and choas led to high turnover.
Color of Change bills itself as the nation’s largest online racial-justice organization. Founded in 2005, the nonprofit raised at least $20 million in 2020, according to public documents, and regularly partners with A-list stars like Michael B. Jordan. Rather than on-the-ground action, the organization focuses more on building awareness through its various campaigns and petitions.
It pushed to end New York City’s racially biased “stop-and-frisk” policy, led a major advertising boycott that forced Glenn Beck off the air in 2009, and ran a campaign aimed at getting Fox to drop the show “Cops” from its lineup in 2013.
Its president, Rashad Robinson, is a regular on cable news, has been the subject of glowing profiles in Wired and Fast Company, and charges between $10,000 to $20,000 in speaking fees, according to one booking website.
But behind the scenes, some staff members say the organization has been wracked with internal turmoil, ineffective leadership, and deep layoffs. Insider spoke with more than two dozen current and former staff, managers, and directors across almost every team at Color of Change, and reviewed meeting recordings and internal communications.
Many sources said allegations of misconduct by senior leadership seemed to be ignored or glossed over, and a chaotic environment led to high turnover. One top executive was accused of bullying, harassment, and gender discrimination by multiple women in 2020, but quietly left the organization with a laudatory email after being cleared by a human-resources investigation. Conversely, the woman who first reported him was terminated.
A senior campaign-team manager was investigated after allegations surfaced in 2022 that he sexually assaulted an employee. After being cleared of wrongdoing by the organization’s human-resources department, he was removed from the organization a short time later. The allegations and the investigation sparked enough tumult inside the organization that Rashad Robinson held an all-hands Zoom meeting to address it.
Current and former staffers told Insider that Color of Change protected senior leaders who mistreated staffers and punished rank-and-file workers who spoke up.
“I have seen how people were treated when they weren’t palatable and they didn’t appease the needs of their managers, especially those on the core leadership team,” said Sadie Dean, a nonunion manager who was laid off in April. “If we speak up about being harassed or overworked, or if we speak up about anything that isn’t putting them in the best light,” there would be immediate consequences, she said.
Most recently, Color of Change management has been fighting with its union, formed in 2020. On April 10, the organization laid off 13 people, most of whom were members of the union. On May 3, the union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming that the April dismissals were illegal. The following day, Color of Change eliminated another 12 positions, and again, many of them were part of the union. Between the two rounds, roughly a quarter of the union was cut.
Insider asked Color of Change to comment on this story and sent a list of detailed questions. In response, a spokesperson declined to discuss individual incidents but wrote in an email that the layoffs were related to the financial downturn, and the decision to make a second round came on May 1, before the union’s complaint was filed. The statement went on to say that staff complaints are investigated thoroughly and people have been held accountable. “COC takes extremely seriously any allegation of staff misconduct,” the statement reads.
Rashad Robinson speaks at a New York Fashion Week event in 2022.
Bryan Bedder/Getty Images
A history of bad behavior and little accountability
In late 2020, multiple women accused a top-level Color of Change executive of bullying, harassment, and gender discrimination, according to internal communications and interviews with eight people who were with the organization at the time.
One senior staff member complained to the human-resources department about the inappropriate behavior she said she experienced, and within weeks of her initial contact with HR, her position was eliminated.
HR launched an investigation after the woman complained of wrongful termination, and multiple other women came forward to say they had experienced similar behavior from the executive. Two of those women said HR later informed them that it found no evidence of wrongdoing.
In January 2021, Robinson announced that the executive was leaving Color of Change. He received a laudatory send-off, and the allegations of misconduct were not mentioned. The executive did not respond to requests for comment.
He was not the only high-level employee accused of inappropriate behavior. Some former and current staff said that they were often berated by managers or denigrated in front of other employees. Others said that a former director would get drunk at organization events and make sexual comments to workers. Another former vice president was known to routinely yell at staff, and once threatened the life of an employee, according to staff and an emailed apology by the former vice president obtained by Insider. She declined to comment.
All of this came to a head in early 2022. According to interviews and a review of internal materials, the organization’s human-resources department became aware of an accusation that a senior campaign director on Color of Change’s criminal-justice team had sexually assaulted a female employee. The woman has not come forward, and she did not respond to requests for comment. Because she may be a victim of sexual assault, Insider is withholding her identity and some details.
Word of the investigation into the senior campaign director eventually began to circulate among staff, causing unease. Robinson sought to address the situation in an all-staff Zoom call on May 12 last year. Normally a gifted public speaker, Robinson sounded uncharacteristically nervous in a recording of the call Insider listened to.
“COC’s human-resource department did a full and complete investigation. They speak to — they spoke to the named parties and others who they thought would have credible information and found the kind of basis of the claims to be unsubstantiated,” he said. The senior campaign director, in other words, had been cleared after the investigation.
In the next breath, however, Robinson said that the senior campaign director would be leaving Color of Change, not due to the allegations but because of the senior director’s lack of “compliance with reform measures related to the investigation.”
Ariel Moore was on the team where the allegations arose. She’d been with Color of Change since 2020 and she’d seen this play out before: allegations of staff abuse by leaders, followed by an investigation and then sudden departures. Meanwhile, she said, the organization’s leader was focused on maintaining his visibility among the glitterati.
“Ultimately, who should have been held most responsible was Rashad, because you’re the executive president of this entire organization,” she said. “This all happened under your purview, but you were too busy buying fedoras and doing red carpets to know that your house was on fire.”
In a statement in response to questions about the incident, the senior campaign director wrote that the allegation was false and arose through two anonymous emails to HR. After about three weeks of investigating, he wrote, “I was told by HR the allegation was ‘withdrawn.'”
After some of the details were leaked to staff, the senior campaign director continued, “HR promised me a meeting to discuss the leak but they never scheduled it.”
The investigations also uncovered the alleged behavior of the director who would reportedly get drunk at company events and make sexually inappropriate comments to employees; she also left the company that spring.
Another director resigned from the team in May 2022; in a statement he sent to the nonprofit’s leadership and board, he wrote that sexual assault allegations led him to reflect on what he found to be the senior campaign director’s’ “consistently inappropriate behavior and to recognize a string of decisions by COC management that centered the accused and belittled the survivor.”
“I have accepted that this is the organization that senior leadership created and they have no intentions of changing the toxic culture or the hypocritical treatment of their Black staff,” he wrote.
Color of Change’s criminal-justice team was thrown into disarray, and the work suffered. Moore, who worked as a campaign manager on the team, said the multiple departures left the team depleted of leadership, “and so we were kind of starting from scratch.”
Moore had been with Color of Change since 2020, and she was a lead organizer with its union until she was laid off on April 10. She and others who spoke with Insider watched many staffers leave after the allegations came to light in 2022.
Seven senior staffers said the same in a letter sent to Robinson and his leadership team days after Robinson’s all-hands Zoom call, noting that widespread rumors about the alleged misconduct had “resulted in the departure of the majority of the Criminal Justice Team.” The senior staff said more work was needed to repair the organization and the organization’s HR policies should be overhauled, among other demands for change.
“While COC is now a safer place to work, after months of staff-wide conjecture and confusion, we don’t think firing one person is enough to ensure we can rebuild trust and retain the talented teams we have built,” the employees wrote. One of the cosigners told Insider they were unaware of any significant policy changes made by leadership to address the concerns.
The Color of Change spokesperson wrote in their statement that the organization has invested in compliance, anti-discrimination, and harassment- and bullying-prevention training. It also has an anonymous hotline for staff to report issues.
“HR has done a full and impartial investigation of all concerns and complaints brought to it,” the statement reads. “Based upon these investigations, COC has always taken appropriate steps to ensure that the concerns do not occur again after being reported to HR.”
Earlier this year, the team dedicated to organizing local actions and events was investigated by HR following multiple staff complaints and the discovery of a Slack channel where three senior leaders bad-mouthed members of their team. As it did with inquiries in 2021 and 2022, HR concluded its investigation by finding no evidence of wrongdoing. Most of the team where the complaints originated were laid off the following week.
One of those staffers, Jae Passmore, felt that she and her colleagues were being punished for speaking out, and she said as much in an all-staff Slack channel shortly before her access was revoked. “Three minutes after I put that Slack, Rashad sent an email, talking about how it was a difficult decision to lay us off,” she told Insider.
Rashad Robinson speaks during 2022 FairVote Awards at City Winery in lower Manhattan in April 2022.
Monica Schipper/Getty Images
Layoffs hit a demoralized staff but spending remains high
In an email announcing the second round of layoffs on May 4, Charles Fields, a new executive vice president of operations and impact, wrote that the recent cuts were designed to ensure the financial health of the organization.
“I strongly believe that these layoffs will put us in a more sustainable position as we navigate the political and economic headwinds coming our way and will help us make good on our mission to build a more human, less hostile world for Black people in America,” he wrote.
But nearly every staff member Insider spoke to balked at the notion that the layoffs were tied to an unavoidable financial downturn. They pointed to the large sums spent on events that amounted to little more than photo ops and open bars, the millions of dollars spent on outside consultants, and the large salaries executives were paid.
Nine executives received nearly $2 million in compensation in 2019, according to tax filings for that year. Rashad Robinson alone received over $458,000 in total compensation, nearly $125,000 more than the president of the NAACP that year. (Color of Change did not report executive salaries on its 2020 tax filings and has not released its 2021 returns.)
Color of Change says that its compensation packages are indexed against peer organizations and done with the advice of external experts. The group said it also reduced its budget for consultants.
The organization has gone through multiple senior finance officers in recent years, and on April 24, Fields announced that the latest executive overseeing spending would be leaving Color of Change in June. An outside consulting firm is set to take over the finances after he leaves.
Color of Change is one of a handful of organizations that experienced a flood of donations in the wake of the murder of George Floyd Jr. and subsequent protests, and some have begun to question whether the money has advanced the cause of racial justice. Questions about the use of donated funds have dogged the social-justice advocate Shaun King for years, and reporting last year on the finances of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation revealed nearly $6 million in donor funds were used to purchase a luxury property in Los Angeles.
In light of the years of internal strife and high-paid senior leadership, Moore said that it was absurd that the organization’s union is still fighting for codified protections and changes to HR policy. In its statement, Color of Change wrote that it has “always operated in good faith to reach fair agreements” with the union and its representatives.
“It feels like a joke because of the organization’s values and mission,” Moore said. “It feels very much like we’re in a twilight zone, that we are trying to create a world that’s less hostile for Black people, and we refuse to protect Black women, Black people, at work.”