In response to today’s Huffington Post article that discussed some of Lambda Legal’s recent internal changes, the Board of Directors issued the following statement

We want to acknowledge that the challenges that Lambda Legal faces are real, and we have been and will continue to be hard at work addressing them. In the last two years, we had a change in leadership, created a DC office, made necessary but painful changes to employee benefits, saw the creation of an employee union, and we had more staff turnover than we would like.

But above all we want to reassure our community that we are as committed as ever to our mission to fight for the civil rights of all LGBTQ people and everyone living with HIV. We have your back, and we always will.

The last two years have been trying times for LGBTQ Americans, but one thing stayed constant—Lambda Legal  never stopped winning victories. We confronted new threats; we faced attacks by the Trump administration targeting many of the gains we have made over the last two decades, and efforts by well-funded anti-LGBTQ organizations to pass hostile state legislation and eliminate protections from discrimination by weaponizing the First Amendment. Our track record of legal victories never faltered, as we racked up success after success.

Just as we are a leader in court beating back the Trump administration’s assaults on our rights, we also need to be a leader in our movement in providing a work environment that creates a pipeline for transgender people, women, people of color, people of different abilities, and people living with HIV. We want the victories we work so hard for to also be reflected in the world we create within our organization.

The Board of Directors also wants to take this opportunity to publicly thank our staff and our donors.

Lambda Legal’s extraordinary staff has continued to move the organization’s work forward without missing a beat. We are profoundly grateful for their incredible dedication to Lambda Legal and its mission.

Likewise, the board extends its deep thanks to Lambda Legal’s thousands of donors, without whom none of this critical work would be possible. We are inspired by their faith in the organization and will do everything in our power to live up to it in this critical moment.

On October 4, we announced the appointment of an interim CEO, Richard Burns. Richard comes to Lambda Legal with decades of experience leading LGBTQ organizations and will steer  us through the transition to our next permanent CEO. In addition to the appointment of an interim CEO, the board and management have taken or initiated the following concrete steps to address the issues surfaced in the Huffington Post:

• In recognition of the fact that the health insurance plans available to our organization do not provide comprehensive coverage for the needs of our transgender employees, we have committed to creating a health reimbursement fund (HRA) to bridge any gaps in the coverage that our trans staff members experience under the current health care plan.  This commitment was unanimously approved by the board on September 22.
• We are actively working with our new union bargaining unit to arrive at a first contract and resolve  issues affecting our staff.
• In January 2018, Lambda Legal retained the Kaleidoscope Group, a renowned team of diversity & inclusion consultants, to partner with us in a sustained effort to improve race equity in the organization.
• We are actively recruiting attorneys at all levels and have made some significant recent hires: Diana Flynn, a high-ranking DOJ official, joined the staff as our litigation director in May.
• We recently created a Staff Morale and Retention Committee that will work with staff and management to create an environment in which our talented staff can thrive.
• The board has committed to robust staff involvement throughout the hiring process for a new permanent CEO.