Leah's Original Post about why she left Recess
Recess's Public Statement as well as a Q&A regarding the conflict made on their website
Public Statement and Q&A
These past months have been difficult for many of us at Recess and in the Recess community. We had a perfect storm on the team, one that broke trust, showed scars, and highlighted places where we had failed to build trust. We believe that the only way to prevent hurting one another the way society has trained us to, is through building relationships, and trust is central to this. None of us will ever eliminate patriarchy, or any other type of systemic hurt within ourselves, our organizations, or our communities. However, through building and maintaining resilient relationships and trust, the hurt of systemic oppression can be mitigated or even stopped. All the lenses, critique, and values in the world are worthless, or often even a perpetuation of the same systems of hurt they intend to stop, if they are not used with the end goal of bringing us closer together, into better relationships, and into enhanced trust. These past months, despite attempts to act within our values, we made decisions and acted in ways that broke the trust and relationships of our teammates. We have also come to recognize and acknowledge parts of our organizational structure, intra-team dynamics, and interpersonal relationships, spoken and unspoken, that have contributed to the detriment of creating and maintaining resilient relationships among the team, particularly among femme and non-binary teammates. For this we are truly sorry. We are sorry for our own mistakes, we are sorry for the people who specifically have been hurt and are upset, and we are sorry to our community to whom trusts us in the upholding of important values in the creation of our event spaces. We have taken steps to improve our own relationships on the team as well as between us and the community we intend to organize in. For those interested, these specific changes are outlined in the following Q&A section below