The positive work experience quickly turned sour when the current Executive Director, Sultan Shakir, was hired. His disinterest in the needs and lives of young people was immediately palpable. What's worse was his disregard for the talent, skill, work ethic and well-being of his employees. In a matter of months he turned a highly effective staff of 7 FT 1 PT into a burnt-out, over-burdened staff of 3 FT 1 PT.
It became clear through his hiring and firing practices that his first priority was not the youth we served, or even the mission of the organization, it was chasing money and promoting himself.
Under his leadership the organization has lost its moral center. Simple practices of professionalism went out the window. As a program manager I made repeated requests to see a budget for the programs I was running, including the amount of funds raised that were earmarked to those programs. My requests were ignored--not even denied. As a result I was forced to run programs and plan events with no knowledge of the available funds.
Finally, the huge disparity in salary between the ED and the highest paid program staff member was appalling. His starting salary as ED was more than double that of the highest paid program staff member, to say nothing of junior and part time staff.
We watched as he insisted on funding his own salary with grant funds and generally mismanaging the grant from which a program staff member was being paid fully--loss of the grant would have meant loss of their job. Meanwhile he made unilateral decisions to change our health insurance plan to reduce overhead costs all the while underpaying a highly skilled and overwork set of employees.
He hired and fired countless temps to attempt to patch up the tattered remnants of the full staff he destroyed and never saw fit to invest in the people he was working into the ground.
When the bathrooms broke and were unusable employees and youth had to find public restrooms to use for 4 months while he shopped around for a good price to repair them. Needless to say not only is this unsanitary and a violation of OSHA, it is also particularly dangerous for trans and gender non-conforming staff and youth who frequent the organization and are supposed to be served by the organization. While I can understand the organization being strapped for cash not once did reducing his over-inflated salary come into conversation as a possible way to alleviate the burden on the organization—too say nothing of the expenses paid out in the name of “fund-raising.”
Sadly the list of exploitative, unethical, and border-line illegal actions that Sultan perpetrated goes on and on. Despite multiple attempts to confront him directly, or to blow the whistle on his behavior to key funders and the Board nothing has changed and in the end the community of young LGBTQ people in DC suffered and continues to suffer.
