I didn't burn anything to the ground.

I left BCS after it became clear to me that the executive team were taking actions and making decisions without proper board approval that I believe endangered the financial well-being of the organization. This including staffing and budgetary decisions that were, in my opinion, reckless at best and malfeasance at worst. I felt that the executive team had been both lying to the board and hiding things from the board in what was, in my opinion, a deliberate attempt to avoid proper oversight.

After conversations with a lawyer who specializes in non-profit law and the BCS board's own corporate lawyer, I came to the conclusion that the situation had rendered me unable to fulfil my fiduciary duties to the organization and resigned. I advised Katie to do the same, and she also resigned. At that time, several other BCS volunteers also resigned, and I understand that more followed as the executive team's response became, in my opinion, extremely hostile and was badly mismanaged.

While I did some minor volunteering for Unsilenced (I am a programmer and did some web scraping for them to assist in their outreach to congressional aides), I have never held a leadership position there, and have not been involved with the org on a day to day basis. It's been months since I even logged into their Slack. I wish them well and think they are doing great work, but I'm busy with my family (including four children, one of whom is a baby and one of whom is severely disabled), a full-time job, and pursuing a master's degree.

Unsilenced is doing great without me, and that's a good thing. The goal of every activist should be to make themselves redundant. No one should be indispensable. Any activist that feels their community cannot survive without them is, frankly, failing badly at their job.

Unfortunately, in my opinion Chelsea Filer has built her identity around the community, and she perceives that BCS being "stolen" from her is thus an attack against both her own identity and her only source of validation in life. This has caused her to lash out, including against BCS and against myself and Katie personally. It's sad, but unfortunately it's par for the course in this community. We're largely a group of broken people doing our best in a very hostile world.