Layoffs, Votes of No Confidence and a Leader on Leave at One of the Nation’s Oldest Environmental Groups

After mounting pressure from staff, managers and volunteers, the Sierra Club put executive director Ben Jealous on leave this month.

One of the nation’s largest, oldest and most influential environmental groups is in turmoil at a particularly critical time, as the federal government rolls back landmark environmental protections that advocates fought for decades to achieve.

The Sierra Club is among the organizations trying to hold the line. But its executive director, Ben Jealous, was placed on leave by its board earlier this month, following mounting complaints about ineffective leadership and a no-confidence vote by the union representing nearly half of its staff. Its chief strategy officer left earlier this year after rank-and-file staff found out he was also working as a lobbyist for a crypto currency company, part of an energy-intensive industry complicating efforts to constrain climate change. 

All of that comes after several years of budget cuts, layoffs and unfair labor-practice complaints at the organization.

The Sierra Club, which employs more than 700 people and counts more than 3 million members, has helped close polluting coal-fired power plants across the country, advocated for the establishment of hundreds of parks and monuments and takes credit for helping protect more than 10 million acres of wilderness since its 1892 founding. Sierra Club attorneys have also long fought for environmental protections in court.

The organization has struggled with leadership problems for years. In 2021, its then-executive director resigned after a report by an outside consulting firm concluded that the Sierra Club’s culture had tolerated “anger and aggression” from managers and leaders.

Jealous took charge of the nonprofit at the start of 2023, becoming its first executive director of color. Many among the Sierra Club’s ranks hoped the former NAACP president would be able to lead the organization in a new direction, in light of its acknowledgement in July 2020 that founder John Muir had made “derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes.”

But internal emails, financial documents, staff meeting recordings and interviews show that the Sierra Club has faced additional challenges since Jealous took the helm. Concerns about his leadership have been growing since the early days of his tenure among national and state-level employees, volunteers and outside observers, according to the interviews and internal emails. 

A year and a half into Jealous’ tenure, members of the Progressive Workers Union, which represents hundreds of Sierra Club staffers, overwhelmingly approved a resolution of no confidence in him and his executive team. Of 330 union members who voted, more than 90 percent supported the resolution, amounting to about 40 percent of all Sierra Club staff. 

“In Jealous’ short tenure at the helm of our organization, our unions have experienced unprecedented attacks,” said a June 2024 letter from the union informing organization leadership of the no-confidence vote. “Sierra Club management has consistently violated national labor law in its efforts to bust our unions, lay off our members, gut our contract and retaliate against elected union leaders. In just the past 18 months, PWU has filed nine unfair labor practices (ULPs) with the National Labor Relations Board.”

Records from that federal board show three active complaints against the Sierra Club regarding alleged unfair labor practices. The agency’s database also reflects the nine complaints mentioned in the letter—complaints a union representative said were later withdrawn as part of a deal with leadership to avert a strike. 

Jealous did not respond to repeated requests for comment on this story. The Sierra Club would not answer questions about the reasons for his leave, and leaders have told staff only that all leaves of absence are confidential, according to employees and a recording of a July 10 staff meeting. 

“We know our staff and volunteers are feeling anxious at this moment. This is natural, and it is why we are engaging with and listening to our entire community more deeply,” Loren Blackford, the organization’s acting executive director, said in a statement to Inside Climate News. “In doing so, I am grateful to be working with a strong leadership team which blends a wide array of experience—both from their time at the Sierra Club and the movement. This is a pivotal moment in the fight against the Trump administration and the climate crisis, where we need every member of our powerful community working together.”

Patrick Murphy, the Sierra Club’s board president, also weighed in with a statement that the organization’s leadership is “committed to working every day to grow stronger.”

“We continue to progress in the march to protect our public lands and clean air and water and secure the country’s transition to clean energy,” Murphy wrote. “As we face perhaps the most critical and challenging time in the history of the U.S. environmental movement, we are not resting on past achievements or allowing anything—including those wishing to involve [us] in the press—to distract us from our vital work together.”

Among the events this year upsetting staffers: Kevin Harris, who served in multiple positions at the organization since 2022, culminating in a post as chief strategy officer, internal communications show, was at the same time a registered lobbyist for Crypto.com, according to federal lobbying disclosure documents. The first such disclosure was dated mid-2022. The most recent salary disclosure from Sierra Club showed he earned just over $240,000 at the nonprofit in 2023. 

The Progressive Workers Union said in a statement to Inside Climate News that it is “concerned that during his time working for both Sierra Club and Crypto.com, Harris may have been actively lobbying against bills which Sierra Club supported targeted at regulating the crypto industry and its associated environmental impacts due to the clear conflicting interests of the two organizations.” 

Efforts to reach Harris for comment this week were unsuccessful.

The Sierra Club did not answer questions about Harris. But a Feb. 7 internal email from Michael Parrish, Sierra Club’s chief operating officer, said Harris left the company of his own accord early this year.

Parrish wrote that Harris was not asked to leave the organization but chose to resign because he did not want to be a distraction. Harris had disclosed his “business commitments” when he joined Sierra Club in January 2022, Parrish said, and “never shied away from his pride in starting small businesses and being widely tapped to provide advice and counsel to several entities on issues that align with the work we do here at the Sierra Club.”

Those business commitments, which Parrish did not detail, were reviewed by the organization’s legal team and were deemed not to conflict with Sierra Club’s mission, he wrote.

Sierra Club has widely critiqued the crypto industry as an energy-intensive drain on resources. 

“Since the rapid influx of large-scale cryptocurrency mining operations to the United States following China’s prohibition on such facilities, Sierra Club has been monitoring both the carbon and cost impacts of these operations on the power grid with growing alarm,” the organization said on its website in a description of a 2024 legal fight involving the industry. 

A Difficult Few Years

It’s a particularly challenging time to lead an environmental group, with the Trump administration turning sharply away from environmental protections. As Jealous noted in a March speech at Stanford University, “Right now, we are going through an extinction crisis where more species are dying than died when the dinosaurs went extinct. We are going through a climate crisis, and the environmentalist movement is the smallest it’s been in my lifetime.”

In a letter to Sierra Club, two former board members defended him and said that Jealous, who is Black, is facing a racist “pattern of misinformation, character assassination, and discrimination,” according to the Amsterdam News in New York. They could not be immediately reached for comment.

But Mercedes Macias, an elected member of the Progressive Workers Union’s Sierra Club unit steering committee and member of the PWU Sierra Club BIPOC Caucus, said Jealous “lost the confidence of a majority of his staff as well as prominent volunteer leaders within the organization.”

“In his short tenure, Jealous oversaw four rounds of contentious layoffs, eliminating hundreds of staff and, we believe, illegally targeting outspoken union leaders in retaliation for legally protected activities,” she said. “Year after year, despite Jealous’ claimed commitments to racial justice and civil rights, based on the data we have, we have seen BIPOC members disproportionately impacted by these cuts.”

Macias said that staffers did not expect Jealous to unilaterally fix the Sierra Club’s image as a historically white-centered organization. Still, they hoped for meaningful leadership.

“Jealous and his executive team must be held accountable for the choices they made,” she said. 

He inherited budget woes: Sierra Club’s IRS filings reflect a negative net income in 2020 and 2022. The organization, though, continued to face budget deficits in 2023 and 2024 and has been forced to make substantial cuts, according to its leadership, which outlined the financial situation in a July staff meeting.

In that meeting, leaders announced that salary increases would be halted for those making above $100,000 annually, offices with low traffic would be closed and national campaigns would be “wound down” after grant funding dried up.

Two separate rounds of layoffs have been announced this year, according to the union, the latter in June. 

“The Sierra Club must be a strong leader against the Trump administration’s attempts to eliminate bedrock environmental policies and protections,” Dylan Plummer, the Sierra Club representative for the union, said in a statement sent to Inside Climate News at the time. “By casting off experienced professional staff, the Club is undermining its own mission, breaking promises to its membership, and betraying the values and principles it publicly avows.”

Asked about that and the unfair labor-practice complaints, Sierra Club said in a statement: “As we have repeatedly shared, we are committed to deepening our relationship and building trust with all of our unions. PWU’s Sierra Club National Unit Representative informed us they were in contact with multiple outlets, including Inside Climate News, seemingly to influence bargaining. Our leadership team is focused on working in good faith at the bargaining table—not negotiating through the press.”

The Progressive Workers Union responded that while its priority is negotiating a settlement that protects its members, “it is categorically false that we are trying to bargain through the press.”

“PWU remains committed to finding meaningful solutions to keep the Sierra Club on track to accomplish the organization’s critical work,” the union added in its statement.

The announcement of layoffs came in the wake of the board’s approval of a budget criticized by the board’s treasurer, who voted against it. 

“I don’t feel like this budget process has lived up to our values as an [organization], and the values that we say that we are striving to have as a Board,” the treasurer, Cheyenne Skye Branscum, said at the time, according to a recording of the board meeting obtained by Inside Climate News. “I’m not going to attempt to understand why I’ve been sidelined and excluded, but it’s not lost on me that this has happened to the first and only Native to serve on this board in 133 years, the first Native treasurer in 133 years. So you know, choices were made about what voices mattered in this budget process. And I feel like the choice was ultimately that it was not voices like mine.”

On June 30, a group of 117 non-union staff members, all managers, echoed the concerns of union staff, writing in a letter to the Sierra Club’s board that they believed Jealous has “profoundly failed” to live up to his obligation to be a trusted, strategic leader of the organization. 

“Our concerns with Mr. Jealous’s failure to lead impacts us every day. He has not provided any vision, leadership or inspiration for how we can best protect the planet under the most challenging circumstances of our lifetimes,” the letter said, calling for new leadership and “greater accountability from our Board.” 

The managers’ letter, a copy of which was provided to Inside Climate News, said that Jealous had “failed to articulate any concrete strategy or theory of change for how we will effectively fight the Trump administration’s dismantling of decades of hard won environmental protections.”

Since then, several state chapters of the Sierra Club have also spoken up about their perception that Jealous has failed to lead, with some passing their own resolutions of no confidence or endorsing those approved by other chapters, according to copies of the resolutions reviewed by Inside Climate News.

Robert Bullard, a distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University and a leading figure in the environmental justice movement, spoke out in April against Jealous’ leadership, calling on the Sierra Club’s board of directors to hold a vote of no confidence. 

Bullard’s criticism was based largely on his view that Jealous and the Sierra Club had failed to live up to their promises last year of supporting efforts by Black Alabamians suffering from repeated flooding caused by the expansion and elevation of a highway near their homes in the Shiloh community of Coffee County. 

“For years, the Shiloh community has been given false hope,” added Bullard, a Coffee County native.

Pastor Timothy Williams, one of the Alabamians whose homes continue to flood, said he’d thought that Jealous, as a past NAACP leader, would better understand the type of racial discrimination the community was facing. 

“But it seems like, at least in this case, he didn’t relate to his people,” Williams said. “I’ve started thinking about whether, if we were a white community, would this have happened to our community? Would there be all these broken promises?”

Williams said Jealous called him a “snake” in a telephone call and suggested Williams and Bullard were aiming to have him fired after Bullard notified the Sierra Club of his concerns.

Bullard said while he doesn’t take pleasure in the Sierra Club’s decision to place Jealous on leave, he feels his perception of Jealous’ lack of leadership has been vindicated. 

“Unfortunately, the short six months working with Jealous on highway flooding in the Shiloh community busted three decades of trust and goodwill I’d built up with the Sierra Club,” Bullard said. “You should know it pained me to sever ties with the Sierra Club. … I wish the organization well and hope it can quickly reverse its downward spiral and get on with its mission, since our environmental movement needs a healthy and strong Sierra Club.”

Whether and when Jealous will depart the organization is an open question. 

A leaked copy of his employment contract reviewed by Inside Climate News outlines the reasons the Sierra Club could terminate its executive director for cause.  

Those include: “an act of gross negligence, dishonesty, fraud, misrepresentation, breach of fiduciary duty, or any act of malfeasance of moral turpitude by Executive that is substantially harmful to the mission, interests, or reputation of Sierra Club; Executive’s willful failure or refusal to perform his duties or his material breach of this Agreement; Executive’s conviction of (or plea of no contest with respect to) a felony or other crime that substantially harms the mission, interests, or reputation of Sierra Club; or a severe violation of Sierra Club’s [equal opportunity] policy.”

If the Sierra Club’s board and Jealous disagree on whether a cause for termination exists, the contract says that they must attempt to resolve the disagreement in good faith. If they’re unable to do so within a “reasonable period,” the next step is arbitration.

Cover photo:  Ben Jealous of the Sierra Club speaks in Franklin Park during Day of Action as climate demonstrators protested several banks on March 21, 2023, in Washington, D.C. Credit: Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images