Dear WildFire Family, This message is an apology for my actions that have helped hurt a good friend of mine, several of you, and the reputation of WildFire, an event which I love deeply. First I want to say that no matter how you feel about the Safety Class incident or the people involved, one of our fire family has been badly burned. He has devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to our community and I have been lucky to call him a friend for a long time. A community member set up this FundMe campaign to help him pay his medical bills: https://fundrazr/campaigns/3sE8b/sh/943N80. If you can help in any way, please do. As WildFire’s Executive Director, my job is to oversee all WildFire events throughout the year. This includes updating major policies, recruiting and training managers, ensuring our community is aware of things happening with WildFire, and being the topmost level for any major WildFire issue. I have dealt with many, many difficult issues in my time as ED. Here, though, I failed to meet my duties in the following ways: 1) Just before September WF, I did not spend enough time with our new Safety Organizer to make sure we had shared expectations and that he felt empowered to say “no” to anyone that he felt was being unsafe, regardless of their community status and experience. 2) During WildFire, I did not attend the safety class to ensure that I was on exactly the same page as to how we teach this class with the new safety organizer, class presenters and volunteers. 3) When I returned from September WildFire, we as a team were too slow in getting info out to everyone. 4) When I did send an email to everyone, my attempt at transparency resulted in a poorly worded email that caused unnecessary hurt. I took on the role of Executive Director because I love the spirit of WildFire. I want to present the truth in my communications, but my letter was inelegant, undignified, and I caused pain and stress where I did not have to. It was not in the spirit of WildFire. I cannot apologize enough. When it comes to legalities, I must leave a trail of documented action, but I didnt have to make the documented action public. This has has been a difficult situation- trying to balance love and respect for Shane with our legal and cultural responsibilities to the community, while running the largest training retreat in the country. There is just no playbook on how to best do this. I stumbled and caused real harm, and can only hope you will forgive me and learn from my mistakes. We have already begun taking action to better equip WildFire for crisis prevention and management, as well as improve our safety team’s policies and expectations. The Spinning Arts Foundation (WildFire’s parent organization) is meeting next month to wrap up 2014 and discuss our next steps in the above matters. We will keep you informed to the best of our ability as we solidify this information before the opening of the 2015 season. Throughout WFs lifetime, we have made and will continue to make mistakes of every sort, from dropping our hoops to screwing up our choreography on stage to making an already bad situation worse. It’s how we learn and grow from these mistakes that defines our character as individuals and an event. WildFire has always taken pride in feeling like a family, but we failed massively here in our treatment of a brother. Time to pick up the pieces, reflect on how much we love each other, and be a more humble, thoughtful, and caring family. Sincerely, Lisa Elkins WildFire Retreat Executive Director
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 21:45:02 +0000
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