Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club, is on leave as of Friday afternoon, the organization confirmed, after less than three years leading the environmental nonprofit group.
The Sierra Club has announced several rounds of layoffs since he joined and this move comes after simmering tensions among local chapters and complaints from a group of managers as well as its union.
Loren Blackford will run the organization as interim executive director, according to the Sierra Club website.
Last month, a group of more than 100 employees sent a letter to the group’s board of directors expressing concerns that Mr. Jealous was not prepared to shepherd the 132-year-old organization through a second Trump administration.
“Mr. Jealous 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,” they wrote. They also accused him of failing to gain the trust of funders and said they felt the Sierra Club has been in a “downward spiral.”
A spokesman for the Sierra Club said the organization did not comment on personnel matters and declined to specify the nature of the leave. Mr. Jealous did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The Sierra Club, arguably the nation’s most prominent environmental organization, was founded in 1892 and brought in more than $100 million in revenue last year. It has more than 800 staff members and local chapters in every state.
In June, the executive committee of the Oregon Chapter voted unanimously to request a vote of no-confidence in Mr. Jealous from the Sierra Club’s board. In a letter explaining the decision that was seen by The New York Times, they criticized his fund-raising efforts and pointed to the hiring of a senior staff member who was registered as a lobbyist for the cryptocurrency firm Crypto.com while he worked for the organization, calling that a conflict of interest.
Leaders of the Missouri chapter also voted unanimously to request a no-confidence vote. “We can no longer trust Mr. Jealous and his executive team’s management of the Sierra Club and demand they all resign to institute new leadership,” the chapter’s executive committee wrote.
Mr. Jealous was formerly the chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and, in 2018, was the Democratic nominee for governor of Maryland. He is the first person of color to lead the Sierra Club.
He joined as the organization’s executive director after a turbulent period during which an employee claimed to have been raped by a former senior employee who was still involved with the organization, and an internal report documented a toxic culture where bad behavior was tolerated. The previous head of the organization left after sparking backlash with a blog post disavowing John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club.
“There’s been a moment of reckoning that was important for the Sierra Club,” Mr. Jealous told The Times in 2023. “Reckonings are hard, and I’ve never seen anybody really do it right. There’s a lot of pent-up emotion, and it all comes out.”
“Ben’s tenure has been experienced by many as tumultuous,” said Erica Dodt, president of the Progressive Workers Union, which represents Sierra Club employees. “We are interested to see what comes next and if change is on the horizon.”
Claire Brown covers climate change for The Times and writes for the Climate Forward newsletter.
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