Sacramento’s leading domestic violence center is ‘toxic’ workplace, current and former staff say
In June 2021, Cyndi Lopez-Spencer was about to start her dream job.
She grew up in a violent home where trauma left its mark. Now in her 40s, she was the new director of operations at WEAVE, the Sacramento region’s most prominent nonprofit for victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and sex trafficking.
“I was so excited to be there,” Lopez-Spencer told The Bee, and not just because the organization’s mission was so closely aligned with hers. She would also be working almost exclusively with women, in a place she thought would be safe and empowering.
Six months later, Lopez-Spencer stacked her belongings on a rolling utility cart, dropped her keys on her desk, walked out of WEAVE’s midtown office and never returned.
In a Dec. 10, 2021 letter to the nonprofit’s board of directors, Lopez-Spencer said that WEAVE, an organization created to provide support and sanctuary for abused women, was itself poisoned by a culture of emotional and verbal abuse.
Lopez-Spencer, who’s been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition she said she disclosed to the organization’s human resources office when she started, described locking herself in her office to cry or to endure another panic attack after being yelled at and humiliated by the women who run the organization.
The CEO of WEAVE is Beth Hassett, who has been in the job since 2006. Reporting to Hassett are Chief Program Officer Gina Roberson, Chief People and Talent Officer Marnie Shuey, and chief officers of finance, counseling, community response, and compliance.
“I am a DV (domestic violence) survivor myself,” Lopez-Spencer wrote to the board. “The treatment by members of (senior management) is abusive, and counter to everything that WEAVE stands for.”
The Sacramento Bee spoke to 13 current and former WEAVE staff members from across the organization’s teams: operations, counseling, prevention and education, advocacy and legal. Many did not know one another. The former employees were there from 2018 to earlier this year; two currently work at WEAVE.
Each described an organization that, despite its mission, is belittling to its diverse staff and tone deaf to evolving conversations about race and racism, issues that can trickle down to the services it provides its clients. Most spoke on condition of anonymity, either because they still work at WEAVE or remain in the same field and fear retribution. (Anonymous sources are known to the reporter and two Bee editors.)
Many staff who spoke to The Bee said taking their issues to WEAVE’S HR office would have been a dead end. They labeled the group of chief executives — including the head of HR — as “cliquey,” and feared that the close personal relationships among executive staff might influence their view of employee complaints.
Hassett and WEAVE Board President Ashley West denied these allegations in an in-person interview and written statements.
“As a workplace and leadership team, WEAVE is working continuously to live our mission in action and to evolve our practices,” Hassett said in a statement.
“We are open, transparent and collaborative. We strive to keep our lines of communication with all employees open and have a dedicated human resources specialist team to address concerns.”
‘You do realize this is a DV agency we work for, right?’
WEAVE, originally an acronym for Women Escaping a Violent Environment, was founded in 1978 by three Latina domestic violence survivors, Sandra Orozco Stapleton, Ramona Delgado and Jennie Hernandez Gin. From a shoestring nonprofit, it has grown into Sacramento’s leading provider of services for people in crisis. WEAVE reported that in 2021 it provided shelter to 146 adults and children, counseling to 524 individuals, legal services to 684 and answered more than 7,000 calls on its 24/7 crisis hotline.
In 2022, it received about $6.5 million in government grants and $2.4 million in other contributions. Its staff are embedded in police departments and sheriff’s offices to help victims report violence or assault. In schools, from elementary through college, they teach classes and lead workshops on healthy relationships and intimate partner violence.
Hassett was named one of Sacramento’s Most Admired CEOs by the Sacramento Business Journal in 2020. Four years earlier, she was honored by the Congressional Victims’ Rights Caucus with the Ed Stout Memorial Award for Outstanding Victim Advocacy.
In celebrating 25 years with WEAVE in 2021, Hassett told Inside Sacramento that she’d undertaken a rebrand that included changing the organization’s acronym from “Women Escaping a Violent Environment” to “When Everyone Acts, Violence Ends.”
The new language reflects the importance of “educating yourself about what leads to violent acts, intervening when you see somebody behaving badly, donating clothes to our thrift stores, donating money,” Hassett said. “I like the positivity of (the new name). It shows that we all have a role — even if we don’t think we’ve been touched by it, we have.”
Staff The Bee interviewed were enthusiastic about WEAVE’s mission. For many of them, the work is personal; they or someone they know and love was affected by domestic or intimate partner violence.
But Lopez-Spencer is one of many current and former employees who say the workplace culture created by Hassett is antithetical to the mission of “promoting safe and healthy relationships.” They say they pursued this mission despite workplace leadership, rather than because of it.
Edward Costa, director of operations before Lopez-Spencer, had spent his career in finance before coming to WEAVE in 2020. He said he made the change because he wanted to work for an organization that served its community. Costa found himself shocked that leadership at a domestic violence agency would treat its employees so badly.
“I wanted to work for a company that does good and gives back,” he said. “I was very excited to join the company … but pretty much from the day I got there, I wondered what the hell I got myself into … I came from corporate America! The banking industry! And I had never seen anything like it.”
There was “constant degrading, yelling, trashing other employees out loud over the phone,” he said.
He stayed for 10 months.
“You do realize this is a DV agency we work for, right?” Costa recalls saying to his supervisor multiple times. “It blew my mind that they would talk to people the way they did, treat the people the way they did.”
Lopez-Spencer recalled two interactions with Gina Roberson, the chief program officer who oversees all victim advocacy and intervention services. Both rose above the level of a heated workplace disagreement, she said.
The first occurred when Lopez-Spencer had been at WEAVE for just a few months, she said. Following a group email discussion about the organization’s safehouse for women and children, she said Roberson came to her office and yelled at her until she was red in the face. The door was wide open, and two other advocacy team members watched from across the hall.
“They were both standing there staring at me,” she said, while “Gina … yelled at me, like I’m the dumbest dumb-dumb in the history of people. She just yelled and yelled and yelled.”
Later, staff who had watched the exchange went in to comfort her, and told her not to take it personally, as Roberson has a pattern of such behavior.
The second interaction was similar — a disagreement triggered by a meeting about security at the safehouse.
“She came up to my office later that day and went zero-to-60 in a second; red in the face, yelling. I just stood there and let her yell at me.”
Roberson denied both of these stories and said that WEAVE does not have a toxic workplace culture.
“I do not ‘scream’ at people I work with,” Roberson told The Bee in a written statement. “And I do not have the context for what instance she is recalling.” Roberson said that in the 4-and-a-half years she’s worked at WEAVE, she has supervised 10 members of leadership and only two have left, “voluntarily and on good terms.”
“I work really hard to support my staff, build a team atmosphere, and develop great working relationships,” she told The Bee. “I write personal notes of thanks and appreciation to my staff and colleagues, including one to Cindy Lopez-Spencer letting her know how much I was glad she was there and that she was doing a great job.”
Hassett also denied that WEAVE has a toxic workplace culture.
“WEAVE has an extensive commitment to creating a workplace where everyone belongs and feels safe,” she said. “We always review and take action when a question arises.”
Three weeks after The Bee interviewed Hassett and West, Costa, Lopez-Spencer and another source for this story received an email from Shaw Law Group, asking to interview them for an internal complaint, as they “may have information that would be useful for the investigation.”
“We take the facts implied by your questions very seriously and have hired a law firm to investigate them,” Hassett told The Bee. “We will not comment further on the workplace investigation.”
‘Not my monkeys, not my circus’
Current and former staff said that WEAVE’s executive leadership — comprised primarily of middle-aged white women — has failed to stay in step with evolving conversations about race and racism. WEAVE leaders deny this.
“This is a subjective judgment about which we strongly disagree,” Hassett said in a written statement. “Our dedication to DEI training, practices and workplace culture demonstrates otherwise.”
In March 2019, the District Attorney’s office announced it would not prosecute the Sacramento police officers who shot and killed Stephon Clark. The year prior, two police officers chased the unarmed father of two through his grandmother’s backyard in Sacramento’s Meadowview neighborhood, before shooting at him 20 times. It was the latest in a series of officer-involved shootings that were often followed by an aggressive police response to protests.
As concern grew about police violence in Black neighborhoods, WEAVE staff met to discuss the news. Black employees worried that communities of color were hesitant to seek WEAVE’s help, given its close ties to law enforcement. They were also concerned about how WEAVE would respond to the shooting and the DA’s subsequent ruling.
“For some of our Black community, people don’t feel safe with the police,” said a former staff member who worked with commercially and sexually exploited children.
“There was a discussion about that. I asked, ‘Where do we stand on safety for Black and Brown communities?’”
Alex Wilson, a WEAVE community educator from November 2018 to March 2019, was in the meeting.
“(Staff members of color) were talking about safety, but (Hassett) was talking about how WEAVE should respond (in the media), about WEAVE’s image and appearance,” she said. “It felt like it was more about Beth’s association with the DA than actual concern for our Black clients.”
Then Hassett made a comment that sucked the air out of the room.
“You know what?” she said. “Not my monkeys, not my circus.”
The room went “dead silent,” according to Wilson.
“We were kind of like, ‘Did that just happen?’” recalled another former staff member who worked on the victim advocacy team. “The energy in the room definitely shifted.”
Hassett told The Bee that she regrets using the phrase, but that no “ill intent or cynicism was meant.”
Hassett told The Bee that during the meeting Wilson and others described, a staff member asked the question, “How does WEAVE decide when we speak to the media about an issue?’”
“A phrase was used that, in hindsight, is regretful...,” Hassett said in an interview. “The words did not land well. I apologize for that.”
She also said that WEAVE leadership “met with the DA to inform her how damaging the District Attorney’s decision was to communities WEAVE serves and offered to broker conversations with WEAVE allies.”
Black staff and other staff members of color said the comment represented executive leadership’s lack of cultural competency.
“That was the pivotal moment for me,” said the former staff member on the exploited children team, a woman of color. “There’s no way someone can say that and then do the work. I was done at that moment, and I had to find a way to exit, which was difficult.” She quit shortly thereafter.
Wilson said she believes she was fired for calling attention to organizational blind spots on race. Hassett strongly disputes this. She said she could not go into details about Wilson’s departure, but categorically denies that she or anyone else has ever been fired for pushing back against leadership, especially about race.
“We do talk about race and diversity often and no employee has ever been terminated or received negative feedback for discussing race related issues,” Hassett said in a written statement.
Wilson, who is Black, recalled talking with a colleague of color on her team who said that cultural appropriation is “not that big of a deal.” Given the diverse student body that Wilson and her colleague worked with, Wilson was concerned about her colleague’s placement in a majority-Black Sacramento high school.
“If this is how she thinks about cultural appropriation, what else does she think about (those) communities?”
Wilson had a meeting with the team manager and her colleague about the interaction, where she felt her concerns went unheard and unaddressed. Shortly after, Wilson recalls being honest with her team manager about the meeting where Hassett made the offensive comment.
“I was like, ‘I don’t feel better about that. I think we could say and do more on our own end about how we represent Black bodies and how we talk about Black domestic violence … and this conversation doesn’t really do anything.’”
Wilson “had a real microscope on her after speaking out,” said a former colleague, adding that “there was this over-surveillance of her behavior.”
Later that week, Wilson was fired from WEAVE.
“I broke down,” Wilson said. “I cried and cried.”
She said when she asked Chief People and Talent Officer Marnie Shuey why she was being fired, Shuey said it involved “an email” that she neither showed nor explained to Wilson.
“They already had my stuff on my desk in a box,” Wilson said.
She also received an email from Shaw Law Group after The Bee interviewed WEAVE for this story.
WEAVE leadership’s difficulties with diversity are known to other Sacramento organizations that work with women in crisis. Michelle Coleman, interim Executive Director for My Sister’s House, which serves the Asian American Pacific Islander community, said that a lack of diversity on senior leadership teams and a lack of cultural competency can send a message to clients.
“If you walk into an agency wearing a hijab, and no one else is, and you feel judged by that, you’re not going to go back,” said Coleman, associate director of WEAVE from 2002 to 2009, and whose nonprofit receives diverse clients who say they couldn’t get the help they needed at other DV organizations.
“I’m happy (WEAVE) is doing the work,” she said. “But I hope they take this article as an opportunity to do some self-reflection. That would be wonderful if they did that.”
Adèle James, a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant who has worked for WEAVE for the last four years, spoke highly of senior leadership’s efforts to create an inclusive workplace, which she characterized as proactive rather than reactive.
“I see the work they put in, and they were not trying to catch up on the bandwagon,” James said. “No one had to prod them to do this (work).”
James said that Hassett is involved in all of WEAVE’s DEI efforts and that where other organizations may be hesitant to “confront white supremacy head on, WEAVE is not.” She said she has been particularly impressed by WEAVE’s partnership with Black communities in South Sacramento, management’s decision to include DEI training in onboarding orientations, and an impressive strategic plan and equity statement.
“They put their money where their mouth is,” said James.
Staff members who spoke to The Bee acknowledged DEI efforts in the form of materials, trainings, meetings and discussions. But they said such efforts didn’t seem to affect how they were treated at work.
“WEAVE is doing really great work in the community, but I didn’t see that work internally,” said a former counselor who worked at WEAVE for three years, and who is Black. “I didn’t see that great work being done for us employees.”
“We had these DEI trainings and conversations, but the problems and the concerns we asked (executive leadership) to address were never addressed ... nothing really came to fruition.”
Shuey “had no idea how to use proper terminology” for diverse identities, said one former staff member on the prevention and education team, a person of color and member of the LGBTQ community.
This staffer, who worked at WEAVE for three years and recently resigned, recalls Shuey referring to a trans staff member as “a transgender” and calling their gender identity a choice.
“She would say things like, ‘No matter the choices you make, people should respect you,’” said the former staff member. “Being trans is not a choice.”
Shuey told The Bee in a written statement that she does not believe being trans is a choice, “so I would never have said that.”
“If I misspoke at one point, I am sorry about that; I am human,” she said. “WEAVE values and celebrate diverse identities and so do I. I am committed to doing my very best to support the employees at WEAVE.”
This staff member and many others who spoke to The Bee felt that management treated Black staff differently.
“It seemed to be a very common theme for a lot of us (non-white staff) that a lot of our concerns were kind of tossed aside as ‘Angry Black Woman syndrome,’” said a former advocate.
“It was just not a culturally competent workplace,” said another.
Lopez-Spencer also recalls that services to clients of color were not always culturally competent — especially for the large number who didn’t speak English.
She said that WEAVE relied on a speaker phone translation service that didn’t offer enough of the many languages spoken by Sacramento’s diverse clients, particularly those in the Middle Eastern community. There were often long wait-times to find a translator.
“Lots of employees (who worked with clients) complained to me and asked me to find a new one,” she said.
Lopez-Spencer suggested WEAVE upgrade to a more modern company that offered more languages and a video translation service, which would have been more expensive. She said leadership did not approve the change.
Hassett said WEAVE uses a “service that is best in its class and has an excellent reputation amongst agencies that provide 24/7 hotline and in-person services in multiple languages to victims of trauma.” She said no staff members have recommended that the organization change translation services.
Red flags and high turnover
Staff members describe a “lack of equity” at WEAVE.
“Minority employees were paid the least and treated the poorest … (leadership) talks poorly about them, treats them terribly, and they don’t care about turnover,” Lopez-Spencer said.
Hassett said this isn’t true.
Costa also recalls hearing a senior manager disparage the advocate team. “All they do is f--- around,” she said.
“That was a huge red flag for me,” Costa said. “Because the advocates do the most important work.”
The former prevention and education staffer said that executive leadership was frequently rude and condescending in tone. Feedback for a presentation that members of the leadership team put together for executive leadership was once met with an email response in which Hassett said, “Don’t you people read?” and “Does anybody here listen?”
Hassett denied using this language. “I do not speak to people like this,” she said. “Speaking to staff in this manner is antithetical to the culture we have worked hard to build at WEAVE.” Staff are required to take several workplace training sessions, and WEAVE “takes the spirit of this training and the EEO compliance process seriously.”
“WEAVE has an extensive commitment to creating a workplace where everyone belongs and feels safe,” she said.
Advocates are the front line of WEAVE’s operation, closest to the trauma that clients experience, be it rape, sex trafficking, or physical and emotional abuse. They provide support to victims during the use of rape kits or other medical examinations following an assault. They work overnight shifts. They help move families into the safehouse. They support victims in court and in interviews with law enforcement.
But advocacy and prevention and education teams also experience high turnover, employees said, because of the working conditions.
“The average employee tenure is incredibly short,” said a former employee from the legal department. “Folks don’t stay there because it’s a toxic place to work.”
“There’s no employee retention,” said a former advocate. “The attitude is, ‘You don’t like it here? There’s the door.”
Hassett said in a statement that WEAVE’s victim advocates and counselors “are the heartbeat of the agency.”
“Our ability to devote ourselves to the safety of our community every day for 45 years is possible because of the healthy workplace we must foster and nurture.”
‘It broke my heart for the family that had to live there’
In Lopez-Spencer’s view, staff felt they weren’t heard by senior leadership, which she described as taking a dismissive attitude to their ideas. Security became a source of friction.
Lopez-Spencer was responsible for WEAVE facilities, including the midtown headquarters and a safehouse and apartments for clients and their children fleeing violent households. She told The Bee she wanted to invest in upgrades like a new gate and security company, but that management was not interested.
In the fall of 2021, a man from a nearby homeless encampment got through the safehouse gate in the middle of the night. Lopez-Spencer said the gate had failed repeatedly.
He was able to cross the wide parking lot, let himself into the vestibule, and enter a second set of doors into the living space, where about a dozen women and their children were seeking refuge from violent and unstable homes.
The security guard had wandered off. Onsite safehouse staff heard yelling, said Lopez-Spencer, and they were the ones to call law enforcement.
“Can you imagine if you are in the safehouse, and you wake up in the middle of the night and hear a male voice? That must have been so terrifying … for everybody involved but for the clients particularly. I can’t even imagine.”
Hassett said “safety and security are foundational to who WEAVE is as an organization,” and that the breach was the first in the 20 years the safehouse has been in use. Police confirmed that the unhoused man was neither violent nor a predator. Hassett said she asked police for more frequent drive-by checks.
Moreover, Hassett said in an interview with The Bee that she took many of Lopez-Spencer’s suggestions, and in November 2021, WEAVE changed security providers twice.
Lopez-Spencer said she initiated these changes. One of her final acts as Director of Operations was firing the security guard company and the security camera company WEAVE had been using.
Security was not the only flash point at the safehouse and transitional safehouse apartments. Advocates were forced to clean an apartment that a family had left with feces and blood on the carpet and rotting, maggot-ridden meat inside the refrigerator. The staff called management, explaining that the apartment needed to be professionally cleaned, but management told them to do it anyway. One of the advocates who came upon the scene threw up.
Hassett said she was unaware that this occurred and said in a written statement that WEAVE has had a janitorial staff since 2018. She also said, “it is ... part of any advocate’s responsibilities who works in our Housing division’s job description to clean and maintain our facilities as well.” Multiple advocates The Bee spoke to said they were expected to clean the apartments after their clients moved out, particularly so other families in crisis could move in as soon as possible.
“If the space includes biohazards or is excessively dirty, they are to contact the Operations team who have the requisite expertise and knowledge of regulated standards to complete that work,” Hassett said. “We prioritize the safety and cleanliness of all WEAVE facilities.”
For the advocate who had cleaned the particularly filthy apartment, there were two issues. Someone should have been hired to clean the biohazardous materials in the apartment with the proper personal protective equipment, she said. This particular advocate worked with child sex trafficking victims, and the psychological and emotional toll of her work was intense; cleaning maggots and bodily waste was not part of her job description. She later quit for a higher paying advocacy job with another more trauma-informed organization, she said.
But beyond her own experience, she wondered why those clients were living in such conditions in the first place. How was it possible that WEAVE staff hadn’t checked on the family and seen the conditions in the apartment?
Lopez-Spencer recalled that the safehouse and apartments were poorly maintained, with leaks and cockroaches.
“It’s not any place I’d want to be,” she said.
The staff member who cleaned the body fluids and maggots felt most sympathetic for the clients.
“I ended up doing it,” she said, “because it broke my heart for the family that had to live there because the severity of the mental health issues were so bad. I don’t know what type of support that family had while they were in there.”
‘WEAVE is an incredible force for good’
All current and former staff who spoke to The Bee said they did so not to “take down” WEAVE but quite the opposite — to see it provide the services its clients deserve and a workplace where employees feel valued.
For some, that means that WEAVE needs a culture reset from top management down to the rest of the staff — many of whom want to see it become a more culturally competent, trauma-informed workplace.
“It’s really important for WEAVE to be held accountable for the way they’ve existed in the community,” said a former prevention education coordinator, a woman of color who WEAVE fired after only three months for “not being a good fit.”
Wilson wants to see WEAVE “go back to the grassroots nature of it all.”
“They need to assess what’s best for the community. Sacramento is such a diverse place. WEAVE should feel diverse, it should feel comfortable, it should feel like home for clients and employees.”
West, the board president, said the organization is “dedicated to healthy and safe relationships, whether in the community, or at work.”
She pointed to a survey from earlier this year, in which “95% of the 98 employees who responded to the survey agreed with the statement, ‘My supervisor treats me with dignity and respect.’”
Those who spoke to The Bee largely said their issues were not with immediate supervisors, but senior leadership.
“WEAVE is an incredible force for good in the community, and I want them to be better,” said the former counselor. “It sounds cliche, but I want them to be the change I know they can be in the world.”
Lopez-Spencer feels the same.
“I want WEAVE to be the organization that everybody in Sacramento thinks it is,” she said.
“I want it to live up to its name.”
This story was originally published April 18, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
