SAFE Board Provides Scant Details about Addressing Reports of Dysfunction
"Non-response responses" is how a former SAFE Board member described the group's answers to questions about its actions in the face of a detailed story about a "toxic" work culture.
BREVARD — Sky-high employee turnover. Inadequate training for workers in crucial roles. The evaporation of promising programs. A work environment so toxic that several former employees of Safe Inc. of Transylvania County compared its level of emotional abuse to that of the unhealthy relationships they had worked to identify and address.
Combined, these issues undermined the organization’s ability to perform its vital jobs of preventing domestic violence and serving its victims, former employees and Board members said.
NewsBeat published a story detailing these complaints in April and in July it began reaching out to members of its Board of Directors to find out how they were being addressed.
Most members either ignored requests for information or declined to comment, but on July 30, the “SAFE Board” sent an email requesting time to discuss the questions and respond as an organization after its next meeting, scheduled nearly a month in the future.
So what was the substance of the answers it finally provided this week?
“These are non-response responses,” Steve Woodsmall, who resigned from the SAFE Board in disgust earlier this year, said after reviewing a copy of the Board’s email forwarded by NewsBeat.
Woodsmall, who formerly served as coordinator of Brevard College’s Department of Business and Organizational Leadership, said it is ultimately the Board’s responsibility to address problems with the nonprofit.
He had previously criticized the Board saying it is dominated by members enabling the dysfunctional leadership of Executive Director Salley Stepp, who has served in that role since 2001.
The answers from the Board made him “feel even worse” about its oversight because of the ample opportunity to address issues raised.
“They've had several people resign,” he said this week. “They've had issues brought to the Board. They've had a story published about them . . . That's been months now, and they're still in a position where they can't definitively answer the question, ‘What are you doing about it?’ ”
One response from the Board was definite. Stepp remains on the job.
“Salley Stepp is the executive director of SAFE,” the email said. “Salley is dedicated to SAFE’s mission in the past, now and in the future.”
Has the Board addressed issues raised in the story and confirmed by state documents, including employees missing a required training session and the failure to use grant funding for this purpose?
“Yes,” the Board replied, but provided no details on actions it has taken and did not respond to a follow-up question seeking additional information.
High turnover was especially crippling to SAFE’s operations, according to former employees, who blamed it largely on a work culture that one of them described, in an email sent to all Board members in December, as “unwelcoming, indifferent, disconnected, secretive, unempathetic . . . and unprofessional.”
What is the rate of employee departures, the Board was asked, and what it is doing to retain workers?
Its answer: a citation of a study documenting high turnover among social workers nationwide.
Has the Board provided training to Stepp and other top leaders to improve leadership? It didn’t say.
Has it tried to get to the bottom of employee dissatisfaction, including by reaching out to former employees and Board members who raised concerns?
“Yes,” it said, without providing details, and “the Board is also in the process of doing an employee satisfaction survey.”
Virginia Watkins in the spring described how SAFE quashed her efforts to fulfill her role as an advocate for the children of victims of domestic violence and imposed unyielding policies in response to the Covid-19 pandemic that forced her and several other employees to leave their jobs.
Nobody from the Board or the organization has contacted her for the details of her concerns, she said.
Neither have they sought input from Greg Cathcart, who left his job as collaborative services coordinator in 2019 after questioning what he said was inaccurate salary information provided for a grant application.
He also said that he raised money for the Men for Change mentoring program, but when he sought funds to hold events, he was told no money was available.
“Nobody’s reached out to me about anything,” he said of the Board’s response to his concerns.
Former Youth Services Program Director Rebecca Beckum was one of two employees mandated by the terms of a grant to attend an out-of-town “Leadership Training Retreat” in 2023.
Their failure to attend prompted the funding agency to prioritize a site visit, which raised other questions about SAFE’s training practices, according to the report on the visit. Stepp said Beckum was the one who decided that she and the other employee would not travel to the retreat. That couldn’t be true, Beckum said, because she had no power to make such a call.
Has she heard from any SAFE Board members? No, Beckum said.
Woodsmall said that though the SAFE board has not reached out to him about his complaints, he was contacted by a representative of Lake Toxaway Charities, a longtime contributor to SAFE.
The representative declined to comment to NewsBeat in July and the Board, in this week’s email, responded to a question about whether any donors had withheld contributions or raised concerns by writing: “SAFE donations remain consistent with previous years.”
“Again, that doesn’t answer the question,” Woodsmall said.
The Board also did not respond to a question seeking a broader picture of its response to the issues raised in the story. “Are they valid? Are you determined to address?”
City Council member Pamela Holder, one of only two Board members who agreed to be interviewed in July, said Stepp had told the Board “that there are parts of the story that were not true.”
“The Board members are concerned and want the program to go well and address things in a positive way,” Holder also said, “and I’ve been able to talk to Salley and I believe she feels the same way and is willing to do what needs to be done to help it get better.”
But neither Stepp or anyone else affiliated with SAFE, past or present, contacted NewsBeat after the story was published to contest its accuracy.
The site did, however, receive emails and texts from former employees, and a current one, who provided additional examples of SAFE leadership’s mismanagement and/or hostility to workers.
Gail Muldoon, a former SAFE volunteer and Board member, also reached out with concerns. Though she has not filled either of those roles for several years, she said, she has kept in touch with SAFE workers who told her of mistreatment at the hands of the group’s leadership.
“It’s just so wrong that an organization that should be helping people is demoralizing them,” she said.
It’s also wrong that the Board did not fully respond to inquiries about its issues, Woodsmall said.
Its failure to do so, he added, indicates Board members “either don't understand the problem, they aren't equipped to deal with it, or they're ignoring it and hoping it'll go away.”
“Everybody knows that when something like this happens, you own it. You get ahead of it, you talk, you speak, you get proactive and preemptive,” he said. “That’s crisis management 101.”
Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com