Larry Jenkins After fourteen months as the NZ AIDS Foundation's fundraising and events manager, Larry Jenkins has left, alleging poor management and staff disillusionment - and hoping to be elected to the Foundation's Trust Board to enact some fundamental changes. Although a number of high profile staff have left the NZAF in recent months, Jenkins is, for whatever reason, the only one to publicly express his negativity towards the organisation - and in his run up to Board elections in three weeks' time he doesn't mince words. Jenkins believes the Foundation is a fundamentally flawed organisation, especially at board and chief executive level. He is highly critical of its approach to staff relations. And to top it all off he believes that the recent restructuring of its Gay Men's Health unit has been ill advised and badly executed. "The restructure has been a disaster. It has caused a lot of ill-feeling, and a lot of pain and agony amongst the staff, which I'm just not able to sit and watch anymore," he says. Larry Jenkins came to the NZAF after a period as a freelance events manager and from organising the Bay Of Islands Arts Festival. He is a career musician and helped organise concerts in Northland. He joined as a fundraiser and events manager, with responsibilities also for memberships and volunteers, and says he initially enjoyed the job and the working environment. Highlights he recalls fondly include World AIDS Day 2006 and this year's Big Gay Out which he organised. He says he also enjoyed involvement with smaller events and helping to raise the profile of the NZAF, but acknowledges that he was pushed to cover all his responsibilities in the four days a week for which he was employed. "A lot of the work just had to wait until there was time to do it, he says, but "I really enjoyed the job when I first took it, I had the company of a lot of congenial people who were all dedicated to what they were doing and they were there because they had a vested interest in the gay community and they were seen to educate, and to promote the idea of safe sex." Jenkins feels that given the conditions and the time constraints he was successful in his job "and it gave me a profile in the gay community which it was pleasant to have... I've become extremely fond of the people that I worked with, and I've never worked with a better workforce." But that contentment did not last. "Due to the restructure all of that fell away and we've been mostly concerned with the restructure for the past six months. It has not gone well and it has not made a lot of people happy, and we've lost a lot of key people in the process. Since April the atmosphere has been deadly around the national office, so many people have gone or come in, so many people have resigned or been made redundant, the atmosphere is not really comfortable." For the first six months, Jenkins says, he had a good, if slightly distant, relationship with the Board, and in particular it's Chair. "The board was new, and the only contact I had with them at first was at the Annual General Meeting. Then I had a lot of contact with the Chairman of the Board, because he was required to come and talk at events. I wrote speeches for him, and other board members that had to be present at things. There was no reason, really, to have any contact with the board at first, because things seemed to be going well. But from the time of the restructure on, the board decided to let the Executive Director deal with everything, and they would not discuss any of this with the staff, even when the staff was very upset and wanted to talk to them, we directly requested to meet with the board without the Executive Director, but they refused to do that." "ON THE WRONG TRACK" Jenkins has been critical of the Foundation's upper management for some months, but only felt he could go on public record on GayNZ.com once his resignation, "on principle," was effective, at 5pm last Wednesday, although he did somewhat spill the beans a few days earlier in a radio interview with fellow NZAF critics Lexie Matheson and Ross Stevenson. "I see the AIDS Foundation going down the wrong track. It's not serving its constituency as it should," he says, positive that his view is backed up by the numbers of staff who have left the NZAF recently. "Since three months ago, we've had at least eleven people leave the organisation, for one reason or another. Most of those are resignations or redundancies. The redundancies are [related to] the restructuring. The resignations are because people don't want to work there anymore." Jenkins is sure that the reason for those resignations is failure by the NZAF board to engage directly with the management of the organisation or with staff members, the board's misplaced confidence in the Executive Director and its members' lack of commitment to their role. "I think the staff have lost faith in the management. They've lost faith [because] the board will not directly deal with them." The remarkable criticisms and allegations that Jenkins is making against the existing board and its executive director are serious and far-reaching, striking into the very heart of how the only significantly resourced NZ organisation addressing the HIV and AIDS epidemic amongst gay men is doing its job. Outgoing board Chair, Hoani Jeremy Lambert, who is not seeking re-election, seems variously bewildered and angered by most of Jenkins' criticisms. As a director, Lambert says he is unable to comment on individual staff members' resignations: "I'm not privvy to the reasons people would want to resign." As for the redundancies, "it's never pleasant having to lose people from an organisation. I know that there was a process that the Executive Director engaged in around those redundancies." Jenkins is critical what he sees as a lack of rapport between the Board and Foundation staff. "The board only wants to deal with its staff through the Executive Director and, however that may be policy, and it's not policy to my knowledge, it is a very big mistake in this instance, because of the staff's lack of confidence in the Executive Director." Jenkins refers to a letter of no confidence in the NZAF's chief executive, Rachael Le Mesurier, presented to the Board in late August. That letter said, in part, the signatories had "no confidence in the executive director... to manage the organisation and the staff with integrity and in a professional, structured, reasonable and humane manner." Board Chair Hoani Jeremy Lambert publicly stated two weeks later that a Board investigation of the complaints had resulted in continued confidence in Le Mesurier, and that “on the basis of information supplied, no further formal action is required." This is an area Lambert feels he can address. The relationship whereby formal responsibilities between the Board and operational staff are channelled through the Executive Director is indeed policy, he says. "In any organisation that you care to look at you will find they have a delegation to the executive director to deal with all matters relating to the employment of staff other than the employment of the actual executive director." In essence, the board employs the executive director, "and that sets the relationship between governance and operations." Although the number of staff who actually signed the letter has never been clearly confirmed by the Board, Jenkins is adamant that virtually every Auckland staff member willingly put their names to it. "On the day, everybody in the National Office, apart from two people, signed it. And then the staff at the Burnett Centre wanted to sign it, so they all joined, so in all, there were eighteen or twenty people who signed that letter. And the board will not communicate with any one of them directly." "The board did receive a letter, says Lambert. "Many of the names were illegible and so we weren't willing to take that letter as any indication... we weren't willing to take a 'poll' of staff but we did take the matter very seriously and we engaged in an internal process to find out whether there were issues that the Board needed to deal with. At the end of that process we had no reason not to continue to have full confidence in the Executive Director. We also then made a number of suggestions, together with [Executive Director Rachael Le Mesurier] about how we could adjust things to try to address some of the things that the staff raised through that process." DECISION MAKERS