The demise of HotHouse, now characterized as a personality dispute, obscures what’s actually been at stake in my removal [The Business, April 20].
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Last summer, fellow board members wrote to protest my dismissal and warned that if I was not allowed to complete funding requests, HotHouse would experience a shortfall of $150,000. They also repeatedly objected to bylaw violations, questionable elections that gave the board president and his minority a “majority,” and other abuses of power. A letter sent to the board seeking mediation was signed by major donors, prominent cultural figures, and long-term HotHouse supporters and was dismissed out of hand. When all of these actions were rebuffed, we tendered our resignations, leaving the leadership and responsibility for the organization in their control.
This lack of any public accounting and absence of transparency, coupled with a plea for large sums of money, strikes many as anti-thetical to the traditions of the democratic institution we cherished, outside the ethics governing nonprofits, and rather suspicious given their positive spin on things in the Reader last September.
