Lorri '$277K' Jean:
On Vacation Till January 12
This morning I spoke with Adriana Rosales, the executive assistant to Lorri Jean, the executive director of the LA gay center who earned $277,299 last year and who took a month-long vacation to Alaska in the weeks before the Prop 8 loss at the ballot box.
Rosales confirmed that Jean is on a "well deserved" break from her duties at the center. The break, which I am characterizing as a vacation, began the day before Thanksgiving and extends through January 12.
I tried to pin Rosales down about whether the break is a vacation in her view, and Rosales danced around the subject, finally saying that Jean is "away from work for personal reasons. She is out of town."
After my conversation with Rosales, this email arrived from an assistant spokesperson for the LA center:
Hi Michael,
In response to your question about Lorri L. Jean, I can tell you that upon returning to her duties as the Center’s CEO after being on loan to the No on 8 Campaign, Lorri began a portion of a sabbatical granted to her by the Center’s board of directors that she had postponed for more than a year. She will return after the holidays.
Best regards,
Thomas Soule
I appreciate the communication today from the gay center, and hope they will announce on their site that the executive director is out of the office till mid January. The center needs to lead a community-wide discussion about Jean's leadership performance this year and answer questions about her $277,299 salary. Silence about these issues will do nothing to make the accountability demands on Jean.
Since Jean and the center are not committed to fiscal transparency, they don't post their IRS 990 reports on their site, showing their budget, salaries and expenses. However, if you click here, you can read the latest IRS filing for the center.
3 comments:
Leadership of this movement, in the spirit of Harvey Milk who knew it was about changing the life of some kid in Altoona, is a profound obligation, even a holy one. I've rarely seen this in our "leadership." They are, with some exceptions, entitled and clubby careerists. Goodbye to all that.
Lorri Jean is egotistically and financially "bloated". The cost-benefit ratio of her value there is tipped in the wrong direction. Their Board of Directors needs to wake up and realize this. She's not the only person who can run that place. It's time for "new blood" at that Center. Our community needs to demand her replacement.
Given the realities of Los Angeles life in 2008/2009, do we really need a gay/lesbian center? Given the low number of people served by this organization, couldn't smaller and more responsive charities step in and provide better/cheaper service?
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