In Mid-March, we encountered Ms. Keyonnia H from Etier Wear on Twitter and she offered to partner for outreach purposes. We were happy to have the assistance and invited her to volunteer with our group, which she eagerly accepted.
Over the weeks, our movement grew very quickly and our needs expanded along with it. The role which was assigned to Keyonnia, based on her skillset and background, was Outreach and Communications Management. We assigned her key tasks requesting that she volunteer to give us a social media marketing plan to improve our reach and engagement.
While volunteering alongside Keyonnia, we found that the responsibilities were not started or completed as expected. She was missing from a majority of our regular meetings and our emails to her went unanswered.
In addition to this, Keyonnia and our leadership team disagreed about the overall direction and goals of our organization. This caused several members of the leadership committee to either speak or attempt to communicate with Keyonnia. With the exception of one member of the leadership team, Keyonnia did not respond to repeated requests for communication. In fact Keyonnia was sent materials by mail to help her accomplish her assigned responsibilities. Despite our continued attempts to work with Keyonnia, she constructively rejected the position that we offered her as the fifth board members, also known as Director of Social Media and Outreach/Communications.
As such, the Fair Internet Coalition management team has voted to end our working relationship with Keyonnia H from Etier Wear.
We wish her the best in all her future endeavors. However this statement shall be construed as a cease-and-desist order for Keyonnia. If Keyonnia has specific facts she wishes to air, she can certainly do so privately at any time. Should this behavior continue, our organization will consider legal action for defamation or libel.
Given the fact that we share a common goal, we do not wish to make this adversarial. We hope that we can go about the task of creating a fair internet environment for everyone even if we cannot do this together.