By Dr. Angelo A. Williams
The Observer
EDITOR’S NOTE: Between 2023 and 2025, a cluster of departures across the Sierra Club and the Sierra Club Foundation — including routine board turnover, resignations, a discrimination lawsuit and the firing of former Executive Director Ben Jealous — fueled a debate over who holds power inside one of the nation’s most influential environmental organizations.
The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, is one of the nation’s oldest and most influential environmental organizations, with roughly 3.8 million members. The Sierra Club Foundation is its affiliated charitable arm, funding environmental advocacy and litigation. Though legally separate entities, the two organizations share leadership and operate in close coordination.
This is the first in an OBSERVER series examining these departures and what they may reveal about the role, history and future of Black leadership in the environmental movement. READ MORE
Over the last three years, a notable number of Black men in prominent Sierra Club and Sierra Club Foundation roles have exited those positions. Some of those departures were ordinary and built into the organization’s governance rules. Others remain sharply disputed. Taken together, they raise a question that cannot be waved away: are these unrelated episodes of turnover, attrition and personnel conflict, or signs of a deeper problem in how power is exercised at the top of the organization?
The departures include four Black men who left the Sierra Club’s national board between 2023 and 2025: the firing of Executive Director Ben Jealous, the resignation of chief strategy officer Kevin Harris, the exit of South Carolina chapter Director Montravias King, and the termination of Sierra Club Foundation Director Pedro da Silva.
Part of the difficulty in answering that question is structural. The Sierra Club and the Sierra Club Foundation are separate legal entities: the Sierra Club is a 501(c)(4) social-welfare organization, while the Sierra Club Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charity. But public records also show meaningful overlap between them. Dan Chu, the foundation’s executive director, also served as the Sierra Club’s interim executive director until Sept. 3, 2022. Foundation tax records show that Loren Blackford and Ramón Cruz also served on the foundation board in recent years, underscoring why former leaders say it can be hard to separate formal legal distinctions from the broader internal culture of decision-making.
The Sierra Club’s own election rules help explain why internal board politics matter so much. A copy of the club’s bylaws says membership votes are conducted by written ballot, every eligible member gets one vote, the top five vote-getters are elected each year, and directors serve three-year terms.
The club’s 2026 election portal also shows members can vote using information sent either by paper ballot or email. A 2022 post by Grassroots Choice reproducing the Inspectors of Election tally reported 52,924 valid ballots out of 695,607 distributed, or 7.61 percent turnout.
In 2025, the Progressive Workers Union publicly endorsed a five-candidate slate for the Sierra Club board. None of that proves any one faction “controls” the board, but it does show why organized endorsements and low-turnout internal elections have become central to the present fight over governance.
Some of the exits in question, at first glance, seem to be ordinary board turnover. The same 2022 election report listed Ramón Cruz’s directorial term as ending in 2023 and Tony Fuller’s as ending in 2024. That report also showed Aaron Mair and Michael Dorsey were elected in April 2022, and the bylaws provide that those terms last three years, placing their expirations in 2025. On its face, those departures fit standard nonprofit board rotation.
What happened next is harder to explain as routine.
When Jealous was hired, the 15-member club board was majority women; of the seven men, four were Black or Afro-Latino. Today the board is majority men — specifically, White men. All four of those Black men were replaced by White men. The current board has one Asian-American man. For an organization publicly committed to diverse leadership, the question is not only why those men left, but who the Sierra Club chose to replace them with.
Other departures are equally confusing and contradictory. Harris resigned Feb. 7, 2025, allegedly after reporting about his outside lobbying work for Crypto.com. According to an internal email obtained by E&E News, Sierra Club’s chief operating officer told staff Harris “decided to step away” and was not asked to leave.
Inside Climate News later reported that Harris had held multiple Sierra Club roles since 2022, ending as chief strategy officer, while federal lobbying disclosures showed he was also registered for Crypto.com; the same report said Sierra Club leadership maintained that Harris had disclosed his outside business commitments when he joined, that the legal team reviewed them, and that they were deemed not to conflict with the organization’s mission.
The most visible and contested departure was that of Jealous. The Sierra Club board unanimously selected Jealous on Nov. 14, 2022, and said he would begin Jan. 23, 2023. Jealous was the organization’s first Black executive director. In July 2025, he was placed on leave; on Aug. 11, the board unanimously voted to terminate him “for cause” following what it called an “extensive evaluation” of his conduct. Loren Blackford was named interim executive director immediately after the firing and was hired permanently in September. Jealous has publicly disputed the basis for his removal and said he intended to challenge it.
That dispute did not end with the firing itself. A coalition of women of color environmental leaders later called for a fair and independent review of how the Sierra Club handled Jealous’ dismissal, arguing that the board could not credibly supervise an inquiry while also being implicated in the bias allegations Jealous had raised.
Rev. Al Sharpton separately called for independent mediation, saying “another set of eyes” was needed.
What the public record does not yet show is whether the Sierra Club has responded to those calls — or launched any broader independent review of the overall pattern of Black departures. Publicly, the club has described the Jealous matter as the product of an “extensive evaluation,” not a wider examination of institutional pattern.
The Sierra Club was asked detailed questions about the division of authority between the club and the foundation, the significance of leadership overlap, claims about board-election influence, the handling of Jealous’ firing, King’s allegations and the broader question of whether these exits reflect ordinary attrition or a systemic problem. The organization did not respond by publication time.
The most sweeping set of allegations now comes from Pedro Henriques da Silva, the former Sierra Club Foundation director who filed a complaint in Alameda County Superior Court on Jan. 29. According to the filing, da Silva worked at the foundation from approximately May 1, 2023, until his termination Feb. 17, 2025. The lawsuit asserts 13 causes of action, including discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wrongful termination, invasion of privacy and defamation.
It also alleges that during a May 2024 board trip in Monterey, Chu told da Silva he was helping “drum up” harassment complaints against Jealous. Those are allegations, not findings, but they matter because they connect da Silva’s case to the broader dispute over Jealous and over how Black leaders were treated inside the Sierra Club orbit. The complaint further alleges that by the time da Silva was terminated, the foundation had no Black employees left in public-facing roles.
The da Silva complaint also identifies Henry Holmes, a former director of compliance at the Sierra Club Foundation, as part of the broader pattern. According to the filing, Holmes was at one point the only other Black male employee alongside da Silva and is described in the complaint as a “highly capable professional” who had delivered significant results for the foundation. Despite his performance, the complaint alleges, Holmes was frequently belittled by senior leadership, including Executive Director Dan Chu, who is said to have made disparaging remarks about Holmes in internal meetings and expressed a desire to push him into retirement. Senior administrative staff publicly characterized Holmes as “difficult to work with,” the complaint states, and his eventual retirement followed a period of internal tension. After Holmes left, da Silva became the only Black employee in a public-facing role at the foundation. The Sierra Club Foundation has denied allegations of discrimination in the pending lawsuit.
King’s departure also remains part of that pattern. Records reviewed by The OBSERVER show King already was Sierra Club South Carolina’s chapter director by June 2024 and still was being quoted in that role that November. By August 2025, The New York Amsterdam News described him as having served as South Carolina chapter director from 2023 to 2025 and reported that he alleged racial discrimination while trying to lead the organization.
So what can be said with confidence? The verified record supports two conclusions at once. First, some of the departures — especially board exits tied to fixed terms — may be examples of ordinary organizational turnover and a lack of commitment by Sierra Club to continue recruiting diverse leadership, specifically African-American male leadership. Second, the departures of Jealous, King and da Silva are not ordinary in the same way: each involves allegations of discrimination, retaliation, contested process or demands for outside review. That does not by itself prove a systemic pattern. But it does mean the pattern cannot honestly be dismissed as nothing more than attrition and routine HR noise. The unanswered question is whether Sierra Club leadership will permit a genuinely independent accounting robust enough to settle that question in public.
This article was reprinted with permission from The Observer.