Sierra Club Black Leadership Departures Raise Questions
The firing of former Executive Director Ben Jealous and the exits of several other Black leaders have ignited a broader debate over race, accountability and institutional culture inside the Sierra Club and its affiliated foundation. The post Sierra Club Black Leadership Departures Raise Questions appeared first on Word In Black.
Black News 
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. This report was originally produced and published by The Sacramento Observer.
Founded in 1892, the Sierra Club is one of the nation’s oldest and most influential environmental organizations, with roughly 3.8 million members. Its charitable arm, The Sierra Club Foundation, funds environmental advocacy and litigation. Though legally separate entities, the two organizations share leadership and coordinate their operations.
READ MORE: 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.
Diversity Wipeout
Over the last three years, a notable number of Black men in prominent roles at the Sierra Club and the Sierra Club Foundation 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 disturbing questions: were those departures ordinary episodes of turnover, attrition, and personnel conflict? Or are they signs of a deeper problem in how power is exercised at a storied environmental organization?
When Jealous was hired as executive director, the club’s 15-member board was majority women; of the seven men, four were Black or Afro-Latino. Today, all four have been replaced by white men, who make up the majority of the board’s membership.
The departures, which occurred between 2023 and 2025, include the firing of Executive Director Ben Jealous, the resignation of Kevin Harris, the Club’s chief strategy officer; the exit of Montravias King, director of its South Carolina chapter; and the dismissal of Sierra Club Foundation Director Pedro da Silva.
Part of the difficulty in answering that question is structural. The Sierra Club is a tax-exempt social welfare organization, while the Sierra Club Foundation is a tax-exempt charity. But public records also show meaningful overlap between them.
Legal and Cultural Questions
Dan Chu, the foundation’s current 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 states that membership votes are conducted by written ballot, that 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 a turnout of just 7.61%.
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.
R.I.P., D.E.I
Some of the exits in question, at first glance, seem to be ordinary board turnover.
The same 2022 election report listed Ramón Cruz’s term as director 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, meaning they would expire 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 as executive director in 2022, the 15-member club board was majority women; of the seven men, four were Black or Afro-Latino; today, all four have been replaced by white men, who make up the majority of the board’s membership.
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 — and why.
Behind Jealous’ Ouster
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 Jealous’s.
The Sierra Club board unanimously selected Jealous on Nov. 14, 2022, and said he would begin on 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.
Racial Bias Questions
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 environmental leaders who are women of color later called for a fair and independent review of Jealous’ dismissal, arguing that the board could not credibly supervise an inquiry while also being implicated in the bias allegations Jealous had raised. Civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton separately called for independent mediation, saying “another set of eyes” was needed.
What the public record does not show is that 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,” rather than a broader examination of institutional patterns.
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.
No Black High-Profile Employees
The most sweeping set of allegations now comes from da Silva, the former Sierra Club Foundation director, who filed a complaint in Alameda County, California, Superior Court on Jan. 29.
According to the filing, da Silva worked at the foundation from approximately May 1, 2023, until his termination on 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. While not yet proven, those allegations 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.
‘Capable’ vs. ‘Difficult’
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, senior leadership frequently berated Holmes. That includes Chu, the foundation’s executive director, 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. da Silva subsequently 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 apparently is part of that pattern.
Records reviewed by The OBSERVER show King was already Sierra Club South Carolina’s chapter director by June 2024 and still was being quoted in that role that November. By August 2025, however, 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.
Pattern, or H.R. Noise
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 extraordinary: 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.
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