Mixed reviews

Supporters and critics dispute legacy of Brenda Konkel at Tenant Resource Center

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More than three weeks after former Ald. Brenda Konkel was dismissed as executive director of the Tenant Resource Center, many remain baffled as to what happened and why.

The firing stunned many in the community who view her as a steadfast champion for truth and justice. More than 200 people and organizations have signed a letter protesting her dismissal.

“Why did this happen, why did they fire her?” says Anders Zanichkowsky, who worked at the center from 2011 until last year. “I have no idea.”

Zanichkowsky says that under Konkel, the TRC was on the verge of conquering Madison’s housing crisis. “It’s important that we recognize the depth and breadth of her leadership in the community,” he says. “She steered that ship and that ship is steering the housing crisis into a better place.”

But five former employees have come forward to Isthmus, painting a much different picture of Konkel. To them, she is manipulative and self-serving. They say that she played mind games with staff members, often put her own interests above those of the organization and didn’t always live up to her social justice rhetoric.

“I felt super-fulfilled doing the work,” says Lee Young, who was the center’s office manager from October 2016 through October 2017. “If not for Brenda, I’d still be working at the Tenant Resource Center today because the work was so important and my coworkers were awesome rock stars that always went above and beyond.”

It’s difficult to sort through the contradictory portrayals. The Tenant Resource Center’s board of directors has not explained why Konkel was fired. The board met on Nov. 18 to hear Konkel’s appeal to her firing. They have 10 days to make a decision.

Konkel says the board has asked her to refrain from speaking to media while it considers her appeal.

When Alix Shabazz started working at the Tenant Resource Center in December 2016, she hoped that she and her new boss would become longtime allies.

Shabazz had been active in Freedom Inc. and protests against Madison police. She appreciated how Konkel had recorded the group’s protests and criticized Madison Police Chief Mike Koval.

“I felt a kinship with her before I was her employee, as being someone who spoke truth to power,” Shabazz says. “I thought we were going to be great friends, or at least great comrades.”

But Shabazz and four other former employees say that Konkel created a toxic workplace at the TRC, where employees were pitted against each other.

Young says that when he started working at TRC, things were great. “When you’re her go-to, she treats you like royalty,” Young says. “She acknowledges you, she confides in you, including telling you all the ways the other employees are terrible at their jobs. I started to feel like they were my enemies.”

But after working with his coworkers for a while, Young began to question Konkel’s assessment of them.

Shabazz says she also was initially influenced by Konkel’s gossip of others. “I don’t like to admit this, but I did help contribute to the isolation of people, because I also did not want to be on her bad side,” Shabazz says. “It was absolutely clear to all of us who was on her good side and who was not.”

Shabazz and Young eventually got on Konkel’s bad side, they say. Shabazz remembers a two-week period when Konkel did not speak to her. She says Konkel never told her what she had done wrong. She became overwhelmed with anxiety about it. Then Konkel suddenly started talking to her again.

“I remember feeling happy to be back on her good side,” Shabazz says. “That feeling reminded me of being in an abusive relationship. That feeling of ‘I want to do everything to make sure that doesn’t happen again.’”

Cristina Lor began working at the Tenant Resource Center while taking a break from UW-Madison in 2012.

A Hmong woman, Lor knew firsthand the realities of being a poor person of color in Madison. Her family was forced to move frequently when she was young and she knew what it was like to cram 12 people into a two-bedroom apartment. She also knew the city’s neighborhoods well.

For Lor, the work was deeply personal. As a Hmong speaker, she’d often meet clients after work hours in their homes, where they felt more comfortable.

“I’ve had clients who were suicidal,” she says. “One of my long-term clients was wheelchair-bound. She dealt a lot with not having mobility. She dealt with bedbugs.”

Lor says she worked with the woman for five hours connecting her to services. But she adds, “I remember getting scolded by Brenda for working with clients for a long time.”

Another former employee, who asked not to be named, agrees that the work is extremely stressful. Konkel made the stress worse, the worker says.

“The work is hard enough, servicing people in poverty and in really difficult situations — that itself is a challenge,” says the worker. “[Konkel] had a lot of expertise and knowledge about the laws that are vital. But in terms of connecting with her employees and understanding their needs and helping them succeed — that was just vacant.

“My needs were not met there as an employee,” the former employee adds. “I felt like the organization had enabled this over years.”

Lor left TRC last year after becoming disenchanted with how it’s run. In part, she felt like the organization wasn’t doing enough to empower tenants. She also felt that Konkel hoarded institutional knowledge.

“I don’t think she liked to relinquish her power so the organization was able to stand on its own without Brenda,” Lor says. “That lack of information speaks to her manipulativeness, not passing down info that would be necessary.”

Konkel declined to comment on these accusations, saying there were personnel issues that she can’t discuss. “There’s always two sides to every story, and you don’t have the full story. Unfortunately, I can’t comment on personnel matters.”

Zanichkowsky began working at TRC when Republicans in the state Legislature were gutting tenant protections and taking away the ability of municipalities to oversee landlords.

By Zanichkowsky’s count, there were “six sets of law changes in five years.

“When the state changes the law, it doesn’t publish any materials for the common person to know what’s going on,” he says. “So TRC does that work. We were also doing this in the middle of a housing crisis.”

Despite the chaos caused by law changes and market forces, the Tenant Resource Center was able to thrive and expand for one reason, says Zanichkowsky — Brenda Konkel.

“That was really difficult work that she was doing,” says Zanichkowsky, who left the center in 2017 to go to grad school at UW. “And [the TRC] turned a really, really good corner this last year.”

Laura Dixson-Kruijf has worked at TRC for more than nine years and is now its longest-serving employee. She says Konkel is good at recognizing potential in people who don’t necessarily have the skills “on paper,” but have talents that can be utilized.

“There’s some level of insanity in trying to do as much as we do,” she says. “But we do that for the clients. And it’s because of Brenda that we’re able to be in a position to do it all in the first place. She’s profoundly passionate. And she acts on those feelings.”

One current employee — who asked not to be named in the article — confirms that there has been conflict among staff.

“Anyone who has worked with Brenda, knows there’s an edge to what she does. I think it’s a product of the kind of work that she’s doing and the atmosphere that she exists in, this constant battle against the system,” the employee says. “It naturally leads to her being more agitated. That certainly carries over into what happens in the office and it seems like some people get it worse than others and some people get on her bad side.”

But, the current employee adds, “On the opposite end, I’ve seen people treating her in inappropriate ways, being somewhat sexist towards her and patronizing. Lately, it seems like it was going a little more harshly towards some employees than it was coming back to her.”

Konkel also had a contentious relationship with a one-time neighbor across the hall at the Social Justice Center, 1202 Williamson St. Sanctuary was a place where homeless people could store their belongings. It was run completely by volunteers, many of them homeless.

Sanctuary’s director, Arnold Boone, says that Konkel was disrespectful to his agency and his clients. He said he was asked to pick up cigarette butts and clean the building’s bathrooms.

“I’d say, ‘I’m not the janitor, I’m not picking up cigarette butts outside,’” he says. “We probably had about 300 maybe 400 clients. But they wouldn’t come every day. Brenda had people coming into her office all day long. Other agencies had people coming all day long. But we’re supposed to go and clean the bathrooms for them?”

He also says that Konkel kept trying to push Sanctuary to move into the basement of the building, which would mean clients, many of whom were African American, would have to enter in the rear. “How dare you tell me that? This is not 1965,” Boone says. “This is not 1924. I used to challenge her on that type of stuff.”

Konkel says moving Sanctuary to the basement was one of many options discussed as the Social Justice Center undergoes a renovation. She says the suggestion of moving the group to the basement was done because it would have lowered its rent.

Shabazz and Lor both say that Sanctuary was given illegal eviction warnings, which Boone had showed them.

“I brought this to Brenda not knowing she was on the board of the Social Justice Center,” Shabazz says. “After I brought it to her, she assured me that everything I learned in training was wrong and I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

Shabazz believes that Konkel had an ulterior motive in moving to evict Sanctuary. “It was common knowledge we’d be moving to their space and expanding our office,” Shabazz says. “It was too convenient.”

Konkel claims that there were serious problems with the management of Sanctuary that she was trying to monitor. There was an allegation one of its volunteers sexually assaulted a woman.

Dixson-Kruijf agrees that there were problems with Sanctuary. She says some volunteers watched inappropriate videos on computers, which people could see through the windows. She says homeless people complained that Sanctuary volunteers had stolen things.

“She was definitely aware of problems and monitoring them,” Dixson-Kruijf says. “Brenda doesn’t stand by for injustice to our clients, even if it’s done by other homeless people. That’s who she is. She tries to fix it.”

Shabazz and Lee say Konkel also was at odds with another nonprofit, the Community Action Coalition. Three years ago, Dane County shifted its $95,000 grant for housing services from the Tenant Resource Center to CAC. After that, staff was asked to keep track of complaints against CAC.

“We were at war with CAC. They were an organization that from a housing counselor level, they were who I wanted to be able to collaborate with to provide better services,” Shabazz says. “Every time we talked about them, it was we need to prove we’re better. It was a competition. I couldn’t understand it because I thought we had the same mission.”

Konkel says she was monitoring calls to avoid doing work another agency was getting paid to do. “CAC was supposed to be helping people find housing, and we were supposed to be helping people with tenant-landlord law,” she says. “We’d refer people to CAC and they’d refer them back to us. So we were keeping track of that to say, ‘hey, look we are being asked to do work that isn’t in our contract.’”

Shabazz now works as a community organizer at the Lussier Community Education Center and also has her own business, CocoaBean Skin Care. Lor is an office administrator at Green Cab. And Young works at Trek in Waterloo. Two other former employees have also moved on. All five say they loved working with clients.

After Konkel was fired, Young says he became alarmed seeing the outrage directed at the board. He worried about suggestions of a boycott and how it might further undermine the group.

“It’s hard to watch,” Young says. “But also, the Tenant Resource Center needs help.”

That’s about the only point that everybody — those who say that Konkel was destroying the organization and those who say she is the organization — agrees on: the Tenant Resource Center is desperately needed.

Konkel, too, is worried what all the accusations will mean, not just for her job, but the TRC. “This is going to destroy the Tenant Resource Center and they’re not going to be able to recover from this,” she says. “Personally, I don’t need my job back. But it’s going to irreperably damage the Tenant Resource Center.”

But Young believes it can thrive.

“Despite what Brenda wants us to believe, the TRC is absolutely resilient enough to survive without her,” Young says. “If people are truly concerned about the TRC they would … flood the TRC with donations and volunteer hours and rally around their staff as they regroup, not isolate them.”