The Toxicity of Cumbe

I am writing this after much healing, reflection and growth. I did not want to send this out into the world from a place of anger, hurt and trauma. I have much to be disgusted about as working at Cumbe was extremely traumatizing eclipsing my craziest experiences in the fashion and music industry. This letter was instigated by Jimena’s harassment, callousness and sheer amnesia over this past summer after I left the organization. Reliving the degradation, mendacity, willful conniving, and incompetence that colored my time at this organization is no pleasure. Though I have fondness in my heart for sparkles of beauty that were actualized. Out of self-respect and learning to defend myself in increasingly healthier ways it is in my best interest to offer this partial record of my tenure.  

To the Teaching Artists of Cumbe, I love and appreciate the time of my life that we shared. I truly love to dance and at the outset of my tenure I intended to dance with each and every one of you. You didn’t see me in class because of the toxicity I was enduring. It simply was not a safe space for my person. And that is the gravest offence of all.

Perhaps Cumbe’s Board sparse interaction with the team is customary, but in this instance it is problematic. To be clear I asked NUMEROUS TIMES for Board intervention in conflict resolution and was categorically denied the possibility of their objectivity. 

It is my experience that Jimena is a misogynoir who preys on Black culture, Black Women and the community and artists to elevate herself culturally and to find a status role. Her primary ambition is to appear as a benefactor and cultural impresario. To a certain degree she is. But it has been attained by overworking people and undermining them.  She engages in unfair and very imbalanced management practices. 

I do not expect people to break ties with Cumbe because of the sharing of my experience. Dancers need a place to dance. Teachers need the place and dancers to pass culture on to. However, community awareness is important and might cause some shifts. Even as I’ve moved on this has lingered uncomfortably and so I’m speaking out.  

During my tenure I commenced programming on Governors Island for Cumbe to great success. I had dearly hoped that Jimena would donate the stage to my fledgling nonprofit community arts org to help us get our start and serve the community. It’s a very cumbersome site specific piece of equipment that probably sits in storage as I saw no documentation of it being used throughout last summer and the Restoration Plaza facility has far better portable staging.

A second incident occurred later that summer when I received an email from Jimena admonishing me for posting a clip of a teacher teaching at Restoration. The clip was taken from the teachers page and the person who created it had no idea where it was from. Through my silence I felt I had made it clear I wished no contact with her. This email was especially triggering because she cc’d the woefully incompetent Marketing Manager Renee Ousley. In August of 2023 Renee got drunk at a company outing and accosted and assaulted me. Jimena looked on and did nothing to intervene. Carla, a mere 22-year-old or so, saw what was happening and got Renee off me. Outside Renee vomited in the street and on the way back to the retreat house. She was blackout drunk and remembered nothing of the incident. Jimena took no steps to address, remedy or resolve the matter and it was never mentioned again. 

Aside from not being safe in my work environment this pointed to another big problem: See in Renee’s drunken state she was crazily trying to tell me that we needed to be on the same page. But this person is junior to me lacking in sales, marketing and promotional experience. Her sphere of competency was the Squarespace website. Spell checking emails wasn’t even in her wheelhouse. I couldn’t move the sales needle any further upward with someone of limited skill and desperate to assert some kind of authority instead of working as a team and being open to some growth. The funniest example was her inexperience in printing conventions. There’s nothing like getting a 12 foot banner printed in screen resolution and being told to. “live with it,” when literally all the graphics were a cloudy mush. It did not help that Cumbe was not her only job along with life obligations. The focus is just not there. Renee, it’d be great if you took me off the teacher’s page of the website at this point. 

I am certain the cleaning up and scrubbing that’s been going on since my response to Jimena’s irritating, privileged, divorced from reality email landed in their inbox has been extensive. It is this incident that prompts the writing of this reflection. 

At one of my initial meetings with Jimena she made a point to tell me that she and her husband infused about $250,000 a year into the organization. Having just reviewed the revenue data pre-covid and coming out of covid I assumed this financial admission was to assure me that payroll would be covered. If I recall correctly pre-Covid revenue was cresting $875 -1,500 week?. At the end of my tenure we’d gotten to a steady $2,000 with peaks and valleys. Put in context enough to cover teachers and the Program Director salaries and not other salaries or expenses. But what this information came to mean is, “I pay for all this, and things are always going to be my way.” Those who come through Cumbe enter with the intent to elevate culture and leave overworked, underpaid with their ideas and brainstorms left in a concept vault for Jimena to pull out her hat and move on without crediting or compensating the originator. To understand this fully the Board can review the Reflections documents from annual retreats that are this vault.

In terms of finances the question I held in my head was:

“Is Cumbe messy because it can’t afford to exist,

or can

Cumbe not afford to exist because it’s so messy?”

I knew from the onset that the job of Interim Programs Director was more than the wages justified. Jimena desired for me to Manage:

Ongoing Classes, Special Workshops & Special Programs This includes correspondence with teachers, musicians, KPI monitoring and budgeting

Community Engagements - School bookings and other events 

Summer Camp - Team management

Fundraising Team - Meetings participation and bookings.

I took the position in part at the behest of Lisa Foster, who now ranks as The Worst Friend I’ve ever had. Lisa began her tenure on the Street Team and moved into Studio Assistant (SA) I believe under Shari’s management. Lisa and Carla, at the time another SA, were very unhappy under Shari’s Management. Shari was revenue minded and pragmatic but very challenging to get on with for both the SAs and Brittney who ran Communications at the time. Needless to say, Shari and I did not fare well. We were preparing the studio for online classes, and she lost my confidence when she arrived in excess of 45 minutes to a mission critical tech meeting with expensive consultants. Not to dive far into that but I sat with Jimena after the debacle and a couple weeks later Shari was given severance. So, then I became tasked with reshaping Lisa and Carla’s roles. They were reporting to me and I elevated them to Studio Manager and Operations Manager respectively. To be clear this managerial role was in addition to my Programs Director responsibility. At the outset of taking the job I had pushed back on managing Summer Camp and Community Engagements in addition to programming. But within weeks I found myself caught up in the crusade and taking on more than agreed to.

Initially we set Lisa and Carla up to work as a tag team. This was extremely problematic as Lisa shifted weight and responsibilities onto Carla. She was unwilling to learn new skills to level up to new positions, preferring to be the student facing hostess of Cumbe. Lisa even failed to show up for the hiring and training day for her Studio Assistants team, leaving Carla and I to the task. She became increasingly belligerent and disrespectful. Morning meetings were constantly derailed by her emotional dysregulation. Which, in my opinion, had something to do with her drinking habits. Her thermos was not water. This predilection shows up again with her lackadaisical attitude around drummers coming to classes with liquor in their systems and even consuming whilst classes are in session. 

Throughout my tenure Lisa turned a blind eye on especially the Sunday drummers drinking DURING class. There were a couple incidents when a long-time drummer was extremely problematic with their drinking. Somehow, I was the one who had to fire him only for Jimena to play good cop a week later and welcome him back. In Jimena’s dollhouse this Chicava as bad cop scenario was a recurring theme. 

For the next 15 months Lisa evaded meeting with me weekly and refused to schedule monthly meetings with her staff, the Studio Assistants. I consistently made Jimena Martinez aware of the issue to no resolve. In the ensuing time there were a number of troubling matters: 

Unreported Sexual Harassment Complaints - On March 21st, 2023 my assistant Jasmine Brewster advised me that Studio Assistant Akeela Lewis had reported being verbally harassed by drummers primarily on Thursday nights to Lisa. Akeela brought it  up in the first Studio Assistant meeting Jimena and Lisa held with Jimena as Lisa’s manager. Jasmine advised me that Akeela had reported the incidents to Lisa but Lisa did not document or report them to the management team. On March 23rd as our weekly management team meeting was wrapping up I asked why Jimena and Lisa said nothing of these harassment complaints and were taking no measures toward corrective action. Only after being called out Jimena added a training video to the All Staff meeting which took place Tuesday March 28th, 2023. There has been no training in place for teachers, drummers at the Programs or Community Engagements level I am initiating such in April 2023.  

Cash Log Reporting - Lisa had not made me aware that she was responsible for the cash accounting for the studio and payments to drummers. From Shari’s departure in October ‘21 until November of ‘22 Lisa and the Studio Assistant team had free reign of the cash box with little to no oversight. Jimena did not have a system setup with the Finance Manager Mariam, who since covid had moved to Atlanta and was no longer an in person presence at the office preparing all cash payments. Mariam too, never made me aware of the cash log duties. Towards the end of my tenure Mariam’s desk was moving towards greater organization. But she has been an ace at slipping out of work and responsibilities doing the bare minimum and expecting everyone to act as an assistant to her. At one point we discovered over a year's backlog of schools and engagements that hadn’t paid and teachers that hadn't been paid.

Jimena watched on over months as our relationship soured. Between February and March of 2023 I requested bipartisan Board conflict resolution for Lisa and I at least twice and they were either denied or ignored. Because of the abysmal way Jimena handled the conflict situations between Shari, LIsa and Carla; then Britney and Angel, and finally Salenta and Angel I knew she just didn’t have it in her. I was emphatic that I did not FEEL SAFE to tackle it between the three of us. So what did Jimena do; She cornered me using a meeting between the three of us on a different matter as a guise then played the bait n’ switch. I was so traumatized I hung up on the zoom. Only to be completely insulted and gaslit with the arrival of a flower delivery within a half hour of doing so. Not everyone can be bought. Working for Jimena was awful and she should not be managing anybody. This is her dollhouse to run as she pleases since she alone is the biggest contributor to the budget. That along with not drawing a salary are the ingredients of entitlement, mismanagement and lack of clarity. Cumbe was spared the reckonings with race and privilege that were witnessed in the Arts Community during Covid it should not have been. My predecessor suggested to me that unionizing the studio would be a good idea. This came before I realized the gravity of the situation and workload put upon the small staff. 

At the start of my time Brittney was the Communications Lead. She was very competent and key for keeping things on schedule. However as the relationship between her and Angel Kaba became challenging it became clear that Jimena had zero conflict resolution skills, and that she would always favor the person she perceived as most valuable to her. She had no problem causing duress on the more disadvantaged person, in this case Angel, even though their work was most fundamental to bringing in students and raising Cumbe’s awareness level on social media. Angel has a knack for straight no chaser honesty which disrupted Jimena’s perceived reality. She explained that Cumbe is a community center that offers dance classes as opposed to being a dance studio. I believe this consistent truth telling bred ire in Jimena towards Angel. Both ladies ended up departing Brittney to move on Angel because Jimena didn’t want to pay her rate. 

Brittney left and filling her desk did not come easy: The salary was low for the volume of work, whoever came into the role had to start from scratch on many fundamental things, and with the scope of the desk was impossible to get it ALL right - Ads, PR, Email, Website, etc. Jimena hired a gent with so little interest in performing the duties it created more work. A manager came onboard and left after a week once she realized the situation I outlined above. I wound up having to cover the Marketing Department from May to August of 2022 in addition to my other duties. This entailed website updates, email campaigns and maintaining social media all whilst in production for a convening of the Dunham dance community.  

The Dunham Project June 2022: Never before have I worked with such an undermining self sabotaging team. Suffice to say the known idiosyncrasies of IDTC leadership colliding with Jimena’s blinding ambition and Lisa’s insatiable desire to be favored created a nightmare situation for me where my vision and leadership was constantly undermined and negated. I should have quit right here. It was my foolish idealism to not discern character flaws from incidents. 

As we progressed through that summer Angel returned to help with Social Media in tandem with a former Studio Assistant much junior to her in marketing skills. Jimena refused to let Angel manage Salenta using the excuse of her being a contractor. Meanwhile I was a contractor as well with Carla in Operations and Summer Camp, Lisa and the Studios Team and Aja the Summer Camp Manager under me along with marketing support.

When Renee Ousley came onboard things soured further between Angel and Salenta. Salenta entered a competitive mode even though her work was severely lackluster and she was consistently unavailable. This all came to a head when Salenta accused Angel’s 6 year old daughter of sexually assaulting her. Jimena and Renee sided with Salenta in the matter. This was hands down the worst day in my entire working career.

Initially I was to oversee this business line as well. Luckily at the start of my tenure Renee Smith was handling these on an interim basis. At her departure Imani, much Renee’s junior, was hired part time. I could not understand the rationale of filling that desk with someone who could not run the business out right. With the exception of one Community Engagement that I directly brought to Cumbe, I left that to its own messiness. It is my understanding that my successor manages this business line as well. 

And this dear reader is ultimately the greatest service I can provide to Artists in writing this entire missive: You are most likely not receiving proper compensation for private gigs and work you perform in schools for Cumbe. As artists we have set percentages we pay people who procure work for us: Agents 10%, Managers 10-20%, and Booking Agents 15-30% are customary amounts. Bookings through Cumbe you are probably being paid 30-50% of the entire contract. I feel this is wrong and takes advantage of artists and immigrant artists most especially. To put it in context, on a typical $2,500 school contract I was directed to offer the artists $750 - 1,000 as a cap with the organization keeping the lion’s share. 

To repeat:

“Is Cumbe messy because it can’t afford to exist,

or can

Cumbe not afford to exist because it’s so messy?”

And should this be burdened upon Teaching Artists without transparency?

As Black History Month wraps up I URGE you to DEMAND transparency of the total amount Cumbe charged clients with what you were paid. For your own information and restitution if you feel you entered into an unfair contract. These folks should not make more than Reps in my opinion. 

As I conclude this account, I want to be clear: my criticism comes from a place of knowing Cumbe's potential and seeing how far it falls short of its stated mission.  I remain grateful for the relationships formed and the art created during my time there. I've moved forward into new endeavors with lessons learned and boundaries strengthened. 

An organization that centers African Diaspora culture must also center US as human beings, artists and contributors in their business practices and leadership. The board, leadership, and community must ask themselves what values truly guide their decisions. Are you building cultural infrastructure that honors artists' labor and dignity? Or are you perpetuating the same extractive practices found throughout society? The choice to transform belongs to everyone involved. I've made mine by speaking this truth.