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Open Letter Summary

The following account details the harm experienced within various communities that David Brazil and Sarah Pritchard founded or worked with and then abandoned, covering a time period of seven years.  It is meant to give those who are coming into sustained contact with them—particularly in the context of movement and spiritual spaces—a more complete understanding of their patterns. 

As David and Sarah have ignored or rejected various attempts to engage them in transformative justice processes, we have turned to sharing this open letter as a way to provide others with information that we believe would have helped each of us make better decisions regarding whether or how to collaborate with them on projects.

Because the account we provide is fully documented and therefore quite long, we are providing here this summary of the timeline involved and patterns observed in order to increase the accessibility of the information we have learned:
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1. Agape Interfaith Fellowship, Oakland, CA (2015–2019)​​​

• While the church was interfaith in name, David and Sarah seemed to be driven by a more exclusionary Christian theology that became more authoritarian over time
• Engaged in “credentialing” by claiming consultation with and accountability to Black queer faith leaders with deep roots in Oakland community when these conversations were not actually occurring
• Significant lack of financial transparency and accountability 
• Authoritarian, shame-based leadership style / no collective decision-making or mutual accountability
• Active shaming of community members to solicit deeper commitments of money and time 
• Throwing a Bible out of anger when theology was questioned
• Abrupt departure and sudden closure of the church
• Refusal to engage in direct conversation or any kind of repair

2. Abolition Apostles and Abolition Church (2019–2022), New Orleans, LA / National

• Represented themselves not fully in good faith; for example, using the pastor title and claiming pastoral and spiritual authority without being clear that they were lay pastors, without specific training or ordination
• Engaged in “credentialing” in regard to advisory board without securing consent of (again Black, Brown, queer) individuals featured on the website or actively conferring with them in organizational decision-making processes
• Significant lack of financial transparency, intermingling with personal bank accounts / failure to engage in best practices; after closing organization, gave donor funds elsewhere without consent instead of returning them (see Angola House of Hospitality)
• Authoritarian leadership style / no collective decision-making
• Punitive and hostile communication and failure to build relationships with those who were carrying the workload or to manage conflict
• Personal attacks made on volunteers who they considered “insubordinate”
• Abrupt departure and closure of the church; failure to plan for or support transition to new leadership, failure to notify at least some inside penpals that they were leaving and ending correspondence
• Refusal to engage in direct conversation or any kind of repair

3. Similar patterns have been identified in many additional contexts, some of which could not be included in our account due to their personal nature or the limits of our own capacity. A significant theme is an unwillingness to collaborate and share power with others. Some examples from David and Sarah’s time in New Orleans follow:

• Angola House of Hospitality: Despite there already being an initiative to build a hospitality house near Angola, led by a Catholic nun who had been visiting Louisiana State Penitentiary Death Row prisoners for two decades, David and Sarah engaged in their own fundraising for a separate hospitality house project, instead of collaborating with the existing community-led effort they were aware of. When they abruptly left Abolition Apostles, the funds were given to an unrelated nonprofit organization, without any conferring with the original donors. There was also a discrepancy between the amount raised (according to what they publicly disclosed) and what was donated to the nonprofit (as per research done by participants in the process of writing this public statement).
• Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition (OPPRC): After hiring David as an organizer, the Executive Director of this nonprofit quickly realized that he did not have the skills and experience necessary for the position. The person hired to fill that gap ultimately became David’s supervisor in July 2021. By December, after a string of terminable offenses, he was fired. Given her experience working with him, his supervisor commented that “he is a danger to movement spaces that serve historically underrepresented, systemically non-dominant, or marginalized communities.” From the outset, David had expressed discomfort that his supervisor did not identify as Christian and questioned her credentials and ability to supervise him. Other patterns that contributed to his loss of the job were his advocacy for his own organization, Abolition Apostles, on company time and his insistence that individuals who were not comfortable with it still use the honorific of “Pastor,” even though he was not serving in that role and the organization was explicitly secular. After he was fired, David began organizing against OPPRC leadership even as he now claims credit in his biography for their successes that he was not part of.​

We want to note that we received more accounts of harm citing David’s individual behavior than Sarah’s.  However, they have presented themselves as a leadership unit in the organizations and fellowships that they founded, and we were told of troubling behavior by Sarah as well, so we have ultimately stated that this letter is written with regards to both of them.

In September 2022, David and Sarah returned to Oakland in order for him to assume the role of executive director of Death Penalty Focus, another nonprofit organization centered on criminal justice. This new leadership position of status and authority has increased the urgency of this letter.

​[Editor’s Note, 7/20/23: David’s position as Executive Director of Death Penalty Focus ended in December 2022. Because this letter was signed and endorsed by so many individuals, it’s infeasible for us to update the language of the letter to reflect this or other changes. It will remain available online as an artifact of how things stood on 11/16/22.]

Much time and consideration was given to this collective statement, and it is our hope that it will be protective for our activist, movement, spiritual, social, and artistic communities: offering healing for those who organized with Sarah and David in the past and information for those who encounter them in the future.