An Open Letter To The Family Survival Trust Board Chair and Trustees, and my Dear Colleagues

This open letter marks the first post in Reflections, a blog I have launched to explore the ways authoritarianism shows up in both expected and unexpected places—including within communities meant to support recovery from coercive control. I never imagined that my time with The Family Survival Trust (TFST) would end in this way. But the circumstances surrounding my resignation, and the troubling dynamics that led to it, have become a lens through which I am now examining broader questions about power, integrity, and what it truly means to center community care.

Below is the letter I sent to the Chair and Board of Trustees of TFST on the day of my resignation. I share it here publicly because I believe survivors deserve transparency—not just about the cults we left, but about the spaces we enter next, hoping for something different.

I have also included the communication sent out by TFST shortly after my departure, announcing the pause of the support group I co-facilitated. Readers are invited to hold these materials together, and draw their own conclusions about the accountability crisis unfolding within this organization.

It is with a heavy heart, clear sight, and unshakable commitment to ethical, community-centered care that I submit my resignation as a co-facilitator with The Family Survival Trust (TFST), effective 31 May  2025. In resigning I will share what I have witnessed. I request that you take in these words with curiosity and embodiment, perhaps divided into more than one sitting, as you have capacity.

Since 2021, I have had the privilege of walking alongside other born-and-raised or recruited cult survivors, and their family and loved ones—sharing and bearing witness to our stories, co-creating spaces of recovery, and offering trauma-informed peer support grounded in compassion, consent, and community care—with The Family Survival Trust facilitator team. I have remained in this work through many challenges, sustained by my love for myself, our team, those we serve, and by my belief in our collective recovery. However, I can no longer remain aligned with an organization that I believe has strayed from the values essential to meaningful cult recovery work

At the core of this rupture is a deep and growing conflict of values—one that I now find irreconcilable.

Alongside fellow facilitators and our former administrator, I approached this work through a stewardship model. We understood that the organization’s resources, the support spaces, and the community itself were not ours to own or control, but ours to tend and cultivate with integrity on behalf of a larger community of cult survivors. We see our roles as in service to something greater than ego, hierarchy, or personal legacy—namely, the well-being and restored agency of people who, like ourselves, are recovering from coercion, authoritarianism, ambiguous grief, and institutional betrayal.

This vision now feels fundamentally at odds with the current leadership direction, as exemplified by the Board Chair and supported by others in positions of authority. What appears to have emerged instead is an increasingly centralized and hierarchical model—one where community needs are disregarded, decisions are made unilaterally, and questions or concerns are met with marginalization and contempt rather than curiosity or meaningful dialogue. This shift has rendered the organization unrecognizable to those of us who have for years offered our hearts, labor, and lived experience in good faith, aligned with TFST mission as articulated in the Charitable Objects.

A charity that serves survivors of coercive control must operate on principles that reflect anti-cultic values of transparency, consent, accountability, and shared power. When leadership begins to resemble centralized control rather than stewardship—when it appears to prioritize individual reputation, prestige, or authority over community needs—then it ceases to be anti-cultic and trauma-informed in practice, regardless of intention.

In recent months, I have personally observed what I perceive to be a pattern of power consolidation, intimidation, and dismissiveness toward both facilitators and participants. This acknowledgment includes the sudden departure of Joy, our former administrator, and another past facilitator who introduced me to TFST, Charlie—departures that many of us understand now were not incidental but preceded by ongoing interpersonal strain and lack of meaningful dialogue or support. Those of us who remain have felt increasingly confused, sidelined, and pressured to tolerate dysfunction and harm in order to keep the support spaces going.

I want to be clear: I do not openly question anyone’s intent to do good. But intent does not erase impact. What has unfolded has had real consequences for real people. I speak to those consequences not to vilify any individual, but to name a systemic issue that deserves honest reckoning and public accountability.

As someone who deeply respects the academic work of the Board Chair, it is particularly painful to witness patterns emerging that resemble the dynamics we are meant to help others escape. When decisions appear to be made unilaterally, when community-raised concerns are dismissed or minimized, when resources are redirected without clear accountability (including, to my understanding, the last 6-months of funding requested by facilitators for the Sunday general support group, and £2,500 of community funding earmarked for a training that was not subjected to a transparent financial request & approval process as facilitators seem to be required to do), the resulting harm is palpable.

The Board’s inaction in the face of multiple concerns raised over the past months is disheartening. From the outside, it has appeared that troubling patterns—such as limited one-way communication, lack of transparency, an overreliance on unpaid labor, and repeated avoidance of ongoing interpersonal conflict—have gone unaddressed. I raise these observations as realities that have undermined the well-being of myself and others engaged in this work.

I continue to do this work not for personal recognition, but from a place of lived experience and deep commitment to people who I consider my community. As a Black, queer, disabled, and indisputably highly-skilled facilitator, I have given over 100 service hours to TFST in the past six months alone because I believe in the power of peer support spaces to help people recover from profound trauma. 

However, I can no longer justify offering my labor under conditions that feel extractive and misaligned with the principles of ethical, trauma-informed peer support. Personally, I do not consent to work for free indefinitely for years at a time simply because it is more convenient for individuals living in the heart of a colonial empire. That would be a betrayal of my African Ancestors, who were denied fair compensation for centuries, and a disservice to the ongoing struggle for equity. I found it deeply offensive to be told by a majority-white British board that I should fundraise my own compensation by working more, particularly as a descendant of enslaved African-American people and someone living with a disability, identities which at least three board members are aware of.

According to both the UK’s Peer Support Principles and Canada’s National Guidelines for Peer Support, reliance on long-term unpaid labor in core service roles such as peer support group facilitation is widely recognized as unethical and unsustainable. It contributes to burnout and exacerbates inequality—especially for those of us whose labor is informed by our own lived trauma.

The continued lack of documented employment pathways, role descriptions, safeguarding policies, financial procedures, or standards of conduct—either for board members or for survivor-facilitators— raises serious ethical concerns that I believe warrant both internal review and public accountability.

The Family Survival Trust is no longer a small, informal initiative. It has grown—thanks in part to the dedication of our participants, our former administrator Joy, and other facilitators during the early part of the pandemic—into a recognized organization with international reach. Participants regularly join virtual support groups from three continents and more than a dozen countries. The Trust has been featured prominently in global media outlets, including The Guardian and BBC News, and has received more than £20,000 in grant funding in the past year. It is long past time for TFST leadership and governance structures to evolve to match this level of visibility and responsibility.

Instead, I have observed a pattern in which those who advocate for necessary evolution are sidelined, intimidated, or dismissed. Whether intentional or not, this creates an environment where needed change is stifled and harm is perpetuated. That is not sustainable.

In my view, The Family Survival Trust now stands at a pivotal moment—a reckoning. I urge the Board to reflect seriously on how we arrived at this point. 

I do not say this lightly: each of you must ask yourselves whether your continued leadership is truly serving the diverse community of survivors this organization claims to represent—or whether it is instead upholding a system or individual that no longer reflects the spirit of collective care, consent, or the Charitable Objects upon which the Trust was founded. If, with genuine reflection, you find that your leadership is no longer in honorable service to this beautiful and diverse community, I encourage you to take accountability—whether that means stepping down, requesting a consensual, transparent process of repair, and/or offering a sincere apology to those harmed by the events that have unfolded—particularly Joy and the facilitator team. Consider also that the best apology is changed behavior.

The cult recovery community is small. It is likely our paths will cross again. Let us not replicate the dynamics we came here to recover from—patterns of disposability, shunning, fractured relationships, and unacknowledged harm that so many of us witnessed or endured in the groups we escaped. And to the new trustees: you have stepped into a deeply fraught situation. I urge you to consider whether your role is to take responsibility for cleaning up a mess you did not make, and whether continuing to prop up this system could further perpetuate preventable harm.

Along those lines, I wish to address a recent outreach email I received from a newly appointed trustee. I chose not to respond—not out of disregard, but from discernment. The timing and framing of the message, coming shortly after the appointment of this trustee (which occurred without transparency or consultation), did not feel like an invitation into genuine dialogue. Rather, it resembled what some might recognize as “hoovering”—a pattern of behavior described in recovery literature where gestures of reconciliation are used to re-establish influence or control without addressing previous harm. I do not use this term lightly, and I acknowledge its potential to be provocative. I reference hoovering here because it reflects the complex power dynamics many of us are trying to heal from, and thus warrants careful reflection given the organization's stated values.

In that correspondence, no genuine mention was made of what led up to Joy’s resignation—despite its clear connection to this crisis. There was no direct engagement with the impact on the remaining facilitators, no acknowledgment of previous meetings we had with board members, nor mention of the multiple letters from us clearly outlining our concerns. The rollout of a “light touch listening process,” led by a trustee completely unfamiliar to the facilitator team and designed without our input, feels performative rather than restorative. You already have our concerns written out very clearly, two trustees already listened to us—why request more of our unpaid time and labor to rehash what has already been shared? And how could we, as people with wise discernment and insight required in our facilitator roles, be expected to trust that gesture after everything that has already happened?

Throughout my time at TFST, I have repeatedly offered my facilitation and training in restorative justice, accountability and repair processes, and conflict illumination. Some of the trustees witnessed me share these skills in a previous situation that involved a participant and spoke highly of my abilities then. Yet, that offer was never taken up again, even as tensions have escalated. Others too, who are already part of the community, have extended themselves in good faith—only to be met with silence, disregard, or sudden unexplained “reviews” of their performance.

In sharing this account, I leave with my integrity and dignity intact. I will continue to advocate—for cult survivors, for consent-centered peer support spaces, and for community-rooted care. I speak not to cause division, but to invite accountability, a value I have come to hold as necessary to anti-cultic operation and de-colonial justice during my recovery from cultic and oppressive harm. I aim to name what I have experienced, to safeguard those still involved, and to speak truth to power as I have always sought and been known to do. 

I am offering you a gift—a mirror and a chance to grow. Whether or not you take it is now your responsibility. I have also included an appendix with testimonial evidence of the support I personally offered to TFST participants during individual Peer Wellness Specialist sessions the past six months.

Cult survivors deserve more than polite avoidance or symbolic gestures. We deserve care rooted in transparency, agency, consent, and humility. And the labor of survivor-facilitators must be honored as a valuable contribution worthy of compensation to support our well-being—not taken for granted.

In Solidarity,

Evvie Lionheart 

Certified Peer Wellness Specialist, Support Group Facilitator

The Family Survival Trust’s Board Chair’s response below to sent all mailing list recipients after receiving our notices of resignation the week prior. All resignation letters had stated we would end our service at the end of May, not immediately, to allow time for a final meeting on 20 May and a month of transition.

19 May 2025

Dear Friend,

We are sorry to inform you that we are taking a break from providing support groups for the summer. We will be engaging in a review and reset process. This is due to a shortage of facilitators, which we hope to remedy as soon as possible. The support group on Tuesday May 20th is therefore cancelled. This decision was not taken lightly, and we understand the essential role that these groups play in providing support and connection.

We intend to recruit and train new facilitators to ensure that the support groups can resume as soon as possible. We are also happy to work with other charities, if appropriate. As you may be aware, we are a small charity based in the UK, staffed mainly by volunteers and managed by a Board in accordance with charity law.   

We have two main aims: to provide support to those affected by cults and to raise awareness of the issues related to cults, which involves campaigning. For the time being we will continue to provide support in response to individual queries through the contact form on our website as well as continuing our campaigning work.

Several useful support groups, for survivors of religious cults, are also provided by the charity Faith to Faithless. UK calls to their Helpline  are free: 0800 448 0748.

We will be in touch again with an update on the situation, and hope to resume the support groups as soon as possible.

All the Best,

Alexandra Stein
Acting Chair of the Family Survival Trust