Stifled voices on public land
DESPITE KNOWING FOR years about widespread harassment across the agency and promising to take action, the National Park Service buried an internal study that shed new light on the problem, High Country News confirmed in mid-November.
The Voices Tour Report, which was compiled in 2018, goes further than any past NPS report in describing how women, LGBTQ+, Black and Indigenous people and other people of color are treated in the workplace and left unprotected by agency leadership. In early November, an employee leaked the report to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which tipped HCN off.
The Park Service hired Fran Sepler of Sepler & Associates, a human resources consultant nationally recognized in workplace investigations, to do the report. The tour — which mostly occurred between December 2017 and April 2018 — included 53 in-person sessions, 27 web sessions and
