Workers, supporters, advocates, and former employees of Planned Parenthood Southeast (PPSE) are alleging a hostile corporate takeover of the reproductive health care provider that supports seven reproductive health centers across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. 

In a new online campaign titled Save PPSE, former workers allege that the branch has been taken over by leaders who do not align with the organization’s pro-LGBTQIA+ and abortion rights mission, including Interim CEO Mairo Akposé, who started as a human resources consultant and rose through the ranks within a year. Akposé’s time with PPSE, the campaign alleges, has included unexplained layoffs, new hires with little to no experience in nonprofits, and retaliation and transphobic harassment from management. 

Akposé was hired by Board of Directors Chair Karen Doolittle in a move that the campaign says confused workers due to Akposé’s lack of experience in the nonprofit sector, according to her now-deleted LinkedIn profile. Former employees interviewed by Prism also said that there was no communication between staff and the board. 

A week after staff said they filed a complaint to HR, over email and two meetings, about mistreatment from management, Akposé on Sept. 30 laid off the entire public policy and organizing teams across Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, as well as the director of education. In total, six people were laid off, according to a screenshot of an email from Akposé posted by the campaign, with PPSE citing financial reasons. Save PPSE organizers described these moves as “without cause or warning” and interpreted them as “a clear and direct sign of retaliation and silencing,” according to a timeline of events published by the campaign on Instagram.

Save PPSE alleged that these terminations “effectively dismantled” the organization’s advocacy infrastructure, leaving the operating clinics without policy, organizing, or education leadership at a time when reproductive rights are under attack, especially in the Deep South. The terminations also come just months before legislative sessions, where policy and organizing teams could help fight to protect abortion rights. 

“Only someone fundamentally opposed to the organization’s mission would impose this level of chaos and unpreparedness,” the campaign said on Instagram. 

Multiple witness reports compiled by Save PPSE, as well as interviews Prism conducted with former workers, paint a bleak picture of conditions at the Southeast branch involving Akposé. 

In one example of a hostile work environment, a former worker told Prism that when she complained about an executive leader misgendering another staffer, Akposé said PPSE was the first place she had worked where “this sort of thing” mattered. Some former staffers also said they were retaliated against after raising concerns about offensive comments and hostile conditions for trans and other workers.

How can PPSE continue to advocate, educate, and care for communities when its core mission has been gutted from within?

Save PPSE Campaign

“You can’t silence all of us,” the campaign, which initially launched earlier this month on a since-deleted webpage, posted on Instagram on Oct. 11. “How can PPSE continue to advocate, educate, and care for communities when its core mission has been gutted from within?”

Akposé did not respond to multiple emails to her professional and personal email addresses. 

The PPSE board of directors referred Prism to a statement published on Oct. 13, saying that its members are aware of the allegations against the leadership and the board. Doolittle, the board chair, did not respond to Prism’s requests for comment.

“We take these allegations seriously and have retained a nationally recognized law firm to conduct a thorough review,” the statement said. “In the interim, PPSE remains open for business, serving the 15,000+ patients who rely on our services.”

In response to the allegations, key partners of PPSE have made statements distancing themselves from the organization. The Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation in Atlanta published a statement on Oct. 10 that speculated that the alleged actions by PPSE leadership “closely align with Project 2025’s agenda to dismantle reproductive rights and health infrastructure.” The Planned Parenthood Young Leaders of Savannah announced its disaffiliation with PPSE on Oct. 8, citing PPSE’s “complete cancellation of community events and mutual aid efforts.” 

A quick rise to CEO

According to the timeline published by the Save PPSE campaign, Akposé was first hired as an HR consultant in February 2023 by Doolittle when she was a member of the board. At the time, Carol McDonald was the acting CEO, the first Black nonbinary leader of PPSE. Organizers reported that Akposé repeatedly misgendered McDonald, who uses they pronouns. McDonald did not respond to Prism’s request for comment.

It wasn’t the only time Akposé appeared to disregard gender identity. Former PPSE director of education Jessica Swanson, who was laid off in September, told Prism that she witnessed an executive leader misgender another employee more than 25 times on an all-staff call, which she reported to HR in July 2023. In response to Swanson’s complaint, Akposé, who was working as an HR consultant at the time, made the comment about PPSE being the first place she’d worked where that “sort of thing” mattered. “I wrote down what she said because it was so out-of-pocket,” Swanson told Prism.

A year later, in July 2024, the PPSE staff was suddenly informed by the board of directors that McDonald had resigned and that Akposé would be the interim CEO.  It is unclear to organizers if Akposé was subject to any vetting processes; PPSE did not answer Prism’s questions about Akposé’s hiring process.

“Staff members were devastated and confused,” the campaign said in its timeline of events posted on Instagram. “In less than two years, a corporate HR consultant with no prior experience in reproductive healthcare or nonprofit management had become the leader of one of the South’s most vital sexual and reproductive health organizations—despite multiple tenured staff possessing far deeper knowledge of PPSE’s operations, advocacy, and mission.” 

For Maria, a PPSE worker using a pseudonym for fear of retribution, McDonald represented everything the current leadership hates. 

“A nonbinary person, a Black person, a person that’s progressive, a person that’s all the things the reproductive justice community wants in a leader, particularly at this time,” she told Prism, adding that Akposé’s hiring as CEO felt strange to her. “You’re just bringing in somebody from the outside world who is not connected to this work, and staff have noticed she doesn’t even publicly say ‘abortion’ that much.”

Prior to joining PPSE, Akposé worked in human resources at Target, Sodexo, Pier 1 Imports, Serta Simmons Bedding, and Wellcare Health Plans. In her deleted LinkedIn page, of which Prism has obtained screenshots, Akposé listed her current role at PPSE as interim CEO of “Non-Profit Organization.”

Turbulence under new leadership

The Save PPSE campaign described the environment under Akposé’s leadership as “dictatorial” and “fear-based,” as she “ended routine staff check-ins, replacing them with quarterly ‘town halls’ where staff cameras, mics, and chat functions were disabled, and only pre-approved remarks could be shared by a handful of leaders,” according to the timeline provided by the organizers. 

A few weeks into Akposé’s tenure in the summer of 2024, the leadership team took away the programmatic team’s access to the organization’s grant funds, said Swanson, the director of education at the time. This meant that the team no longer had any spending power to fulfill PPSE programs.

“I had to explain to Mairo that grants are time-bound, and we do have to do what we said we would do with that money in that timeframe, or we have to give the money back,” Swanson said. “That is something she didn’t know.” 

Swanson added that there was “incompetence around not understanding how nonprofits work” and a “real lack of interest” when it came to security and an increase in anti-abortion protest activity. 

In the following months, organizers say, Akposé fired several key employees at PPSE, sometimes replacing them with associates from her previous employer Wellcare.

Following the 2024 election, staff grew suspicious of Akposé’s motivations and leadership style. Some workers expressed safety and compliance concerns with Planned Parenthood’s national offices, including Swanson, who said that Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) told her that what was happening was “not OK,” but did nothing to address her concerns. 

“Each Planned Parenthood local affiliate is  an independent non-profit organisation and has its own board of directors, CEO and staff,” a PPFA spokesperson told Prism over email. “PPFA has no involvement in affiliate hiring or other personnel decisions. The affiliate’s independent board of directors has the sole responsibility for personnel decisions concerning an affiliate CEO or other affiliate staff.”

According to the Save PPSE campaign, those who complained about Akposé to the national group felt they were later iced out of key meetings and communications and assigned cumbersome work. 

Staff also said they complained to PPSE’s board of directors. 

“No meaningful action was taken to protect employees,” the timeline document says.

Changes in leadership

The relationship between Akposé and the rest of PPSE’s upper management deteriorated over the course of her tenure, according to the campaign and interviews given to Prism, and communication between leadership and staff ceased. By this summer, the CEO announced a full restructure of the organization. 

In July, Akposé appointed LaTosha Kerley, who previously worked as an employee relations partner for Akposé’s previous employer Wellcare, as chief operating officer. Kerley’s LinkedIn profile does not list experience within the nonprofit sector. Kerley did not respond to Prism’s request for comment.

That same month, Akposé hired two other people for positions in human resources. According to reports from staff compiled by Save PPSE, this HR department repeatedly misgendered and deadnamed a Mississippi organizer, one of the few nonbinary staffers still remaining at PPSE, when they were being laid off.

New hires in high-ranking and well-paid positions frustrated front-line workers who had long been pleading for more support amid “overwhelming” patient volumes and an increasingly strained reproductive health care landscape. 

“I used to work in the Savannah Health Center, and our AC was out for almost a month during the dangerous heatwave this summer,” Swanson said. “They need a new roof, the wiring is messed up in the building, so lights are constantly going out. When we saw an increase in protester activity, there was no communication about it, no follow-up.”

Shifting priorities

Throughout Akposé’s tenure as CEO, PPSE staff said she appeared uninterested in the mission and work carried out on the ground. Actually carrying out programs and events became extremely difficult, according to former Georgia State Director Kaylah Oates-Marable. 

“She needed the business justification and asked what would it bring to PPSE to do these types of events,” Oates-Marable said in a phone interview with Prism, citing events like a PPSE table at Pride and a community advisory board event. “It’s the lack of understanding that when you do public policy and organizing, it’s for the community. You don’t gain anything out of doing it. It’s not meant to gain profit. You’re doing it for community trust.” 

According to Oates-Marable, staffers were not allowed to attend legislative sessions about key abortion bills that could affect abortion rights across the state of Georgia, including a total abortion ban and criminalization of abortion via HB 441. This meant that regional staff could not connect with the national Planned Parenthood legislative team dedicated to helping local organizers prepare to defend abortion rights and craft talking points.

According to Oates-Marable, during a national meeting with the group’s advocacy arm, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Akposé said, “We talk about abortion too much” and that she “doesn’t care for politics.”

The Save PPSE campaign claims that Akposé expressed no interest in addressing security concerns toward reproductive health providers, who have faced violence across the country. However, after the Sept. 10 killing of Charlie Kirk, the new executive director hired by Akposé proposed in a meeting with the Georgia policy and organizing teams that PPSE should issue a press release honoring the conservative podcaster and denouncing political violence. Prism obtained a recording of this meeting. The staff was “taken aback” by the suggestion and “sat there quietly,” according to Oates-Marable. Ultimately, PPSE did not release a statement about Kirk’s killing.

According to Oates-Marable, all PPSE events were canceled after Kirk’s murder, with leadership citing “security concerns.” This year, for the first time in the organization’s history, PPSE was not present at Atlanta Pride, according to staffers.

Later in September, the senior vice president of external affairs, another Akposé hire, also suggested in an email to Swanson a partnership between PPSE and Students for Life of America, a well-known anti-abortion organization. 

“I replied explaining the organization is a major antagonist and security risk,” Swanson said. “She replied saying we would discuss it at our next check-in. That meeting never came.”

At the end of September, the campaign said that PPSE’s public policy team filed a complaint with HR, citing concerns about the behavior of the new senior leadership, according to the campaign’s timeline document and recordings of HR meetings and email screenshots obtained by Prism. In the recording, Oates-Marable expresses concerns about leadership raising their voices during meetings and making inappropriate comments, including telling a staffer to “go make a baby” on vacation and making racist comments about going to pick up Hispanic day-laborers at Home Depot. 

Days later, on Sept. 30, Akposé laid off the entire public policy and organizing teams and the education director. 

For Swanson, the mismanagement of PPSE is a mixture of the leadership team’s incompetence and a lack of interest in the organization’s mission, which she attributes to the board of directors being “largely asleep at the wheel.” 

“I really want the board to ask some hard questions,” she said. “How did we get to the point where the best option for an interim CEO was apparently somebody who had no subject matter expertise, no health care experience, no nonprofit experience, no repro experience?”

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor