PATH Inc., a Bloomington-based nonprofit, has helped people in crisis throughout central Illinois for over half a century. From crucial homeless services to two statewide crisis hotlines, PATH has established itself as essential to the McLean County social services infrastructure — and more recently, that of the state.
But in the past year, the nonprofit has struggled to meet the demands of its clientele, forcing other social services agencies to step in and damaging its standing in the community as a reliable source of help.
Conversations with current and former PATH staff, as well as other community leaders, reveal that in the months following the April death of CEO and Executive Director Chris Workman, the organization saw a wave of staff turnover, compromised at least one federal grant, and became the subject of a complaint to the Illinois Office of the Executive Inspector General.
Newly appointed interim CEO Adam Carter said PATH is recommitting itself to its original mission of fostering relationships by “providing access to help” through “Personal Assistance Telephone Help” — PATH. (This is pulled from the PATH website.)
“We have to acknowledge and look at places where we may have fallen short in our relationships in order to be able to address them and do better on purpose in the future,” he said. “That’s where we are right now.”
Carter has returned to PATH after a nine-month stint as assistant director of the 988 call center. The stint ended abruptly Nov. 8 when he was terminated for undisclosed reasons. He was fired by a former interim CEO, who many people affiliated with the organization told WGLT they blame for the recent challenges PATH has faced.
While Carter said PATH is actively rectifying any damaged relationships with community partners, there has already been fallout from the past several months.
Home Sweet Home Ministries CEO Matt Burgess said the nonprofit doesn’t receive money through PATH’s federal grant programs, but it’s still been affected by the disruption because the two agencies coordinate to provide unique homeless services.
The Bloomington-based homeless shelter is one of several collaborators on central Illinois’ Continuum of Care — a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program to end homelessness — which PATH leads, although the federal agency is reviewing its performance as part of an ongoing competitive grant renewal cycle.
For example, PATH is supposed to maintain the Homeless Management Information System, a database with compiled background information about a person’s experience with homeless shelters and other social service agencies in the Bloomington-Normal area. It helps providers see where a person has previously gone for help and reduces the chances of duplicating services.
“When the database is not maintained, and up to date, it complicates our ability to ensure good efficient delivery of services,” he said. “It makes it harder for us to connect people to other service providers, or to inform our decisions even for ourselves about what we need to do to help somebody”
Burgess said it’s unclear the last time PATH updated its database.
It’s not just service providers: Municipalities like the Town of Normal have also noted the organizational changes at PATH.
Normal Community Development Specialist Jennifer Toney said “restructuring” at PATH contributed to the organization’s failure to meet certain requirements of a HUD Community Development Block Grant allocated for homeless services, as WGLT previously reported.
“We had to choose between having nothing to report this year… or reallocating those funds to other organizations that were maybe going to be able to actually spend some of the funding where it needs to go,” she said.
Public comment was expected to be taken Thursday at Normal Public Library before the grant amendment is sent to HUD for approval.
PATH’s Board of Directors appointed a new Interim CEO and executive director on Dec. 27: former 988 call center assistant director Adam Carter.
Carter replaced Martha Evans, who had been hired as a human resources manager for PATH in 2022, but stepped into the organization’s top leadership role — interim CEO and executive director — shortly after Chris Workman’s death.
Carter’s appointment came nearly two months after he was terminated from PATH. He acted as assistant director of the call center from May until early November, when Evans terminated him. He wasn’t the only person Evans terminated. During her tenure, she replaced all executive leadership in the nonprofit, including a veteran of nearly a decade. WGLT was not able to reach Evans prior to publication.
Turnover became a pattern among lower-level staff as well, current and former staff say. Carter pointed back to Workman’s death as a catalyst for organizational change.
“When you have a transition related to an unexpected death, that may be the loss of some information about formal or informal relationships,” Carter said.
Evans had an interim appointment, indicating the board eventually planned to find a permanent CEO for the position, but PATH’s current Board of Directors said in a written statement to WGLT “staff turnover and other areas of concern” delayed its search until the fall of 2023. PATH’s board launched an official application on job-seeking sites like Indeed and LinkedIn in December.
Board members said applications are currently paused, but there is no deadline for filling the position.
“We have received over 80 applications since the position was posted and are actively selecting those for further review,” they added. “[W]e are committed to the necessary time it takes to secure an exceptional candidate.”
The board said this is also why it appointed a second interim CEO.
“The decision… was made strategically to select the best leadership while the board conducts a thorough search for a permanent CEO/Executive Director,” they wrote in a statement.
A cultural shift
Changes in PATH’s executive leadership have not only had widespread ramifications on the homeless services division, but the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline center — the state’s largest.
These extend from call operators to people calling the hotline for help — some of whom may have been self-harming or even attempting to die by suicide while on the line, according to multiple current and former staff.
Those staff members pointed to Evans as the direct reason for the high turnover other entities — such as the Town of Normal and Home Sweet Home — noticed these past months. Workers said Evans’ leadership was marked by sudden policy changes, unexpected terminations of staff at-large and a generally inhospitable work environment.
How we reported this story
There are multiple anonymous sources in this story. Names were kept private in cases where people were concerned that speaking to WGLT would affect their current jobs. All of the statements and claims made have been thoroughly cross-checked through multiple sources and supplemental research.
Questions? Contact news@wglt.org.
At least one source — and a former call center employee — said a community member who was having urges to self-harm called 988 and was denied help. The counselor on the other end reportedly hung up on them, prompting the individual to visit Carle BroMenn’s emergency department.
It’s unclear why the operator made this decision, but the same source said it’s not the first time they’ve heard a story like this. While current crisis counselors in PATH’s 988 division couldn’t say they’d heard of instances like these, the call center employs dozens of people.
Current call center staff also said their call performance has been impacted in other ways. Workers told WGLT Martha Evans’ leadership, Adam Carter’s sudden departure from the call center, and rigid new rules surrounding time reports compromised their ability to give quality service to callers.
The Bloomington-based organization’s 988 department operates statewide, and is the fourth largest 988 call center in the nation. PATH accepts roughly 1,200 calls per day, triple the calls than any other call center in the state. That’s because it receives all calls that go unanswered from the five other 988 centers in the state — including Chicago — when they’re at capacity.
Callers reach the 988 hotline in varying stages of crisis, and the amount of time counselors take with each person reflects that. The counselors WGLT spoke to said calls could range anywhere from 10 minutes to three hours.
Under Evans’ leadership, counselors said they began to feel pressure to wrap up calls quickly. Where performance was once measured by how effectively counselors addressed the clients’ needs, call operators said it felt like they were being measured on efficiency. Namely, the time calls took from start to finish.
One counselor said the quality assurance managers questioned staff: “Why was that call three hours? You didn't need that call to be three hours. That should have been wrapped up in 30 minutes.”
Another counselor added “How do you wrap up a call when you have somebody that says, ‘I understand, we can wrap this call up. But now that we're ending, I'm gonna get my pills back out’?”
Strict new policies from upper management required operators to get approval to stay on a call past the end of a designated shift, even if that call was already underway, the counselors said.
But counselors are unable to control when calls come in. They’re also not supposed to decline calls, so if the phone rings a minute before their shift ends, they have to pick up. The three counselors WGLT spoke to agreed the policy detracts from their mission as counselors.
“I would frequently provide almost better services on my last call at the end of the day because that's where my heart was,” the same counselor said. “Now, I feel like I’m gonna have to justify why I talked to this person.”
Another counselor who spoke to WGLT indicated call operators began to mention calling 988 themselves.
“They may be jokes. They may not be,” the counselor said. “But they would say, ‘It's pretty sad when you're considering calling the line as a counselor because you're overwhelmed, you're stressed, you're struggling.’”
Bathroom and lunch breaks came into question. New directives even limited counselors’ ability to step away from the phone after particularly emotional calls to recuperate.
“We will get talked to like, ‘Hey friend, you're not supposed to be on a break right now. You need to hurry up,’” one of the counselors said. “If I needed 10 minutes to process that three-hour long call, I would get talked to you like, ‘Hey, why are you taking so long? You have 90 seconds to do that.’”
Caitlin Ryan joined the call center at the end of August, and by mid-December she resigned. Because of a mandatory 30-day training from Vibrant Emotional Health — the national administrator of 988 — she only spent around a month taking calls.
The job of a 988 counselor is grueling, so there’s high turnover no matter what. But Ryan and the other crisis counselors said the atmosphere within PATH made it all the more challenging.
“When you are putting people in the mental health field — like we are, answering those calls — and then treating the employees like that, acting like we're disposable, it's just sickening,” she said.
At the beginning of December, one of the call center employees notified WGLT that they were planning to walk out if the board failed to address concerns surrounding Martha Evans’ leadership. Call center employees who spoke with WGLT said employees reached out to the board individually multiple times and eventually some staff sent a joint letter demanding the board take action.
When asked about these communications, the board said it does not comment on personnel matters. They said the same when asked why Martha Evans was terminated.
Since the board appointed Adam Carter as interim CEO, the crisis counselors WGLT spoke to said the work environment has improved. One call operator said it feels more relaxed and communication is improving.
‘A commitment to transparency’
Carter said among his goals as interim CEO, he hopes to establish a new practice of transparency within the organization. Under Evans, sources said jobs were not posted publicly for executive leadership roles, though they were filled. Currently, the executive roles Evans filled during her tenure have been replaced by interim leaders.
Carter said the search is ongoing for permanent executive leadership.
“PATH does have a commitment to transparency and what we're doing as it relates to hiring and moving forward,” he said. “The positions that we are hiring for will be posted publicly, and will be available for review by everyone.”
Listings were not yet made at the time of publication, and some new positions have been created and filled. This includes a grant and reporting administrator and an accreditation and recording specialist.
Kevin Richardson, who was director of the 988 call center, and Christopher Baldwin, who was the director of database services, filled those roles respectively. Like Carter, both were terminated by Evans in November. Their new appointments have brought them back to the nonprofit.
But for some people, the sting of a potentially unwarranted termination lingers.
Sarah Rod was a former floor manager for the 988 call center, a job she said it felt like she was “meant to do.”
“When I was 12, I tried to kill myself. I lived in a town where it was just something you did to get out,” she said. “When I started volunteering there, it was like I was helping save lives. I was helping save somebody that could have been one of my friends that I lost.”
Rod said her termination contradicted the compliments she had received about her performance as a floor manager, which included her ability to ensure people were beginning and ending their shifts on time, or as close to it as possible.
Rod said her firing came without warning. She said Evans told her call operators had complained about a lack of “support” from Rod.
To her knowledge, Rod had “no writeups, no disciplinary actions towards me, at all, like the entire time that I was there.”
“It was hard. I think we sat in the office for almost a couple hours while I cried. This is something I just had such a passion for and worked so hard at,” Rod said, adding that she would have welcomed criticism as an opportunity to improve.
Instead, after three years with the organization where she started as a volunteer, she was left in the dark.
Now, Rod tells WGLT has since learned that she can reapply to work there and her application would be considered fairly.
Restoring relationships
Carter said he’s applied to be the permanent CEO. While he isn’t sure how long he’ll lead PATH, he has clear aspirations in the interim.
“If I do transition out, my goal -- and what I would like to look back on -- is to see that the relationship aspect that PATH was formed on has been brought back to the center and the forefront of what we do,” Carter said.
Carter said he’s already reaching out to PATH’s community partners and others with the hope of restoring potentially lost connections.
“It has been a very healthy combination of … me reaching out to those relationships that I know need to be reached out to immediately -- which is a very small percentage of PATH as a whole — and then community partners reaching out to me,” he said. “But more importantly, I want to share this: There has not been a conversation that I have had with anyone who has not offered support and help.”
JoAnna Callahan with Salvation Army McLean County, for example, is leading the upcoming Point-in-Time (PIT) Count, which PATH is required to submit to HUD since it leads the Central Illinois Continuum of Care (CICoC). This is where community members go to McLean and the other 11 counties in the CICoC to identify how many people are unsheltered.
Callahan added that she consulted Carter, who agreed she should take over the 2024 PIT count, while PATH continues “taking steps to stabilize.”
“I reached out to PATH, letting them know that I did feel the need that this Point-in-Time process not be forgotten in their planning, and volunteered to assist,” she said.
PATH has historically run a hotel voucher program, offering people short-term stays at nearby locations, but a source close to the situation said it hasn’t done this for some time.
Meanwhile, other social service agencies have started offering their own opportunities for hotel vouchers. Salvation Army and Mid Central Community Action (MCCA) are both offering vouchers; neither said PATH impacted their decision.
The Salvation Army has been exploring the idea since last year, when HUD reached out. However, Callahan said this year was the first time the shelter looked into doing it independent of PATH.
“Because we historically have not had the manpower, the capacity,” she explained.
MCCA Executive Director Tami Foley said in an email their decision to use recent grant funding from Illinois Prairie Community Foundation for this purpose had nothing to do with PATH.
“[W]e are writing to multiple different funding sources this year to expand our direct client assistance dollars,” she wrote.
This would not be the only service another agency has stepped in to provide since PATH has lagged behind in homeless services. Home Sweet Home Ministries has been increasingly helping its clients obtain government IDs.
“We've been stepping into that because of the decreasing ability of people to get that help from PATH,” said HSHM CEO Matt Burgess. “That's not something that we did very much of previously. Every once in a while we would have a shelter resident that would need some help with that, but we're doing that fairly frequently. On a weekly basis, we're serving multiple people who are needing support with getting identification.”
Burgess added that Home Sweet Home is considering helping clients obtain birth certificates — another item PATH has historically done — but it’s a more complicated process.
In the 988 call center, it’s harder to measure impact. Call center data requires context that’s still being defined by the state, which had a 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline Workgroup; CEO Adam Carter declined to provide PATH data from the past several months.
“The reports that were run and submitted between my departure and rehire did not accurately reflect the great work that was being done in the call center; another side effect of the transition,” he wrote in an email.
PATH remains in control of the statewide call center — an agreement between the organization and the Illinois Department of Human Services — through the end of June. At that point, it can reenter a competitive application process to retain control.
As for a complaint to the Illinois Office of the Executive Inspector General, the complainant said they are not sure about the status of the investigation. However, the inspector general is supposed to notify a complainant when it closes. A spokesperson at the OEIG told WGLT they could not confirm anything about the investigation, including its existence.
Still, PATH partners say they are hopeful the organization will right itself.
“As a community member, I am looking forward to seeing PATH be successful and regain their space where they're able to really impact lives in our community,” Callahan said. “And we're just looking forward to being a partner with them and pushing for that change that our community is — I believe — ready to take on.”
Burgess said:
“It's really in everyone's best interest that PATH pulls through this crisis that they're experiencing right now. It's best for the people that we're trying to help. It's best for PATH as an organization, and it’s best for the rest of us who are trying to serve that population. And so that's my hope — that they're able to do that, but it seems like a tall order at this point in time.”
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
