Report: National MS Society Dumps Elderly, Lifelong Volunteer Because She Asked What Pronouns Were
“Recently, a volunteer, Fran Itkoff, was asked to step away from her role because of statements that were viewed as not aligning with our policy of inclusion. “
The National MS Society has come under fire over the last two weeks after Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik reported on an incident involving an elderly lifelong volunteer who says she was dismissed because she asked questions about pronoun usage in the context of their DEI policies.
In mid-January, 90-year-old Fran Itkoff received a letter in her email inbox from the organization’s Community Engagement Manager, Kali Kumor, notifying her that due to an alleged “failure to abide by our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion guidelines” they had “made the difficult decision” to tell her to “step down from your volunteer position, effective immediately.”
Incredibly, though they no longer want Itkoff and the Lakewood/Long Beach Self-Help Group she leads to be “formally affiliated” with the organization, they told her that she and her group were “still welcome to attend and participate in the Society’s events and programs”:
UNREAL. National MS Society (@mssociety) forced a 90-year-old volunteer to step down because she wasn’t “inclusive” enough after she asked what pronouns are.
Fran volunteered for 60 years and her late husband had MS.
The @mssociety still hasn’t said a word about this. Don’t… pic.twitter.com/OlXrT2kClQ
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 14, 2024
Raichik posted a short clip of the interview she did with Itkoff and Itkoff’s daughter, Elle Hamilton, to Twitter last week. In it, they talked about how the dismissal email came on a Friday afternoon just before 5 p.m. when there would be no one around to take a phone call or respond to an email. Itkoff also explained that the reason she asked about pronouns was because she saw them used after names on Society literature and wanted to know why:
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: National MS Society makes a 90-year-old volunteer step down because she wasn’t “inclusive” enough. Her crime was asking what pronouns are after she was required to start using them.
Fran was a volunteer for 60 years and her late husband had MS.
Full… pic.twitter.com/6y25svZ9du
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 8, 2024
In the full interview, Itkoff talked about how her husband had MS and was the founder of the self-help group that she began heading up after he passed away 20 years ago. She says she has been volunteering on behalf of MS patients for 60 years:
Not long after the story broke, the National MS Society began doing damage control behind the scenes, boasting about their “inclusive” policies while claiming they would never part ways with a volunteer for simply asking questions. They also told employees and volunteers not to respond to media inquiries and insinuated that Itkoff’s alleged comments about pronouns made staff members feel “unsafe”:
BREAKING: @mssociety is doubling down on their decision to force a 90-year-old volunteer to step down for breaking their "inclusion policies" after she asked what pronouns are.
They suggest the 90-year-old volunteer made people feel "unsafe." They also warn staff not to comment… https://t.co/rhNSSPKiHQ pic.twitter.com/Lg6DnFIZK0
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 15, 2024
A week later, they posted a statement – the replies to which were limited on Twitter – explaining their side of the story:
A statement from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society: https://t.co/jb4B9L2Uqn
— National MS Society (@mssociety) February 15, 2024
Here’s what they wrote:
For more than 75 years, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society has advanced one bold vision—a world free of MS. Through thousands of volunteers, dedicated staff, and generous donors, we live that vision every day. We welcome anyone to join us to advance that mission. As an organization, we firmly believe that we best serve and support those living with MS by creating a space that welcomes all. This is especially true for self-help group leaders, who are responsible for leading meetings for people affected by MS to confide in and support one another. Recently, a volunteer, Fran Itkoff, was asked to step away from her role because of statements that were viewed as not aligning with our policy of inclusion. Fran has been a valued member of our volunteer team for more than 60 years. We believe that our staff acted with the best of intentions and did their best to navigate a challenging issue. As an organization, we are in a continued conversation about assuring that our diversity, equity and inclusion policies evolve in service of our mission, and will reach out to Fran in service of this goal.
They “will reach out to Fran in service of this goal”? They’ll be lucky if Mrs. Itkoff doesn’t sue them into oblivion over what they did to her.
Not surprisingly, some of the players in the MS Society involved in what happened are either stepping down or making their social media profiles disappear for some reason:
BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: President of @mssociety has unexpectedly quietly decided to retire. I’m told by an employee this is completely sudden and out of the blue. Unclear if it’s related to this story.
This was her DEI video where she says they’re inclusive of everyone. Everyone… https://t.co/rhNSSPKQxo pic.twitter.com/LtwOgschIE
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 15, 2024
BREAKING: Kali Kumor, the volunteers manager at the National MS Society who forced a 90-year-old volunteer to step down over pronoun usage just deleted her Linkedin account. She’s trying to run away from this. @mssociety https://t.co/rhNSSPKQxo pic.twitter.com/J1Es2owflR
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 16, 2024
Blaze Media noted that the MS Society went full woke in 2020 and never looked back:
In 2020, the MS Society began prompting employees to recite its DEI statement before all meetings; it removed Columbus Day holiday and added Juneteenth as a paid holiday; and it started having race-based summits. The next year, the MS Society added “pronoun options” to standard email signature templates and ramped up its obsession with racial politics.
By 2022, it began holding Hispanic summits extra to its annual black summit and established a zero-tolerance inclusion policy underscoring it is “committed to embedding diversity, equity and inclusion in everything we do.”
In response to what happened to Fran Itkoff, many have said they will no longer donate to the MS Society and are looking to put their money into groups that are focused more on finding the cure for MS than on forcing DEI down the throats of their dedicated, hard-working volunteers:
Everyone who donates to this organization should stop, unless you are okay with them taking your money to push social engineering games and bully 90-year-old ladies instead of helping MS patients. https://t.co/vgbp09T5kV
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) February 16, 2024
Here are 3 MS Support Organizations for those withdrawing their support from @mssociety:
I have not vetted them personally so please do your own researchhttps://t.co/8drPDgBbw7https://t.co/93K4oglBBYhttps://t.co/feFj0Mbcht
DO NOT GIVE ANOTHER PENNY TO NATIONAL MS SOCIETY!
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 16, 2024
Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean, who suffers from MS, is also demanding answers:
I emailed Cyndi Zagieboylo the
President & Chief Executive Officer of @mssociety yesterday. They have asked me to do many things to help them over the years, and I would like to know why they did this.— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) February 16, 2024
Excluding someone in the name of “inclusivity” is just a terrible look. The MS Society needs to get its priorities straight and get back to focusing on what matters, which is helping to find cures and save lives.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Every year an MS fundraiser stalks me at home knowing when he catches me I will sponsor a cyclist for $500. This has been going on well over a decade. This year I will tell him to beat it and give the money to American Renaissance.
Thank you for your prior support.
I have contributed to MS causes in the past, not any more. I used to contribute to Salvation Army every year, quit when they squandered over a million bucks on lobbyists.
Woke kills donations.
I have many friends and acquaintances with MS. I participated in their major fundraising event, Bike MS, for many years, from 1990-2020, when the Covid insanity cancelled the event. I was able, thanks to a very generous employer match and many generous co-workers, family and friends to raise $7-8,000 some years. Just this week I was thinking I might try to participate again, although my fundraising ability has plummeted due to retirement. I guess the alternative choices for supporting MS research and patients mentioned in the post will garner my attention. The National MS Society is dead to me.
Whenever organizations or institutions adopt policies or stances outside the core mission you have three broad choices:
1. Immediately curb stomp that crap so hard it creates a generational fear of repeating the error
2. Acquiesce to wokiestas running the show in that organization/institution forevermore
3. Refuse to participate and walk away from that institution or organization taking your time, money and volunteerism with you
There are so many organizations that my family and I have participated in fund raising due to these illnesses and diseases affecting family and friends.
Since many of them have gone woke, we no longer raise money and volunteer.
American Cancer Society
Salvation Army
American Red Cross
Leukemia and Lymphoma Society
And many others.
It’s amazing what we can do with the free time and money!
The only way to stop this nonsense is to force these organizations to go broke.
While I know that our donations alone won’t break them, I was happy to see that through the years, the American Cancer Society had to close many of their local offices and Divisions, some of those merging into regional offices.
When any organization kicks volunteers to the curb, it’s great to see their employees kicked to the curb in greater numbers.
Besides. Their CEOs are paid more than they deserve.
We now give locally to organizations that have a local effect on those who need services.
They want us dead, even the most innocent & well-meaning of us, they want dead. They loathe and despise us. They want our existence wiped from the face of the earth, and no trace of us left behind, except the amazing infrastructure we have created so they can live in it. They want to kill us with the equivalent of neutron bombs.
Duly noted.
They can want us dead. But the only people donating to these organizations are the worker bees.
Leftists love nonprofits, but don’t support them with their own money. Their employees are leftists, getting the feels by virtue signaling, but they don’t donate directly. Even actors supporting these groups get paid, and their face brings in donations.
Close your wallets. If they hate us, hate them back.
Most of the large charitable organization provide very little to actual research or actual charity to those in need.
The vast majority of funds raised go the administrative costs or running the organization and for salaries and other compensation.
The MS society is no different.
Girl Scouts is one of the worst with almost all the money going to administration costs and salaries. Girl scouts actively recruit the young girls because that is their sales force for selling cookies which is the largest source of their funds
If a person is charitably inclined, donate to the local charities, not the national organizations.
We used to give to ACS, American Heart Assoc, Alheimers etc but the more research I did the more I realized how ineffective these big orgs are so now we focus on local charities where we resonate with the mission and where every dollar is spent with care.
We also dropped Boston Children’s Hospital when they descended into madness in their gender clinic and published videos saying things like boys that prefer long hair may be trans. Absolutely depraved.
My mother died of MS complications, it’s a horrible disease.
Some have mild forms, which my mother had probably for 10-15 yrs, undiagnosed. Her Dr kept giving her B12 shots because of her extreme fatigue…
Then like a bomb it exploded and destroyed every facet of her body
She had been so beautiful that boys in the neighborhood who were drafted and sent to Vietnam took her picture with them.
My mother the GI pin up girl
FU MS
And FU MS National Society
the thing that really chaps my hide about this story is that Ms. Itkoff sounded WILLING to go along with it, if only she could understand what she was supposed to do.
The arrogance of the woke SJW to assume everyone – especially a probably-internet-ignorant 90-yo – knows what a pronoun means in todays world (heck when Ms. Itkoff was in school, she probably actually learned the parts of speech and when to use them properly!) is astounding.
If this innocent question set off this SJW, I suspect SHE is the one who needs to be booted. Anyone who cannot answer a question about their sacred cow is too deep in the cult to ever come out.
furthermore, anger and refusal to answer an honest question, that reaction comes from a place of ignorance of the answer. So maybe woke SJW has no idea why we are all supposed to do this, but she is a good minion and parrots the line and the action.
But when asked to explain it, it causes a glitch in her programming and she cannot do so without cognitive dissonance. So instead, she lashes out in anger and self-righteousness. And gets rid of the person who caused the dissonance.
Slaughtered sacred cows are delicious.
I think your making an assumption
I would love to discuss this. Will you? (no snotty here. Seriously, I would like to find flaws in my thinking)
You’re correct. Happens every time. I’m one of Jerry’s adult kids – was even the MDA person of the year. I volunteered for MDA, went on local TV, gave community presentations, etc..
Then I read some terrible things about MDA in Mouth! magazine. So, I went and called on the magazine’s editor, the late Lucy Gwin. She dropped a couple of reams of documents on my lap supporting the horrible facts published by Mouth!. I spent days reading and verifying. It was all true. MDA was a fraud.
I went to the local MDA office and asked the executive director some pointed questions. Instead of answering, she called security and had me removed and tried to trespass me from the premises. She also stripped me of my award. This all took place in the early 1990’s.
When you ask the wokesters questions they don’t like, they simply cancel you as they did to Mrs. Itkoff.
Kali Kumor is bitter lezbo who blames all her problems in life on straight people?
At least TRY to be funny.
I am having fun watching Israel, smart people, very competent. They have a bunch of cement to recycle into aggregate. Crushed concrete is great for building roads to new settlements.
Public information. No personal doxing. Don’t visit her office or her home.
Feel free to let Kali know how wonderful she is.
Kali Kumor
3104811132
[email protected]
Oh no, don’t do those things. But here, I’ll make it easier for you to do those things.
Thad, I don’t think it’s productive to phone or email her, but it’s clear you have a reading comprehension problem.
ESAD!
This is publicly available information, dingus.
Rhymes well with “human tumor.”
Where’s our resident haiku artist?
Who’s more important?
a. A ninety year old woman who has faithfully served your organization without pay for 60 years.
b. A wasted pervert who just showed up yesterday and is determined to force their perversion down your throat?
Obnoxious, callous and insane tranny fascism, misogyny and thuggery.
I wish that George Orwell was still alive, so that he could write about this lunacy and mock it.
I watch Gutfeld in the evening, he and his guest hosts do a pretty good job of macking the left and their cronies.
mocking
Mockery is not going to solve this. At a bare minimum, a whole bunch of these turds need to be locked up. For very, very long times. That is the bare minimum. And that, by itself, might not solve it, either.
This is a real war with some of the sickest, most deranged and vindictive people that evolution has ever puked onto this Earth.
“Insane tranny fascism” is right … and then some.
I didn’t say that mockery would solve the problem of tranny misogyny, narcissism and child/teen abuse/manipulation/mutilation. Obviously not.
But, mockery, derision and satire are part of the forces that shape our culture and our political thinking. The Dhimmi-crats understand this. Look at the former success of “The Daily Show,” and, the influence it used to have (not so much, in its recent revival).
Like the ideology of “Submission” and communism, the “trans” ideology brooks no mockery, which is precisely why it should and must be mocked, at every opportunity.
I agree with everything you wrote, to be clear. This is total war, and, it must be waged as such.
I simply ask them “if the person who did that to you has been arrested?” and move on. Just doing my part to plant a seed that “they” might be the defective one here.
The Emperor will not have anyone question the idiotic claims of his new, make-believe clothes. No child and no 90 year old.
This is one sick friggin society we have, right now. Completely deranged. And nasty as all get-out. It is as sick as any group of humans that has ever walked the Earth. Something is going to break very soon, and break very, very badly. This sort of aggressive lunacy cannot go on. Nature will not allow it.
So much for real diversity.
Because the goal of the MS Society, like every other infected organization, is to spead the Woke mind virus.
and pilfer the cash. The commies never build anything, they simply suck out all of the resources and move on.
“insinuated that Itkoff’s alleged comments about pronouns made staff members feel “unsafe”
The time-tested phony excuse of the crybully.
Somebody needs to be shown what real unsafeness feels like.
More probably several somebodies.
OH, that will happen as soon as the crybullies emasculate real men. After a few generations, our invaders, who drip toxic masculinity will show America what unsafe really means.
I doubt MS-13, Chinese, Muslim, and other invaders care about the sympathies of the woke. We will quickly revert back to rape, pillage, and burn.
This is troubling. Parallel economy is one thing. It’s such a shame charitable organizations are being corrupted in this disgusting way.
You gotta be a special kind of stupid when a 90-year-old lady makes you “feel unsafe.”
Or incredibly old.
I’m sure that the employees involved were certain they were doing god’s (with a lower case “g”) work.
…and with the apostrophe at the end instead.
It’s very nice of Kali Kumor, a cis white female, to remove herself permanently from the workforce to give others a space. She’s so selfless.
1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
9:39 AM – Nov 10, 2015
David Burge
@iowahawkblog
The organization is a racket at this point, as predicted:
“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
― Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time
I never have donated to National MS. Thank goodness. Now, I never will.
I can see the headline now: “Local MS Society liquidates, prepares to shutter office
Well, their mission isn’t helping people dealing with MS any more, if it ever was.
When the show you their true mission, act accordingly.
I was a regular O-neg red cross donor well into the double digit gallon club with nary an incident when I had a bad experience with a phlebotomist. I mentioned it to a nurse friend who urged me to contact them as our perceptions were that this individual at present was a danger. I filled out the forms, received an acknowledgement, and waited the 60 days and when I contacted them about the outcome, they could find no record of my complaint.. Apparently there is now a different operation that is taking the blood donations in our area as RC it seems has decided to engage in bridge burning as a business model.
Friend of mine is O-neg donor: she’s never lonely.
I suppose, good for me that my sustaining meds made me an unacceptable donor — O-neg — before anything off putting happened.
Being an irredeemable individualist, I’m unwilling to reduce my survival odds to improve the chances of some number of strangers. Maybe someone I know, or care about personally. Humanity in the abstract n collective has been letting me down a bit, lately.