Kismet Advocacy closed for 30 days after staff walkout

GREEN BAY, Wis. (WBAY) – A worker walkout has left a mental health and disability resource in Green Bay closed for the next 30 days.

Kismet Advocacy provides in-home, center-based and school program services to 48 families with “complicated mental health diagnoses, trauma, significant behaviors and autism.”

Several employees walked out last Friday, saying they had yet to receive their latest paycheck and couldn’t get answers from their boss about when the issues would be resolved. It was a work day when no children were present.

Since then, about a third of all employees have resigned.

Founder and owner Amy Jo Timm wouldn’t talk with Action 2 News on camera. She called this an isolated incident and something she’s trying to correct.

Meanwhile, employees we talked with, who asked to be anonymous because of non-disclosure agreements with Timm, said this wasn’t the first time they had pay issues.

“We’ve been told we were getting direct deposit, and then it wasn’t coming in, and everybody would be like what’s going on and then we’d get paper checks. And then most people’s paper checks would be bounced. That could happen even a week later,” one worker said.

Another wrote to us, “Kismet’s pay checks were sent back multiple times from March payroll to present day or were just not given to staff at all due to insufficient funds and frozen accounts.”

Brown County Circuit Court records suggest the company has had cash flow problems in recent years. Most recently, the Department of Revenue filed two delinquent tax warrants totaling almost $10,000 on June 27.

An employee who didn’t participate in the walkout told Action 2 News she has yet to hear anything from Timm regarding her missing paycheck or the status of her job moving forward.

“A lot of us are wondering, okay, is this us getting laid off? Is this, you know, should we file for unemployment? Like, what’s going on? And she still has not even responded to that. So it’s like worrying about not only job security but worrying about how to take care of your families.”

She told us she feels her colleagues walking out was the right thing to do but it hurts to know they left the people needing their services behind.

”I really want people to know that every single person that works there or worked there does care for those kiddos. Breaks our hearts that we can’t keep continuing those services. But when you’re not getting paid and your family’s livelihood is at stake, you have to, you have to do something and that is for most of us leaving and trying to find either another job to make payments and just continuing to try to ask her to pay us.”

The Brown County Health and Human Services Department said the county will “work with families to adjust plans and connect them with providers who can meet their needs.”

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