MCC boards have ended the facilitated conversations with John Clarke and Anicka Fast prematurely, even as board members in the conversations acknowledge some harm and recognize the need for systemic change.

After three sessions of facilitated conversation (Dec. 3, 10, and 17, 2025) in which John and Anicka began to carefully share their story with two MCC board members, the MCC boards indicated their unwillingness to extend the facilitators’ contract. This meant that the conversations had to wrap up after only two additional sessions, which focused on Q&A with the board members. These final two sessions (Feb. 10 and March 2, 2026) felt much more painful than the first three because John and Anicka no longer felt safe to continue sharing their story after the withdrawal of the commitment to hear them out; the need (on which all parties agreed) to hear some response from the board members to what they had heard so far was in sharp tension with the fact that board members were responding to a very partial and truncated narrative of the events in question. Read on for details and analysis of what was discussed – which included some admissions of wrongdoing by MCC board members and some growing awareness of systemic problems inside MCC – as well as full closing statements from all participants.