BILLINGS - Montana Rescue Mission, a Billings nonprofit, welcomed a new executive director this week in an effort to rebuild trust with the community.
Former executive director Matt Lundgren was fired in September following an internal investigation and several complaints from the employees.
Meet MRM's new executive director:
The new executive director, Dyann Romeijn, started in the position this week. She is returning to MRM after working there from 2017 to 2019.
She is the Billings Leadership Foundation executive director, the foundation that supports MRM, the Friendship House and the MRM Bargain Center.
“We’re looking at our 90-day plan moving forward. And we've spent a lot of time on what we're going to actually do to make sure that there's accountabilities in place, make sure that something like this does not ever happen again,” said Romeijn.
“I've seen the news accounts, I've seen the things that have happened, and I'm here to help rebuild the trust,” she added.
Romeijn said Tuesday afternoon her and the other MRM employees’ efforts to rebuild relationships with partner organizations have been successful.
“I reached out to one organization, and I said, ‘I know that we're going to have to rebuild trust. I want to work at doing that.’ And it was an organization we'd had a great relationship with in the past. And they said, ‘It's already there. We're good,’” said Romeijn.
According to Program Director Joanna King, the new hire has led to a positive reaction from the community.
“From everything that I've seen and heard, the community response to Diane's hiring has been overwhelmingly positive. And that's our attitude as well. We feel very positive,” said King.
Two employees who left during Lundgren’s leadership are also coming back to work at the nonprofit.
One of those employees, Glenn Fournier, came back in October after a seven-year break.
“It was kind of a happy moment for me because Dyann and I go way back,” he said.
Fournier is optimistic about the new leadership. He said he left all those years ago due to the former executive director.
“There was a lot of confusion. There were the wrong people in the wrong position, and so it's a lot of things. I mean, I can just give you a list of things that we have to fix. We've been going as fast as we can since the day I started here. Changing things, hiring new staff, training staff, getting things in order,” he said.
MRM has not disclosed the reason why Lundgren was fired or what they found during the internal investigation.
MTN spoke to former employee Jess Farnum in September, who said Lundgren shamed employees for asking for higher pay and retaliated against employees who requested change.
