When joining Disabiltiy Cornwall I never imagined months later the Cornish Charity CEO would force be to resign.

It was October 2011, and I joined a Cornish Charity in a new temporary role as an Online Administrator, for three days a week.

The role was a new role, so the Cornish charity CEO wasn’t clear in what she expected me to do.

My duties included updating the website which is built by a man who lived in Newquay who they used as their Web Developer.

He used a CMS called Joomla, which I had never used before.

I also updated their social media channels, Facebook, and Twitter as well as participating in their offline magazine and populating their other side project which was an online list of Cornish places that are disabled friendly.

The CEO told me that I could choose my working days, so I choose Monday, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

I was expected to also attend events such as online and social media events in London and Plymouth.

I had ideas such as fundraisers and concerts which were met by negative constant criticism and reminders from my CEO about not having enough funding to do anything.

Things started to go a little bit sour when a new lady started in Finance, and I was asked to change my working days because the new lady needed to use my desk, so I was asked to work on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.

I felt a little bit out of place but continued to stay upbeat and positive and determined to turn this part-time job into a successful full-time role for the charity.

My CEO and her administrator had an idea; they wanted me to ask celebrities on Twitter to donate memorabilia and sell it off in an eBay auction to make money.

I was a little bit unsure about this idea because I thought it would look like we were begging.

I voiced my concerns to my CEO’s administrator, and we decided to go along with what we were told to do.

Over the next week or so someone had written a negative tweet about the charity always asking for money.

The CEO’s administrator told the CEO, and I was then pulled into the office.

Once in the office the CEO was really nasty to me and blamed me for the negative tweet which was written by her and her administrator, all I did was post it to the social media channels.

She also said that her team had known each other for years and that I didn’t fit in with them because they are all friends out of work as well as at work.

She then said she would be giving me a week before deciding on what to do with me!

I even joined the after-work Yoga sessions and ended up working with the CEO’s number two.

Her job was to get funding for projects and write the bids, and I was the one driving the tech side.

We wanted to build a mobile app, showing disabled-friendly places in Cornwall.

I had also started attending the ILM Level 3 management course which I was told to do on my day off and all the other staff were paid to do this.

The next week the CEO said that she and her staff were pleased with me and indicated that things were improving.

I was also mentoring a young lad who is deaf and helping him. Once when the website went down, I was talking to the young lad on the chat in my own time when I was finished work.

A month later I was about an hour away from finishing work when I noticed something sinister was happening.

The office door was locked, and I could see through the big glass window that the CEO called in her right-hand man who was in charge of the offline magazine and who for some reason never appeared to like me much.

About half an hour later she called in her administrator who I saw in tears and then I knew something was happening.

I was packing away about to leave for the week when out marched the CEO with an envelope in her hand.

She gave it to me and said I think I need to give you this?

I ran out of the building and to my car and shredded open the envelope, and there it was in black and white.

I was being invited to a disciplinary meeting because I was supposed to have been I had been caught sending emails to my father from my work account asking him what he thought of the work.

I wanted to make a good impression, and I was so keen to be the best that I was looking for advice.

The CEO had thought that my father was doing all my work when he wasn’t.

The letter also said that I didn’t do as I was told, but this was untrue because I did everything and more!

This made me so ill that I was signed off with stress for two weeks and when I told the CEO that I was off with work-related stress she said: “I’m very sorry to hear you are unwell but are you still coming to the meeting on Thursday?”

She even got her number two to ring me up and persuade me to hand in my notice.

But her number two said that “If you come back to work until we find someone else, you can continue with your ILM course, and you will get a reference and that the meeting will go ahead without me unless I hand in my notice within the next hour.”

I agreed to come back after two weeks if I could continue on the course.

Once I had handed my notice in, the CEO said that she didn’t want me back and that she would pay me up until the end of the month and that I can’t continue with the ILM course.

Unfortunately, employers are allowed to treat you how they want because if you haven’t been in a job for two years, they can get rid of you without reason!

I was shocked by how a Cornish Charity who is supposed to care about people with disabilities can decide to force someone who is suffering from mental health problems to hand in their notice!