The executive director of Pride Toronto has left the job effective last Wednesday, the organization has announced.

An emailed statement on Tuesday from Tom Spence of the Pride communications team did not provide a reason for Olivia Nuamah’s departure.

But a source close to Pride said the board of directors has decided to take the organization in a different direction that is closer to the community and less about politics.

Nuamah said she enjoyed her time at Pride, but it was the right time to leave.

“I’ve steered them through a difficult time, got them out of debt, tried to create stability, feel that I was able to achieve all of those things,” she said.

Hired by Pride Toronto in 2017, Nuamah held the job during a controversial period in the organization and the LGBTQ community, which was shaken by the murder of eight men with ties to Toronto’s gay village amid criticism of police handling of the disappearances and killings.

She was criticized by some members of the community for suggesting that uniformed police be allowed to participate again in the annual Pride parade after they were excluded following a 2016 protest of police participation by Black Lives Matter.

But in a narrow vote in early 2019, the Pride membership decided that police would not be welcome at the parade for at least two years.

An auditor’s report in the summer of 2018 found Pride was $700,000 in debt and suggested that it needed new sources of revenue.

Nuamah said that government grants, lower spending and sponsorships from the biggest parade “in a number of years,” helped put Pride on a more balanced financial footing.

“What I hope I was able to do was at least position Pride Toronto as an organization that truly represents some of the more vulnerable voices inside the LGBTQ community,” she said.

Nuamah, 47, was raised in Toronto’s Moss Park neighbourhood and has an undergraduate degree in international development and social anthropology at the University of Toronto.

She also has a PhD in computer science that she earned after leaving the job of executive director and secretary to the board of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation between 2010 and 2012. The foundation was founded by Star publisher Joseph Atkinson in 1942.

The 39-year-old Pride parade attracts about 1.7 million people to the downtown each June, according to the Pride website.

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Pride thanked her for her service and went on to say that the group would soon be releasing a timeline for the search for a new executive director.

It said that the timeline “will include multiple opportunities and mechanisms for the membership and the communities we serve to provide input and authentic engagement into what the skills, experience, priorities and passion of the next executive director should be.”