Thanks for your feedback, all, and thanks for your advice, adjusterjack and aardvarc.

aardvarc:

Aw, man, I thought I had the scholarship award letter, but I think I turned it in to the Coalition at the training. : ( And I thought I had an electronic copy, but I don't, because I've been locked out of my ex-work email, of course... : ( The letter did name me personally as the recipient, though. The best I have is an email saying my letter is attached (but I don't have the attachment).

As for making a big scene...I just want to add this as an aside: This is so sad and frustrating and unfair. : ( The shelter I worked for has serious management issues... The executive director and shelter manager are just mean-spirited, dishonest people. So what if that in itself isn't technically illegal? It's morally wrong. I wasn't fired for doing bad work; I was fired for no official reason, technically, but I think it's mostly because they just didn't want me to complain to the board about them. My ex-boss and the shelter manager both use power and control tactics against their employees (like lying, threatening, manipulating, invalidating, minimizing, and gaslighting)--or against me, at very least--and it seems such a supreme injustice that a shelter would be run by these people who themselves engage in behavior analogous to the abusers they're supposed to be protecting people from. : ( I was very unhappy with how they treated clients (and me) and was trying to file a grievance at the time, but they kept putting me on probation, so I had no official recourse, and then they fired me. : (

I don't care so much about working in the field again. I just care that this is such an unfair, toxic situation and something ought to be done about it! :,( And I just want those training materials for my personal use, not my professional use. I care about this work and want to be knowledgeable on the topic and be able to help people whether it's my job or not. Plus, the materials they kept from me are mostly my handwritten notes, which include little asides I wrote to myself during training--personal things--and I don't want that to be in the shelter's possession. : (

Getting these materials back is just a tangent to a much bigger issue I want to address. : (