Ex-employee sues KC nonprofit, alleging CEO and local candidate fired her unfairly
Editor’s note: This story has been updated and corrected since its initial publication to reflect the final status of Shirley Folch’s case against Guadalupe Centers. Both parties reached a confidential agreement to dismiss the case in August 2025.
A former employee of a prominent Kansas City nonprofit sued the organization, alleging the CEO, who is also a Lee’s Summit councilperson and mayoral candidate, discriminated against and fired her unfairly because of her age and disability.
Beto Lopez has been on the Lee’s Summit City Council since 2018. He also is the CEO of Guadalupe Centers, a social service agency that has served Kansas City’s Latino community for more than 100 years.
Former Guadalupe Centers Human Resources Director Shirley Folch sued the organization, claiming that she faced discrimination while working there from July 2019 to June 2022.
Lopez is not named as a defendant in the suit but is the subject of the majority of the allegations made by Folch.
Folch alleges that Lopez and other administrators discriminated against her and other members of the HR department on the basis of age and disability status, according to the lawsuit obtained by The Star. She also alleges that Lopez fired her on illegal grounds, destabilizing and partially dismantling the organization’s HR department in the process.
Lopez became CEO at Guadalupe Centers in 2021. He was named acting CEO in May 2018.
In 2021, one of Folch’s colleagues was up for an internal promotion but was passed over in favor of a younger candidate, according to the lawsuit, whom Folch alleged Lopez “hand-selected”. The older employee was fired shortly after, which Folch’s lawsuit describes as an illegal retaliatory reaction to him speaking out about the hire.
Folch alleges that she urged Lopez not to fire the employee but was unsuccessful, at which point he allegedly began targeting her instead. A similar cycle took place when another older employee was fired in 2022, according to the lawsuit, at which point Lopez allegedly demoted Folch by having her report to the company’s CFO instead of directly to him.
Folch alleges that starting in 2022, she was excluded from meetings pertaining to her job, which she feels was done to alienate her from her leadership role.
“This further minimized Plaintiff’s leadership role within the organization and was seemingly only done to keep information from Plaintiff that she needed to do her job and to keep Plaintiff ostracized and in the dark concerning information privy to leadership,” the lawsuit reads.
According to the lawsuit, Folch felt that Lopez’s decisions to fire other employees in her department unfairly stripped her of some of her responsibility as HR director, while endangering Guadalupe Centers’ eligibility for some federal grants pertaining to fair employment practices.
“She had to perform a significant amount of administrative, entry-level tasks just to keep HR afloat,” the lawsuit reads.
Around the same time, the lawsuit reads, Folch was pursuing a pay study that she claims would have proven some employees - including kitchen and janitorial staff - weren’t paid enough as others at Guadalupe Centers with the same amount of experience in the workplace. Folch alleges that while she was conducting the study, she went on a pre-scheduled vacation and found that an entry-level employee was promoted to take over the department in her absence.
Folch alleges that she was told the woman who became her replacement was initially a temporary employee. Instead, the woman was given authorization to “audit” Folch’s department and “claimed that [Folch] made many mistakes as the Director of Human Resources.”
Folch also alleged that Lopez and other leaders belittled her in the aftermath of regularly scheduled surgeries for chronic medical conditions, with a recovery process including temporary blindness. During her recovery, Folch also wore prescription sunglasses at work and kept her office in low light, which she alleges inspired frequent derogatory and “dismissive” comments from Lopez and other Guadalupe Centers leaders.
She claims that her eventual termination was intentionally scheduled right before one of these surgeries.
Guadalupe Centers denied the allegations in Folch’s lawsuit, which was filed on May 31, 2024.
In July, Folch amended her petition to add punitive damages on top of the already requested compensatory damages, escalating her case.
Then in August, both parties reached a confidential agreement to dismiss the case.
Lopez, who previously worked in banking, is currently serving his second term as both a councilmember and as mayor pro tem in Lee’s Summit. He announced his candidacy for mayor in April.
This story was originally published November 20, 2025 at 3:52 PM.
