SPRINGFIELD — New England Public Media’s Latino Advisory Board has resigned en masse over recent layoffs that its members say disproportionately affected people of color, despite NEPM management’s repeated assurances of its commitment to a multicultural audience.

In a letter to NEPM’s board of directors and President Matt Abramovitz last week, Natalia Munoz of Holyoke and the other advisory board members claim the board and Abramovitz continued to marginalize and devalue Latino, Black and other people traditionally excluded from representation in the way they handled the layoffs.

NEPM, created in a 2019 merger of New England Public Radio and WGBY-TV, announced last month it was laying off roughly 20% of its staff, affecting 17 full- and part-time employees, including the entire team of the weekly magazine-format public affairs television show “Connecting Point,” according to reporting by WBUR, Boston’s NPR station.

In a statement, NEPM management said the nonprofit media company’s deficit had grown to nearly $4.7 million, a little more than a third of the company’s annual operating expenses in 2022.

NEPM television and radio staff recently began a long-planned move into a renovated facility in downtown Springfield.

Munoz and the nine other advisory board members called on Abramovitz to reinstate “Connecting Point,” with host Zydalis Bauer or another woman of color, and to diversify the NEPM board.

Abramovitz said in a statement that NEPM was “grateful for the service and care of the members of our Community Advisory Board who also served on the former Latino Advisory Board.”

He said the company needed to address what he termed “structural business issues.”

“We recognize that there is much more to be done to engage the Latino community, as well as our efforts to improve diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in all its forms,” Abramovitz’s statement read.

“We are prepared to do that work. Our goal is to come out stronger as an organization that serves all of our audiences’ needs across in Western Mass. in a robust, sustainable and meaningful way.”

Munoz said she’s been a member of the advisory board for more than 20 years, and she has seen progress in that time.

“Some really good things came from it,” she said Monday, citing the Latino Youth Media Initiative and “Presencia,” which presented bilingual stories from western New England.

Her dismay now stems from the way the dismissals were handled, which the letter characterizes as “without respect for the dignity and value of affected individuals.”

“That many of us were brought to a showcase of your upgraded facilities (on Hampden Street in Springfield) at a moment you would most certainly have been involved in unmentioned planning to gut programming around which our efforts have been centered strikes us as truly cynical and dishonest,” the advisory board’s letter reads.

Munoz said Abramovitz’s response did not address the substance of her group’s concerns.

The Latino Advisory Board is part of NEPM’s Community Advisory Board. Munoz said the members of that board are still deciding what action they want to take.

She said NEPM is excluding a growing demographic when it should be retooling for the future, and said she and her fellow advisory board members now felt they were being used to suggest a commitment that was not real.

“We were just a checklist,” she said.

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