American Friends Service Committee Reviews

Dysfuntional work environment, identiity crisis for the past 15 years.

The financial cuts and layoffs in 2009 were devastating. Many regions have still not recovered the number of programs and staff that were in place before then. Top management also did not handle the layoffs well, keeping a larger proportion of highly-paid management and admin staff, and therefore having to layoff a larger proportion of direct program staff at the lowest salary levels. Also, after the layoffs, compensation and benefits became much less competitive, forcing even more good organizers with decades of experience to leave. The regional management was wonderful in my experience, the difficulties were how much was required to go through the central bureaucracy in Philadelphia. The Quaker tradition is to deliberate on decisions and make democratic decisions, but there was not enough infrastructure in place (or possibly intention) to communicate in a reasonable timeline with staff on the ground about what was happening in the process of decision making. They wanted to centralize media work at one point, but then we could never get the time and attention of the central media staff to do the media for our location.