Leadership team is defensive and actively harmful - Anonymous employee Forward Service Corporation Employee Review

FSC does not take any form of constructive feedback well and will not acknowledge the ways they harm employees. Please refer to all the glassdoor reviews that name hard truths in the recent months. The response from FSC is defensive. Concerns are swept under the rug. Truths are argued in a way that does not acknowledge the time and vulnerability it took to provide feedback. Not to mention, there are legitimate fears of retaliation on employee surveys, which by the way, are not anonymous. Internal surveys also ask leading questions that (of course) generate positive reviews. A large handful of W2 workers were let go recently because of changes in state funding. The decisions were made by the leadership team with very little notice. Seniority was a major determining factor in the decision making as well as the position within the hierarchy. This process was disheartening, "dream" crushing, and reproduces toxic white corporate America where recent hires and direct service staff continue to receive the short end of the stick. BIPOC, low-income, disabled, queer people... FSC is not for you if you care about justice. Right now the company is just starting to provide training on unconscious bias. They are wrapped up on teaching people with privileged identities how to perform allyship without giving them the tools and space to actually understand why their biases exist and how it's harmful. The learning of white people is always centered at the expense of BIPOC. The lack of diversity and low retention of diverse people make it hard to build a sense of belonging. This is not a path to justice. Lastly, FSC have what they call TTS. TTS is basically the philosophy for case management based on seeing poverty through a medical diagnosis perspective. When people of color, low-income, and disabled people say that TTS is stigmatizing and not aligned with justice frameworks, proponents (white women I've observed by far) argue that pathologizing poverty isn't stigmatizing because it's about the conditions that put people in poverty. What they don't understand is that when you pathologize people, you're still saying that something is wrong with them. There are connotations that they didn't put themselves in the right environments to thrive. Pathologizing poverty is still a deficit lens that connotates that poor people need to be saved by FSC. Also, it is extremely ableist to pathologize people. Those of us who have been ill (mentally and physically) know that we are often blamed for our illnesses or our inability to recover. I argue that we can do structural work without pathologizing language. And above all TTS needs to incorporate how power is involved in the perpetuation of poverty.