AmeriCorps Member - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso SBP

One of the biggest challenges was the incredible lack of professionalism. From the get go, everyone is invited into a very lax culture of drinking and hanging out as a team. Superficially this seemed great! However, it quickly became apparent that this same attitude is applied to the organizational and management structure of the entire operation. Managers frequently fraternize with AmeriCorps members, giving them unfair opportunities and making conflict resolution nearly impossible (especially with non-existent HR staff.) Upper management rarely listens to the needs of AmeriCorps members, particularly those who work in the field, who are often expected to work over 60 hours a week, including weekends, when other AmeriCorps members had more flexible scheduling. Even during my time there, I felt like some things were dealt with, only to find out that as soon as the people who were complaining about a certain thing left, it went back to the way it was before. Incredible lack of institutional memory. There was also a clear divide in opportunities between those who worked in the field and those who worked in the office. A majority of the staff who works there full time now were once AmeriCorps office members, and only two or three were in the field. There is no warehouse manager, which made the poor warehouse team work themselves to death in order to keep up inventory and orders to move houses along. Client service coordinators are expected to do intense social work type jobs, but are rarely certified or trained to do such work, causing some unhappy homeowners and coordinators in a delicate situation. It can be emotionally taxing on the Client Service Coordinator, which makes their job more difficult. Volunteer coordinators have become money grubbers. As much as they would love to spend more time with the volunteers that come through SBP, they are expected to raise a certain amount of money and convert volunteers (who have already spent so much time and money in order to travel in the first place) into donors. They have little to no interaction with them otherwise. Construction Coordinators are thrown into the pit and expected to be able to pull all sorts of permits and schedule pretty much the entire housing board with little to no training in the beginning. There are not enough Project Managers. The ones already there are fantastic, but get bogged down and so busy with the amount of houses, there's little to no time to develop site supervisors (which is a part of their job) so they rely on second term AmeriCorps members to pick up the slack. Second term members are also offered wonderful opportunities and benefits, just so they sign up for another term. But once the term is actually started, a lot of those benefits are never seen. I saw many incredibly talented AmeriCorps members leave with such a bitter taste because of these false promises. They spent countless hours improving the organization and in the end all of their efforts were tossed aside. There was little to no feedback about the work that you did do, positive or negative, so it felt like there was no room for growth. On top of all of this was the incredible lack of concern for staff member's safety (particularly in the field). As a rebuilding organization in one of the oldest cities in North America, they only recently came up with a lead safety protocol to protect their volunteers and staff. There were multiple times that framers were sent in to do demo on houses that had clear asbestos safety concerns, but we're not informed of the dangers. No one on the staff is OSHA certified, and they have a very lax attitude towards mold remediation protocols. Another problem was the idea that SBP has a significant role to play in hiring Veterans or members of Good Work Good Pay (working with v. The amount of trainings for Good Work Good Pay are inconsistent and the members involved are not guaranteed a job afterwards (although are promised such things). Also, the preference of Veteran hiring is not as a part of what they call Veteran Corps, and they do little to nothing in terms of extra benefits or after SBP help/care for these particular individuals. These were simply used as tools to prove to the community that SBP “hires locals” when in fact, most of our work force are recent college graduates from the Northeast. There are a lot of secretive things going on, and a lot of misunderstanding about where the money goes towards, particularly since we have previous received funding and assistance from MAJOR global corporations such as Goldman-Sachs, Dow Chemical, Toyota, UPS, Shell, etc. They have even needed to use volunteers to help finish the new building, so where is the money going? They also claim that each house costs $25,000 in volunteer donations... when it is a perfectly legitimate thing to say, volunteer donations goes into a pool to cover operational costs of the organization.