Vantaggi
The non executive staff are mission driven talented people.
Svantaggi
Firstly I'd like to corroborate the following points made in the the previous reviews - these are things that others mentioned that I too experienced in my time at Turtle Island: - Unprofessional emails and meetings - Absence of support - The oscillation between micromanagement and complete lack of management - -Livelihood and job security threatened on multiple occasions as a scare tactic - On multiple occasions, myself and other colleagues were told that if we were unhappy with how things were run, that we should leave. It was made clear that ultimately your opinion doesn't matter. - 5 staff members quit in my two years at the org. This is almost 50% of the staff. Some interns were offered jobs after their internship ended but refused to come back. - Hostile management – you will be a glorified assistant. No matter what idea you come up with it will be disregarded in favor of whatever the whims of the ED are this month (which is usually whatever happens to be in the news or whatever his more famous counterparts have decided is important). - the managing director exists only to execute the whims of the ED. He will act like an advocate for the staff but never once did I seen him do anything but ensure the ideas of the ED are enacted no matter how ridiculous, most often at the expense of the morale and workload of the staff. - There is no HR department. Upon leaving received a 'separation letter' via email as 'per the employee handbook' (no such letter is mentioned in the handbook). The letter threatens to seek financial damages if I talked publicly about 'executive management or their strategies'. Luckily the only strategy they have is to make money, so that was kind of a moot point. Ask yourself what kind of 'grassroots' environmental organization feels the need to send their employees a letter threatening to sue for damages if you talk publicly about the executive management? Perhaps the kind of executive management that has a history of sexual harassment and a Managing Director with a history of helping cover it up? More on that later... - I was there at the staff retreat mentioned in another review where the ED stated that if we were all to be fired tomorrow that there would be 50 more people lined up to do our jobs. If that doesn't tell you how valued you will be in this organization I don't know what will. In that same staff retreat he suggested that our interns get their own interns, reinforcing the idea that all workers at TIRN are essentially seen as replaceable labor – in the case of the interns free labor. - It is completely accurate that everyone who is hired has to completely come up with their own operating procedures from scratch. This is an org that has been around for 30+ years yet has so little in the way of procedures and protocols that they asked me to write up an SOP for my position in my last week on the job. It begs the question: why does a 35 year old org have no standard operating procedures? Because operating procedures change with the whim of the ED and no staff member lasts long enough to improve procedures anyway. This will be sold to you as the org being 'scrappy' and 'grass roots'. Better terms would be 'chaotic' and 'abusive'. - Yes campaign development is completely chaotic. A method of campaign development simply doesn't exist. Why bother having a procedure for developing campaigns when the ED will just change his mind the following day and scuttle the whole thing anyway? The managing director is a real piece of work. Extremely conflict avoidant (most likely because he knows how reprehensibly unethical his pathetic pandering is), his entire job seems to be to convince you that he's an advocate for you whilst working to protect the ED from the consequences of his many well documented transgressions. The ED is paid a 6 figure salary well above market rate, as is the MD. My guess is that MD manages to command this rate by virtue of the tacit agreement that he rubber stamps every idea the ED has no matter how ridiculous, abusive or reactionary. The MD has no other role than that of protecting the ED from consequences of his actions. The Managing Director usually does this by lying to your face: the staff member that left on vacation and never came back? Oh she's just ill. The organization is having trouble getting liability insurance? Nothing at all to do with the ED. Almost the entire board just quit en masse? Oh they'd just timed out (and were incidentally replaced by the ED's friends). That's just the tip of the iceberg. The entire time I was there we were being audited. The first audit company refused to work with us a second time. Who knows why? One can only speculate, but some of the fund raising practices I saw whilst there I could only described as, uh, 'unethical'. I don't think I have ever met anyone in my entire life as completely lacking in integrity as the Managing Director. He constantly lies to his staff to maintain his bloated salary and protect the ED. He believes in nothing. Someone of higher moral integrity would have left years ago when they asked to defend some of the EDs' many indefensible acts and nonsensical ideas. The MD excels in corporate doublespeak. He will convince you that you're being listened to and something is being done, but when you walk away from the conversation and examine his words you find that he has said nothing whatsoever. Given this skill and his lack of a moral core I believe he would excel as an HR person at Amazon or as a PR person at a fossil fuel company perhaps. Maybe big tobacco is hiring? The board is a joke, stocked with ED's friends. Being that ED is on the board, concern about how the org is run or how the ED is behaving can not be brought to the board without the ED being in on it. This is absolutely done on purpose to prevent the board from having any power whatsoever to reign in the ED. Sound sketchy that there is no way to complain to the board aboard the executive management's behavior? Sure is. But don't take my word for it, take David Oppenheimer's. He's the director of the University of California, Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-discrimination Law. He said that this arrangement is: "...at a minimum, a technical violation of state and federal law". You can find more about that in the Point Reyes Light article from 8/11/21, drawn from the testimony of 12 former TIRN staffers taking about their experiences. The article is called 'Former TIRN Staff Allege Harassment'. Google it - it's maybe something you might want to read so you know a little more about the suits for sexual harassment and discrimination that ex-employees have filed before you wind up in a similar position with TIRN. If I was on the board I would resign immediately, given the compromised integrity of their positions. Oh wait, most of them did. At the time of writing the 'board' consists of four people, one of whom is the ED. I completely agree that the executive management have racist and misogynistic tendencies. Wanting to do more than just display a black square in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd staff took it upon ourselves to form an internal Environmental Justice collective to advance the goals of environmental justice, diversity, equity and inclusion within the organization. We were met with nothing by corporate doublespeak and hostility despite the fact that the organization continued to fund raise off the lie that they were doing internal work to make the organization and board less racist. Outside of the worker-directed environmental justice collective no such work was done. What's more the work of the collective was met with outright hostility by management, who all the while were soliciting donations from supporters by sending newsletters to their supporters waxing poetic about the internal anti-racism work they were doing. As Environmental Justice Collective that involved 50% the staff and 100% of the interns negotiated in good faith for months with executive management always with the goal getting the organization to commit to the most basic kind of anti-racist training for staff, using grant fund earmarked for such work. For this the environmental justice collective were belittled, siloed and retaliated against. Eventually three out of the five founding members of the collective left as we could no longer justify working for such a morally bankrupt organization. Two of us that resigned received the 'separation letter' threatening to sue us if we talked about management or their 'strategies'. We managed to confirm that no other staff that had left in recent history had received such a letter. The legal threat seemed to be directed squarely at members of the Environmental Justice Collective – staff who who left over moral objections to the dishonesty, abusive behaviors, misogyny and racism of executive management. The fact that these separation letters were received only by members of the Environmental Justice collective clearly meets the definition of retaliation so far as I can tell. Keep in mind that while all this was happening the organization's supporters and peers were still under the impression that the organization was actively involved in internal anti-racism work. Please note the Managing director's response to the review from 2018. Check out his other one from 2019. None of what was promised in his responses has actually been delivered on. There are two more damning employee reviews after that, and no doubt more to come. The Managing Director's word is worthless anyway, because all decisions are run through a misogynist, racist, power hungry ED (who wishes he was Jack Cousteau so much he even wears a little red hat - you couldn't make this up). Take this as a warning – whatever response he posts to this or any other review are utterly worthless. In the three years since he posted his initial response things have only got worse. Take a look at these reviews. Please note that the only positive review comes from an unpaid intern - someone who isn't actually even employed by this organization. Can it really actually be a great place to work with just a few disgruntled employees? Are you noticing a pattern here? Again, please take the time to read the Point Reyes Light article on TIRN detailing the toxic culture of abuse perpetrated by this organization for decades. It barely touches the tip of the iceberg - believe me when I say there is much much more where that comes from. If you're thinking that it would be worth putting up with this kind of nonsense to get your foot in the door with a job in the conservation field, think again. As an environmental organization TIRN achieves very little. As a fundraising organization it achieves a great deal. If you truly care about marine conservation or any other kind of conservation issue I implore you to wait for a better opportunity or get a job somewhere else – anywhere – and spend your spare time doing environmental work. You wouldn't be propping up destructive power structures like you would be doing here, and you'd likely get more conservation work done. The constant gaslighting and abject toxicity masquerading as 'scrappy' 'grassroots' 'activism' at TIRN will leave you reeling. I have spoken to multiple ex-employees who have all said that it has taken them months if not longer to recover from their experiences at TIRN. If you want to be put off participating in the environmental non-profit sector for life, this is for you. If you actually have goals of being a lifelong participant in the environmental non-profit sector, best to just skip this org altogether so you don't have to spend time putting yourself back together after your experience there. So long as the ED or MD remain there is no hope whatsoever of reform within this organization.