Pros
The students were amazing to work with and engage.
Cons
Future Foundation has become an organization producing more harmful results than good to the youth development field. Most of this stems from the top down. Management and leadership of the organization presents itself in a biased, deceitful, and manipulative manner. Those members of the organization who represent senior management leadership have fostered an environment of fear, mistrust, ineffective student engagement. Senior management has continued a pattern of miscommunication, lack of communication, misuse of power, manipulation of vague company policies and much more to misguide and manipulate employees. This has led to a culture of distrust, resentment, and ineffective student programming. The CEO has stated that over the past 10 years they have only fired 2-3 employees yet interestingly enough within the last few months over 5+ employees have been terminated and over 9 employees with several years of investment with the organization have quit due largely to the toxic culture perpetuated by senior management (CEO, COO, Dir. Strategic Management, etc.) which infiltrates into the entire organization. In an organization that has less than 30 total employees and about 15 full-time employee positions this turnover rate is extremely significant. The latest COO, in a long line of COOs who have been affiliated with this organization over the past several years, appears to have been brought into the organization to get rid of longer standing employees and bring in new employees who seem to have prior connection or friendships with her. The current COO accuses staff of being incompetent and not following company policy. She has attempted to harass and bully employees into working longer hours, not being compensated for overtime or lunch breaks. The policies and procedures of the organization are vague and subject to change at the whim of the senior management. The COO attempts to manipulate employees by presenting information to them under the pretense of current policy or newly created policy which does not align with what employees are most familiar with regarding most up to date standards & policies. She has also blatantly lied to employees and on employees in attempts to discredit them and create evidence for their termination. It is obvious that she has the agreement of the senior management for her decision making and action taken in all regards of the organization. Employee time has been manipulated and disregarded over the past several months also. Senior management while telling employees with empty words that they value the work they do and their engagement with the students have several times not supported employees in being able to take much needed breaks from work. In what appears to be a reactive and punishment driven response management several times has without warning blacked out entire months not allowing employees to take time off of work. Blackouts represent times where no one (outside of senior management) is able to take days off from the work environment. These dates have been thrown up several times at the last minute (literally a couple of days before they go into effect) over the past few months not adequately allowing staff to have breaks between the school year and summer program and fall programming. Youth development is already challenging work and this type of behavior in a work environment increases the rate of employee burnout and negatively impacts the children being served when they engage with overworked and underappreciated staff members. Recently rewarded a grant their lack of preparation, organization, understanding of successfully managing a major multiyear research project threatens to cause more harm than good for the students who will participate in the program. Yet another factor increasing the unduly stressful, toxic, unproductive, harassing, stifling, discouraging work environment.