Incredible Organization, Dedicated People - Anonymous employee Mary House Employee Review

The work is way more substantive than an average Americorps position. Given full case manager responsibilities. The families we work with are all so nice and make your job pleasant, and you will get a variety of substantive experiences. Towards the end of your year, the director will work with you to try and help connect you to another job (she's worked in DC forever and has a lot of connections).

The organization is made up of 3 Americorps members and 1 program director. There is very little training involved , so you are left doing really challenging work without any training or previous experience. The director tends to run things more on emotion than with a preset organizational structure so often decisions are made without seeming to have good reasoning or decisions are changed constantly and it can be confusing and contradictory. You're also paid an americorps salary to be doing a case managers job.

I was an AmeriCorps volunteer a few years back, I'm not sure how/if the position has changed, but this position gave me lots of experience in case management. I was given much more responsibility than is normal for an AmeriCorps position (this is good and bad). The clients are all great and you can make real connections with these families.

Not enough training, I often felt "in over my head" helping clients deal with certain issues. Advice from supervisor was at times contradictory and unclear. Sometimes I felt like I was made to do things that were not in the best interest of clients. Issues with the housing provided by Mary House were common, but often not much was done, or it would take weeks to fix a simple problem. There were some practices that seemed unethical (such as the director's adult children living in houses owned by the non-profit). The director would "play favorites" with families, cutting some families slack while being overly strict with others, leading to an environment where families were afraid to bring up issues because they were afraid to get on the director's bad side. This was very frustrating, and I often felt like I was forced to defend the director's decision that I didn't agree with or think was fair. Overall, it was a frustrating experience at an unprofessional (and possibly unethical) organization.