Pros
Education Award, Food Stamps, and Health Insurance
Cons
After serving as an AmeriCorps Member for the past three years, I've become insecure in my abilities and more unsure about my own career path. The managers pretend to care about their ACM's and the students they serve. They pretend to care about diversity and inclusion, about equity and community impact, but their actions speak otherwise. ALL staff--both at the executive and regional levels--are hypocritical and self-serving. Reading Partners can only run at its current capacity by abusing AmeriCorps's "benefits." While all ACM's went in knowing how little we'd get paid, we didn't also expect to be overworked and condescended to. We didn't expect to be treated so patronizingly. Not for that kind of money. The regional managers may do a good job of seeming to care, but they don't really. Which wouldn't be such a problem if RP didn't also give off the impression that this was some utopian work community where ACM's would have opportunities to learn and grow and be treated with a modicum of trust and respect. Instead, ACM's are seen as disposable. We are lower-than-minimum-wage factory workers, in service to our manager's desire for a promotion. All the offices are like this. It is the value system by which the entire organization operates. Read the reviews. People have been saying the same thing for almost a decade. You either stay and submit to/become a perpetrator of the toxic, abusive behavior, or you leave, depressed out of your mind, thinking that you're actually the trash RP indicated you were. Do not work here. Trust me. It'll ruin your life.