Pros
The mission is great, but...
Cons
The organization is poorly structured--the affiliate offices can do whatever they want, programmatically or financially, which means there's zero oversight or accountability. That's just for starters. The organizational culture is sick. The place quite literally runs on secrets and lies. It's a deeply dysfunctional organization with a disengaged leadership, and its overall health reflects that. It's dying. Donations have dropped off significantly (which is only to be expected, when the entire development staff is one person off in a different city doing nothing but writing grants), and its affiliate offices are, one by one, shutting down or leaving the organization altogether. As an employee there, I saw four of its affiliates shut their doors or leave the organization. The home office, which had at one point 18 people, is down to something like six full-time employees. And it blows whatever money it has left on consultants, looking for that magic bullet that's going to solve all its woes. Meanwhile, the new CEO lives and offices in Guatemala, while attempting to run the organization from a distance. The organization's dirty little secret--the biggest of many--is that the kids it "helps" probably would have succeeded on their own anyhow. Kids have to earn their way into the program with grades--now it's taken to calling itself a scholarship organization --which is a convenient way of hedging one's bets and stacking the deck for success stories. And even so, close to three quarters of the kids in the program leave without completing it. All of which is too bad, because if the organization really did what it purportedly exists to do, it would be a good one. I was hopeful while there that it would be able to right itself, but it appears that the rot has set in. At this point, all it can hope for is to avoid prosecution for dereliction of duty when the inevitable shut-down happens.
