Huckleberry Youth Programs Reviews

The nature of the work for client-facing staff is taxing. Management has supported self-care and work-life balance, but regardless, wages are too low at that level. They have been working hard to better them and have made some progress, but it will take time to make the pay truly viable for someone to support a family on. There aren't a lot of opportunities for promotion because the agency is so small and historically employees have stuck around for many years, but when there are opportunities management often hires internally. While everyone on the executive team (excluding the new CEO herself) shows incredible leadership, the Board of Directors do not respect the staff. They fired an incredible and universally beloved CEO and replaced him with someone who is unqualified for the job, whose values do not align with the mission, and who is disrespectful, combative with staff, and trying to motivate with fear and shame rather than encouragement and support. This is despite the fact that staff made it incredibly clear to the BOD (prior to the hire) that she was a terrible choice. The CEO has been flooding management staff with unnecessary work and excessive redundant meetings. The board and the new CEO seem to be aggressively trying to reshape the culture into something conservative that goes against our core values and hurts kids. They are poorly representing the agency with long-term donors/funders. They are bleeding the agency monetarily by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on this poorly managed transition in leadership. We’ve already lost over 60 combined years of experience in long-time staff who have quit because of the environment the BOD created. Neither the CEO nor the board is open to feedback and they are very much wanting the staff to respect a strict hierarchy and to be deferential rather than advocate for what is right. The future looks bleak, but the staff is incredibly strong and if leadership gets fixed, replaced with people who are equity focused and values-aligned, I imagine the place will bloom brightly again.

- The board of directors has caused a lot of problems for directors/management, which sometimes means there isn't as much support for Frontline staff - There's sometimes a lack of communication/collaboration between sites