Start Early Reviews

Within Start Early, there is a culture of perfection and nonstop work that is extremely toxic. Managers have too much on their plates to be able to supervise effectively. Senior leadership's communication is cold, corporate, and out of touch with their workforce, and they do not seem interested in coordinating work across the organization, only acquiring new projects and starting new business development initiatives. You might even forget they are a nonprofit given the emphasis internally on building training products, marketing materials, sales pipelines, etc. Senior leadership has been on a multi-year campaign to convince employees that they center DEIB and are committed to rooting out white supremacist values from the workplace culture, but there is little evidence that anything they are trying is working. The workplace is still predominantly white, and there is literally physical segregation within the organization - the nice glitzy office downtown is where the white folks work, and the early childhood center on the South Side is where the black and brown folks work. There were opportunities for integration but no effort at actual inclusion was apparent. All in all, the only thing Start Early has going for it is its massive wealth. I have no doubt this is because the president is a white, neoliberal aristocrat who excels at talking out both sides of her mouth. For example, when we agreed to share decision making powers with partners in the Educare Learning Network, and learned that they might vote to divest it from Start Early, her response was "over my dead body," despite our organization having made a prior commitment to share decision-making authority. This was just a drop in the bucket of bad faith and dysfunctional relationships Start Early has with its close partners. Behind closed doors, the leaders of Start Early will absolutely trash you if you cross them. I spent my tenure at Start Early in the Educare Learning Network program. I will say that the culture of the ELN program is better and ELN leadership does successfully foster a more inclusive and diverse culture. However, the ELN program is in disarray - they are scrambling for funding as their anchor investments are reduced year-after-year and the costs of running and maintaining a nationwide network of 25+ high quality early childhood centers increases. Several schools in the network were struggling for financial solvency before the pandemic, and the situation is much worse now. It often feels like a sinking ship, and this is not helped at all by the fact that Start Early leadership continues to expand the ELN national program without expanding the staff capacity in the ELN division. There is not even a discussion about succession planning for the leadership of ELN, and the current ED, although a passionate leader who I deeply respect, is clearly thinking about retirement. Further, the ELN just spent an arm and a leg on consultants to produce a strategic plan for the next 3-5 years, and the result was a vague series of objectives that were just restatements of work the network has been doing for the past decade. There is an incredible amount of wheel-spinning going on here as folks clamor for some pathway toward a sustainable purpose and vision for the ELN. Regarding internal mechanics of the ELN team, my experience in the division was marked by siloing, disorganization, a lack of operational coordination on tactical goals, and lack of any meaningful routes for advancement or professional development. These are, however, problems within the whole organization, so I do not fault the ELN team for these things. There is little to no operational oversight from the org for each division. I do want to emphasize that my colleagues were extremely intelligent, caring, and awesome people who were a pleasure to work with. You will definitely find good people and lifelong connections here. People genuinely care about how you are doing, and there is awareness of the toxic culture, and that is good, but I found that discussions about the problems with the culture often would take place with a foreboding, ominous current running underneath - that something is deeply wrong and we all were powerless to change it. I don't recommend working here. This is the type of org that attracts sycophants who cater to the beck and call of the top executives. Anyone with integrity is either gone or jaded by the end of their first year.