What I wish was different
I wish organizational leadership was different. Currently, there is one paid employee (our executive director) in our Amherst office, the rest of us are service members. It took incredible persistence to convince our ED to fairly compensate employees for their work going forward.
The ED tends to be a micromanager, and in my opinion has crossed ethical/legal boundaries in tasks that he has asked us to execute, without allowing us to say no. He also tends to be deeply suspicious of those who work in the office, and does not trust us to do our work, even though he does not understand how the mentor program currently functions. Organizational missions and projects tend to be driven by white saviorism, without real concern for populations served. He openly prefers organizational staff in New Mexico over Amherst.
The ED has made multiple people in the office cry, and shown no sense of awareness of what he had done. He has little social awareness and will talk to staff for up to an hour without stopping and without purpose, sometimes following staff to the door of the office as they leave. He is aware that he is prone to monologuing, but fails to make any changes to his behavior.
There is a lack of institutional knowledge of the mentor program. Besides our ED, who founded the organization, I am currently the longest serving employee at two years admin, two years mentoring. The ED does not have a current sense of how the mentor program is run, nor has he tried to learn. Mentor program leadership for the next school year will be based on ten months of service experience.
There is poor communication between leadership and others in the office, causing tasks to fall through the cracks. It is incredibly difficult to know what's happening, and the office is only four people. Leadership fails to/actively resists delegating tasks, to their detriment.
While I love the mentor program and it has played an important role in my life, I have no faith in long-term organization sustainability.
