City Year reviews

The service is mostly bogus. The company measures corps member efforts (hours served! students reached!) but they do not measure results. This is largely because City Year is almost entirely ineffective in making a difference in the schools they serve. They have too many goals and are too unclear with their objectives to be effective. Their organizational goal is to make national service a matter of public consciousness. Which means... they promote service for the sake of service? It felt that way a lot of times. We were placed in inner-city schools with little training and little strategy. It's great that we brought hundreds of thousands of kids to a college fair. But is it really worth the effort when few will get into college and even fewer will finish? I left the program disillusioned with non-profits in general.

City Year usually hires folks who just graduated from college and often times don't know how you deserve to be treated in the workplace. City Year staff takes advantage of this information and treats their AmeriCorps members like garbage. They say all these platitudes about self advocacy but punish you every time you try to do so. They pride themselves on growth and force "coaching conversations" on everyone, which is really just a way to get you to be vulnerable and get information to take advantage of you. My service year started with around 35-40? americorps members and finished with about 15. They did not dismiss acms with inappropriate relationships with students or acms who threatened violence against their coworkers but dismissed other folks with extremely ableist reasoning. Horrible place to work.