Pros
Good benefits, an actually decent salary, amazing co-workers (as of 2022)
Cons
Where to even begin here… Elwyn is a giant social service organization that has 5000+ employees operating in 11 different states, with three completely disparate branches (adults with ID, adult/children’s behavioral health, and early intervention services for kids with developmental challenges). Decisions at this org are made at the highest levels of management depending on which programs are making money or not, with total and utter disregard for the feasibility/consequences of applying their decisions in the field, the lived realities of clients and staff, the barriers to providing services and applying the top-down decisions, and the common-sense (and often solvable) reasons why a program may be failing instead of succeeding. The org is too big for upper management to care about the details of any one individual program’s success. Communication only happens in one direction, from top to bottom, and there is absolutely no transparency about why certain decisions—which often have negative consequences—are being made or even who made the decision. The result is a work environment that is abusive, toxic, chaotic, dysfunctional, and callous. Middle managers, who are squeezed between whatever nonsense their bosses tell them to do to not get their programs slashed and the reality of what is actually happening on the ground—the daily operation of their programs—result in cognitive dissonance, gaslighting, silencing, unethical decision-making, helpless acceptance of abusive management strategies, high turnover, reactive and short-sighted decisions, and a culture of “don’t try to make anything better, just make sure to cover yourself when something goes wrong” being the norm. Don’t work here unless you want to waste a bunch of your energy playing the game instead of providing quality services to clients. Also—there is a huge racialized disparity between management and direct service workers, and it seems like the people in management are allowed to play by different rules than direct service providers.