Let's get the petty stuff out of the way: The pay sucks. There's no room for advancement. No career development. Micromanagement from the top-down. No trust in lower level employees or in volunteers. No guidance provided to new employees. No vision for what the organization should be. Staff turnover is very high and morale is nonexistent. Office politics are brutal, with staff members being more than willing to build their careers on the backs of their colleagues. Some staff members exceed their goals and have their accomplishments ignored, while others miss their marks by huge margins and are still kept on staff year after year. A half-hearted attempt at strategic planning is underway at the moment, but so far it's only resulted in a major facility/program being shuttered due to under-use and the Legal team being fired. Nearly every high-profile, glitzy fundraising event turns in a financial loss for the organization. The new CEO seems to mean well, but after six years of losing at least $1M a year, this organization needs a complete overhaul before it bleeds to death, starting with most of the C-Team.
But even worse than that? The Chicagoland council doesn't know its audience. Upper management has no idea who these girls are, in part because the potential audience is so enormous (population-wise and demographically), and they have no interest in figuring out how they can better serve girls. They don't care to distinguish between rich North Shore suburbanites, working class Indianans, and their diverse urban audience--programming, marketing, and membership use a one-size-fits-all approach that misses so many girls who'd otherwise love the Girl Scouting experience. The board makes decisions without asking those served by the organization, and management follows in lockstep without questioning the wisdom. The rest of us fight for the scraps, trying anything we can think of allowed by our limited resources to attract girls and constantly failing.
The Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana doesn't serve girls, it serves itself.
