Pros
I was surrounded by some of the best, most hardworking, and most creative people. Even on days that the work was tough, I was always happy to walk into the building and be surrounded by such a hardworking group of staff and students. The students are incredible, too. While not all 90 students are life-changing, it is quite likely that you will meet a lot of people that you connect with deeply every new six month recruiting cycle. I was a coach of up to 9 students at one point, and working with all of them was such a joy, even if not all of them were successful. I was happy to take late night phone calls, text thoroughly, and answer any question I could - or direct them to someone who could - because of how compelling all of the students were. The students are also incredibly appreciative of the work that you do for them; it's possible that you're the first person to stick your neck out for them in a long time if not ever. While the work can be really challenging - I would have to "fire" 3-5 students every six months, many of whom that process is extremely devastating - you're surrounded by so much to feel great about. I had people who cared about me on staff, some of whom were helpful in moving my career along. While I didn't connect super closely with my first manager, she was incredibly skillful and I learned a lot from her. I was much closer with my second manager, but didn't find him to be very supportive. Oh, I forgot! the benefits are incredible. Almost enough to offset a very meager salary.
Cons
Year Up has a few separate components: there's program (which encompasses the entire student experience, from recruitment - employment placement), operations (which runs the staff management and building operations), development (fundraising), and corporate engagement (who bring in internship and hiring partners). Depending on where you are in the organization likely goes a long way in determining how long you can last there. My role was designed to sit in-between the interns and the corporate partners. Sometimes, I would suggest that a student should be fired for poor attendance/performance, others I would advocate for the student to get more support. However, to be doing that means that there's a constant tension and fight about what to do best for the students and the company. If we keep letting a low-performing student go to internship, we risk alienating the partner. If we fire a student too quickly, we lose a possible positive outcome, so there is a tricky balance. However, Corporate Engagement will almost always win these fights and there's not much you can do about it from a Program side of things. Because the site runs on the dollars generated by internships, people will always pull the trigger really quickly on a low-performing student even when there's an opportunity to turn things around. The promotion/talent evaluation process is two-tiered and shockingly political. The first component is a 360 evaluation, where you choose people that you work with to review you. Your manager reads the reviews of your 360 reviews and then offers their own commentary and assigns you a 1-5 grade. I have never heard of anyone getting a 5, and I've only heard of a single 1. In order to get promoted, I was told that I had to get a 4 on a review (or at least I was told that it was really important for that to happen). However, there wasn't really a method to demonstrate that people are worthy of a 4. Sure, there were objective metrics to hit, and a vague thing called "competencies," but in many cases there was an extreme overlap between a 3 and a 4. In addition, there was an unspoken rule among staff where you wouldn't actually choose people that you worked with, you would just choose people who would give you the highest reviews. I, naively, did not do this, and found a lot of my review tarnished by people referencing disagreements that we had (remember, our roles exist in tension?) as an indicator of poor performance, as opposed to actually measuring the quality of my work. This is not to say that Year Up should automatically promote every well performing employee - that would be impractical and not cost effective. After all, this is a non-profit in Seattle. However, most promotions went to Development, Corporate Engagement, and white men. This created a quasi-caste system, where program staff would wind up making considerably less than their corporate-facing partners and the latter would flex their title and power on the program team. Year Up, of course, because they mean well, would bring in racial diversity speakers designed to help support the staff, but the people who really needed to be hearing the conversations (the Executive Director, the senior staff member who called Belltown "dangerous" after one of our students got arrested, and many others) wouldn't actually be there, leaving us to do the "important" work. Another time, we were teaching staff members how to facilitate because we noticed that there had been a struggle the previous cohort for what to do when facilitation went wrong. All of the staff members who attended that training were on the program team, while the "important" staff members left and did other things and didn't end up using our skills that we were training them on.
