Kimberly Churches

Save yourself and run as fast as you can from this place It is impossible to do anything but drown in the toxic work environment at AAUW. After poor financial decisions of previous management, current management continues to make poor decisions including several rounds of layoffs and freezing salaries for the remaining staff. Instead of downsizing their scope of work with fewer staff, senior management divided up the fired staff workloads among junior staff and then proceeded to take on additional initiatives. They kept stating that we were going to do less with less, as if junior staff wouldn't know we were being lied to. Speaking of lies, senior leadership love to ask junior staff to falsify data. Data is so segmented from turnover that it's hard to report honestly if you tried but senior leadership would rather you didn't and instead always provide them with what they want to see. I was constantly upset with myself for my role in helping lie to secure grant funding that AAUW does not deserve. Senior leadership doesn't seem to understand that they need to lay proper groundwork and grow from there, so they just lie and pretend they are ready to play in the big leagues. There seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding among senior management about how to accomplish AAUW's mission. The work of junior staff is beneath them to understand, so they have no idea how to set reasonable goals or timeframes for projects. For example, a project that would take me at least 3 months at a reasonable organization was given a 1 day turnaround at AAUW. I did my best and finished in 3 days (over the weekend) and was yelled at for this 'disaster'. Then my boss decided the project wasn't important and decided to 'revisit later'. The unreasonable pressure is internal as well as external. Senior leadership are so desperate for a 'win' that they will ignore the terms of contracts and expect juniors staff to do whatever a partner organization requests, no matter how unreasonable. Senior leadership includes obsessive micromanagers as well as people who don't want to manage the own team at all. This leads to outsourcing work to external vendors that should be done in-house. Somehow there is always money for that, but nothing else. I wouldn't be shocked at all to hear that senior leadership has financial conflicts and gets paid by some of the organizations that AAUW hemorrhages money at. Senior leadership have one thing in common though: they all care more about one-upping each other than running the organization. At times I was unsure if I was watching a drunken club brawl on The Jersey Shore or senior leadership having a meeting. Because of their petty, unprofessional bickering it was impossible to work as a team. My boss forbade me from talking to leadership she didn't like. If our department needed something that would normally fall under that other department we did it ourselves, doubling workloads for no reason other than to preserve senior leaderships sore egos. I felt like an enabler but had no idea how to stop it because verbalizing this was met with shame and anger. And then there's the members, oh boy. Members are old, out of touch, and alarmingly racist. Senior leadership doesn't have the backbone to put them in their place because they are hoping they'll die and leave AAUW money for grants. So members often do their own thing "on behalf" of AAUW and then junior staff have to scramble to clean up after them. This alone could be a full-time job. Since they laid off everyone who answered member calls, staff across every department are often harassed via email (or on their personal line or even on social media if you are lucky!) for not answering members calls. If you take more than an hour to answer these entitled women who waste your time with absurdly unimportant questions, they will call the CEO directly and you'll receive an email scolding you for not answering them instantly. If you see a theme here, you are correct! At AAUW you are expected to do anything and everything at the speed of light while understaffed, overworked, and underpaid. After cleaning up after senior staff and members, there aren't enough hours in the day to do your work. Then there's the CEO. I personally decided to quit after the CEO got annoyed at everyone in a staff meeting when we didn't jump for joy after she announced AAUW received a multi-million dollar donation. She was genuinely surprised that her underpaid staff wouldn't be excited to hear the organization was receiving money that will never go towards salary and overhead. Senior staff are too clueless to rework how donations can be allotted and continue to allow the fellowship program to be funded generously while the rest of the organization crumbles. So what staff heard when she announced this was 'We received millions for you all to do even more work, but you still won't get paid a cent more!' When she finally realized we were bummed because our pay was frozen indefinitely, she doubled down with 'You know, I took a pay cut too!' Kimberly Churches: AAUW's 990 shows you made well over $450,000 last year (meaning your pay significantly increased per 2018's 990). Junior staff aren't dumb and even if your pay cut were real wouldn't sympathy because you are seriously overpaid to begin with. Her response to the organization rapidly crumbling under her rule was to lecture all staff that the 'petty gossip stops NOW' as if telling everyone to stop talking about organizational issues were a more helpful approach than trying to address them. I knew at that meeting that she would never fire the troublemakers or try to understand how awful it was to work there for junior staff. As another mentioned, this place should shutter it's doors and let organizations that practice what they preach take their spot. It's insulting to underpay your workers while asking them advocate for fair pay. I sincerely regret working here and wouldn't recommend it to anyone.