Silicon Valley Community Foundation Reviews

Pros

Good company to work for. Work-life balance

Cons

Not much to mention really

Pros

smart committed people and important community work

Cons

CEO and Chief Development Officer

Pros

Provide good benefits & 403b

Cons

Promote manager with no experience.

Pros

The people that worked with me were truly amazing individuals. The work that we did was engaging, and empowering and gave you perspective on certain local and nationwide initiatives. The building before I believe they went remote was centrally located, and the offices were neat and clean.

Cons

Management needed to be re-trained and properly developed. Low wages and salary for Silicon Valley. There were some departments that were more affected by toxic leadership than others. There would always be some re-organization in certain departments as it felt like a messy start-up sometimes.

Pros

- Exposure to many different aspects of philanthropy, from impact investing to complex assets and diverse types of grants. - Community team makes meaningful grants to high-impact nonprofits in the area.

Cons

- Pervasive lack of trust among key leadership, including CEO, in employees' ability to do their jobs leads to micro-managing and discourages learning and innovation. - ELT members, VPs, and HR leaders talk about employees behind their backs rather than giving constructive feedback. Shame-driven culture also leads staff to blame someone when mistakes are made rather than focusing on solutions. - Lack of responsiveness to feedback from employees about how they do their best work. Leadership asked each team to develop RTO plans, then rolled out a plan disregarding employee feedback without acknowledging 180 in approach. - Culture rewards burnout behavior where leaders model little to no work/life balance and joke about checking email at all hours and not taking vacation. - New positions posted and hiring decisions made made without consulting or building buy in among key team members. - CEO shows no accountability for culture and turnover after 3+ yrs. in role. - Very hierarchical.

Pros

Great mission, good opportunity to launch a career. Lots and lots to learn. Very very good team mates.

Cons

Org has some financial restrains which makes it a bit difficult to fully invest in staff and organizational development. They are in the process of change, hence you need thick skin to survive the storm.

Pros

First and foremost, staff are incredibly talented, resourceful, and helpful to one another. There is a solutions-oriented mindset, which somewhat helps to overcome the inevitable frustrations of dealing with outdated technology and manual processes. The foundation offers a very generous benefits package in comparison to the nonprofit sector at large. More recently the organization has also taken important steps to put in place compensation standards that enable it to remain competitive in that area. When it comes to professional development, there are numerous opportunities both formal and informal for staff to pursue - in addition to dedicated time off for professional development activities and access to resources. This comes on the heels of some very intentional moves on the foundation's part to expand its offerings. And even if someone does not take advantage of these, the exposure that they will receive to the different parts of the philanthropy industry just by working here is abundant, resulting in lots of great experience to carry into one's career path/future roles.

Cons

Management is poor in general. Senior leadership does not take an interest in understanding what staff faces on a day-to-day basis, which hampers efforts to implement solutions. Even while there is a commitment to improving the organization, the lack of attention to thoughtfully scoping the way forward only creates further problems. On top of that, various levels of and departments within the organization appear to be quite out of sync with each other and there is a sense that either staff does not understand their priorities or has not been given any meaningful direction. High turnover also exacerbates already critical knowledge gaps, which makes it difficult to foster the culture of continuous improvement that the foundation has been striving to achieve. Under its newer management the organization's executive team, and to a lesser degree its leadership team, have also demonstrated a tendency to want to reverse the way things are done seemingly for the sake of reversing them but not always for an objective reason. Particularly when these changes are piled on top of each other, it results in additional workloads that teams who are already stretched thin simply cannot manage. Overall, the challenges of working within and trying to transform a decades-old infrastructure lead to a considerable amount of strife and cultural tension across all levels, which unfortunately plagues the workforce even as other workplace issues that were exposed at the foundation in 2018 have been addressed. Worse yet, the HR team is not sufficiently aware of all that goes on amid this environment.

Pros

Building trust with communities. Great mission.

Cons

Hard to do remotely. HR disconnect with actual work.

Pros

1. Good first step into the world of nonprofit 2. The sense of urgency and the quick turnaround time to make things happen in the community (covid-19, hurricane relief, CA wildfires…etc) and provide support where it’s needed, was amazing to be apart of. 3. Majority of coworkers are team players, fun and helpful to work with and instrumental to surviving at this company

Cons

1. Extremely high employee turnover. Red flag. 2. Executive Leadership Team is all about the company and the bottom line, not the employees. This is a very top down culture. If you fall in line, you’ll be fine. 3. Lack of career advancement opportunities. 4. HR team only cares about the interests of the company and not their employees. HR is neither impartial or fair to employees, don't let them fool you. 5. Management (middle - senior level) is disconcerting. Because of high employee turnover, the folks in these positions have no clue what they are doing and were only rewarded these positions to fill a vacancy. Most are not qualified for management positions and they are certainly not trained for them. Also, most employees don't last more than 6 months in these positions. Sink-or-swim is the mentality. 6. Overall due to lack of constructive formal HR policy around pay, there also seems to be a wage gap {men / women} as confirmed by multiple data points between my peer group. This is ironic for a company doing work in the equity domain.

Pros

rewarding mission, smart and caring colleagues

Cons

poor leadership, lack of transparency, inadequate staffing