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Lemon Trees posted:I'm running into more issues at work. Depends on what you're meant to be doing during the day. Were you tasked to attend fundraising webinars? It sounds a bit like this is outside the scope of your role and they're trying to herd you back towards other responsibilities. quote:The other is my coworker who isn't my supervisor said she wanted me to do some research on Friday. Today she asks me for a file so I went ahead and made a new document to paste what I had found down. However, she's now asking me why I only created the file this afternoon. Is this normal behavior? Am I supposed to respond to this? Even harder to say with this one, without a lot more context. They just wanted you to provide the research results sooner than today, I guess?
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Jan 12, 2023 23:49
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So not sure if this thread gets frequent enough replies to be worth asking the question, but does anyone have resources or info about establishing a union at a nonprofit? I've been working here for a bit under 2 years and basically everyone's role is poorly defined, there's issues with the board and director not stepping up, and the people under me are getting jerked around because anyone who doesn't have face time with the director is treated as disposable. This ends up especially problematic because the community is majority Latin@ and some of our hourly workers only speak Spanish, meaning they aren't able to directly advocate for themselves. I think I'm likely unfireable myself because I am batting 1.000 on grant applications for my department, and on a scale that is largely the reason the org can afford to keep going, but the director is a constant micromanager and makes things difficult for basically everyone. The board is basically just his social circle plus community people that he has worked with in the past, so it's unlikely that he would ever be meaningfully chastened by them for the things he does. Several things he has done recently toe legal and ethical lines that I'm pretty upset about. Essentially, I want to use my importance in the org as a way to express proper solidarity with my coworkers, and a union seems increasingly like the best way to accomplish that. In the US, which I assume is pertinent info. If there is another thread that is more relevant on one of the other sub forums then I can take the question there, but it also is sort of directly relevant for the context of no profits so I figured I'd try here. Also, to Lemon Trees, from my own experience there are two problems here: 1. Your job responsibilities probably haven't been properly drawn up, so you and the other 3 people are basically all stuck trying to exercise your best judgment. 2. Your boss has taken the complaint from your coworker (regarding the presentation you got the gift card for) seriously enough that the Eye of Sauron is now looking at you. There's not a good solution to this other than waiting it out for something else to take up her attention. In terms of solutions, consider what you can do proactively to make it clear what you are doing day to day - if you don't want to be sending constant emails asking for permission to do minor tasks, you should work with your boss to clarify which things you are able to do without explicit approval and which things she always wants to approve. You could also consider sharing a calendar with her (ideally Google Calendar or whatever is in common use in your office) with all webinars you intend to attend so she can just look at that rather than doing it piecemeal. It seems from my experience in my own org and observation of other orgs in our vicinity that boss micromanagement is very much the norm - you will get constant requests for more documentation of work in every possible manner. Sometimes this relates to requirements for grants and similar, but the other issue is that you establish a nonprofit because you believe that you are somehow uniquely suited to solving a societal problem, so basically all people at the top have huge egos and a "vision" that they think everyone else should be working towards. If they are bad at communicating this "vision", they will nitpick people or generally get themselves involved in tasks that are below their pay grade even when they have more pressing issues they should be focused on. To repeat the refrain, it's not actually that different from corporate work - people are people regardless of the context, and that means they are flawed
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Jan 21, 2023 18:40
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Sometimes the micromanagey power grubbers are lower down, and senior management shys away from taking charge, resulting in factions and passive aggressive battles
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Jan 21, 2023 19:44
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good luck, i've heard some bad stories from people i know in non-profits, seems like some bosses take advantage of their employee's strong drive to help people to pile on abuse and know folks will stick around several of the government worker threads have a lot of union chat, but that's probably not applicable. not sure if the forums have an active thread on organizing a workplace not sure how productive it'll be, but i would consider reaching out to the non-profit professional employees union https://npeu.org/ they might be able to at least share some basic info about unionizing in a non-profit setting
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Jan 21, 2023 19:44
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BougieBitch posted:So not sure if this thread gets frequent enough replies to be worth asking the question, but does anyone have resources or info about establishing a union at a nonprofit? Up until this point I was wondering if we work for the same 501(C)(3).
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Jan 21, 2023 20:45
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pseudanonymous posted:Up until this point I was wondering if we work for the same 501(C)(3). I was wondering the same thing but no, nonprofits are all poo poo and use exploitive business practices, often times in contradiction to the mission statement of the organization!
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Jan 22, 2023 06:00
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We were looking at getting the Admin staff onto the local Office Workers Union, but the person organizing it finally couldn't take it any more and quit altogether. The rest of us don't have the energy or bandwidth to take over, all of which are... y'know... great signs... 
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Jan 22, 2023 07:22
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I think lovely bosses are universal, just trying not to perpetuate it by letting the director just do what he wants. There turns out to be a general workplace organizing thread in CSPAM, so I took the question there. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that anyone else has parallel experience, at least not with any of the more bespoke union outfits. Was hoping to get a bit of insight about whether anyone had worked with any of the nonprofit-specific orgs - I see the one link here, which I can look into, but I'd really like to have something first-hand or at least a preponderance of second-hand reports to go off of - you only get one shot at this sort of thing, after all.
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Jan 23, 2023 17:12
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Not to dissuade you, but a partner org of ours went through a unionization effort which ended in bankruptcy, but to be honest I think if you can't treat your employees decently you shouldn't be in business.
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Jan 24, 2023 01:47
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I'm having an issue where my boss seems to have unrealistic expectations about getting a product made for free. My boss tasked me and my coworker with the project of bringing in teen volunteers into the organization. Since Covid, we hadn't had very many volunteers. We decided to partner with our organization's Boys and Girls Club. It turns out the guy in charge of the volunteering club there has some graphic design experience, so the project we decided on was creating a mural for one of our buildings. I was like, sure why not, it would be a fun project. The idea was that the kids would design the mural and the teacher would help refine the final design. Last week, I saw the designs that the teachers had made. They weren't amazing, but he did the best he could to adapt the designs of what the students drew. They're younger teens, think 11-13. Turns out, my boss didn't like any of the designs and it seems like she will want several more round of revisions before she will be happy. My problem is that her expectations are too high and that she is pressuring him to create something high quality for free, which isn't fair to him. I don't think it's reasonable to expect someone to spend hours working on this without any compensation. I also feel like even if we are going to get a good design, there's going to be issues transferring into the wall. Neither my partner nor I working on this project have any painting experience, and the kids we are working with are quite young. My boss explicitly told me we need to have "high expectations" because "kids are talented' (her words) but I feel like her expectations are not realistic. We're not working with seniors in high school who have been taking art classes for several years, we're working with tweens from an after school program open to anyone. Am I missing something?
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Mar 29, 2023 15:17
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No, nonprofit management is poo poo and exploitive.
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Mar 29, 2023 16:28
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Oh, that makes sense. Is there any way I could bring any of my concerns up with my boss?
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Mar 29, 2023 19:47
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trying to connect with corporate sponsors is making my temples throb. we have a major event next month and nobody seems at all interested in helping financially
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Oct 25, 2023 00:16
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Lemon Trees posted:Oh, that makes sense. Is there any way I could bring any of my concerns up with my boss? Christ, I'm sorry Lemon Trees. How did this end up? And I know its like 6 months late, but I think if you can't just go back to your boss and say kind of exactly what you told us - "I know you have high expectations, but I need you to also be realistic because these are tiny children, a guy working for free, and absolutely none of us can paint", and not get a reasonable response along the lines of "I know, just trying to have some fun and brighten things up a bit, it'll be great no matter what - or at least bring a smile to peoples faces" then you absolutely have to look for a new job. Although it sounds like nonprofits somehow manage to attract the most toxic managers.
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Oct 25, 2023 00:24
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