Sickening environment - Anonymous employee Homeward Trust Edmonton Employee Review

A few good employees, overshadowed by terrifying bullies. And a free laptop

Terrible place to work. Understaffed, overworked, incompetence at executive level due to micromanagement and bottlenecks. Culture is awful, always walking on eggshells around fragile leaders. Thanks for the free laptop though! It's working great after I wiped it and removed all the useless homeward trust programs.

Some good people work there, but they get burned out and sabotaged by upper management. Despite the company's extreme financial wastefulness, it has somehow, after decades, managed to build a small portfolio of affordable and supportive housing projects... from which it regularly evicts people for mental health and addiction issues, in direct contradiction to its stated mission.

The CEO is intelligent and passionate but a terrible leader. She gaslights, gossips, plays favorites, humiliates staff, and refuses accountability while blaming others. Senior managers and assistants quit constantly, and despite reading management books, she embodies exactly what good leaders avoid. Her micromanagement, patronizing style, and refusal to delegate create chaos, delays, and fear, leaving staff stressed and disempowered. Employees are told you have to "read between the lines" to understand what the CEO wants. That's because, although apparently intelligent, she consistently fails to communicate what she wants. She speaks in unintelligible circles, creating a nightmare for staff in meetings. Her train of thought rarely makes it to the station. She gives vague orders in a rushed and frustrated manner before abruptly leaving for another meeting. Then she blows up at employees for not doing what she wanted after she failed to take time to explain what she wanted in the first place. As a result, nothing gets done at HT until it's an emergency. She is frequently missing important emails and demanding things at the last minute. HT is notorious for burnout. Pay is exploitative, with raises that don’t even match inflation, leaving you poorer than when you started. Roles never match job descriptions, training is nonexistent, and turnover is constant. Staff are overworked, underpaid, and pushed outside their scope until their health suffers. The nonprofit hides behind its mission while wasting taxpayer funds on flashy but useless programs, failing its community, and treating employees with cruelty. Boundaries don’t exist; government funds and donations are squandered. They spent more than $60K a year on expensive software programs that were never used by anyone. Their COVID response was disastrous: they spent ~$80K per unhoused community member PER MONTH on ineffective, underutilized interventions. If government wanted to end homelessness, they would've done it decades ago. There are six empty homes per unhoused person in Canada. HT and orgs like it exist not to redistribute taxpayer funds to those in need, but to palliate the public conscience while corporations and government work in lockstep to keep housing supply low and unaffordable. People like the CEO are kept around not *despite* their incompetence, but *because* of it: to keep up the charade of looking busy, building housing at a glacial pace, and producing impressive sound bytes, while government lazes in bed with corporations and landlords (40% of MPs are landlords). I suspect this longstanding incompetence is intentional and instrumental to HT's actual, unstated mission: putting on a show of philanthropy to distract from the government's total enthrallment to the wealthy landlord class. HT’s disorganization, waste, and hypocrisy prove that nonprofits can be as exploitative and unethical as any corporation. If you join, know you’re not serving the mission, just surviving a toxic workplace until you burn out.