Pros
The majority of Searchers are beautiful people filled with amazing ideas that our world really needs. Staff at headquarters and in the field are mostly hard-working, positive individuals who care about what they do and believe in the importance of conflict transformation. Senior leadership has made recent attempts to increase transparency about organizational affairs and strategy, which has helped to address flagging employee morale. The DC headquarters has also just upgraded to a brand-new office space, which is a significant development and was much needed. In many cases, Search projects make a meaningful difference in the field. The organization’s institutional memory and expertise in peacebuilding is nearly 40 years rich, and its willingness to innovate in some of the world’s seemingly intractable conflicts, even before peacebuilding was even a field, is impressive.
Cons
Search suffers from chronic dysfunction at multiple levels, ranging from financial non-compliance (and even corruption in some cases), to crippling debt, a constantly shifting senior management structure, decrepit office spaces, and a lack of good systems and processes across the board. The organization has been teetering on the edge of financial insolvency for years and is only being kept on life support thanks to millions of dollars in donations by Board members. Only recently has a bank been confident enough to offer the organization a line of credit. Search relies heavily on entry- and mid-level staff, yet barely pays its headquarters employees enough to survive DC's high cost of living, which is 60% higher than the rest of the country. When adjusted for cost of living, an associate-level employee at Search makes the equivalent of $19,000/year, with managers making only a little more. HR has promised that salaries have been benchmarked to industry rates, and yet those rates are kept behind closed doors. Some deeper research, however, reveals that the majority of lower- and mid-level positions are being paid $10,000-30,000 less/year than at comparable peer organizations, which means the benchmarks are being low-balled or perhaps disregarded altogether. At the same time, staff at the Director level and above earn in the solid six figures, which depletes lean budgets and leaves little left to compensate lower-level staff fairly. Senior staff regularly charge their time to non-compliant budget lines because their salary level cannot be absorbed elsewhere. Search has laid out a bold strategic plan that includes targeting some of the most fragile and insecure conflict geographies. While this strategy is laudable, decisions to work in certain dangerous and volatile areas have been made over-confidently and ad hoc without a full assessment of risks or a clear security plan. Doing so severely jeopardizes staff safety on the ground. Anyone who has been at Search long enough will tell you that there is a clear and consistent pattern in the organization’s dysfunction. At least once per year, the organization hits a crisis point that will send leadership scrambling for solutions and assurances. A plan will be developed—whether firing new executives, acquiring new software, re-envisioning departments and roles, implementing new protocols, or setting organization-wide strategic objectives—and yet time and again these new measures fall flat on their face and roll straight into the next crisis point. It’s a vicious cycle, but turnover within the organization and on the Board of Directors, along with “talking a big talk” to peers and donors, keeps true accountability from being achieved. It’s a constant carrot on a stick that makes the organization feel incredibly fragile and on the edge of collapse.