Shockingly Toxic - Avis employé Employé (anonyme) Rethink Food

Go getters with bold ideas tend to thrive. The free lunch is a big plus. The team is very friendly and seems to enjoy working together. Senior leadership is very accessible and open to feedback. Not too many meetings.

If you require a lot of structure you will not do well here. You need to think fast and move fast. The typical nonprofit bureaucracy does not apply here.

The food was delicious and the mission worth believing in. There was creative thinking to food access solutions while working with great organizations across the city. There were a lot of kind, driven people on staff.

Believe the reviews and buckle up. The internal reality of the organization made it difficult to feel good about any of the work being done. There's a reason the senior staff has stayed the same for years and junior employees continue to leave. This organization is a mess. Aside from mission-centered marketing language, the priorities and direction of the org are completely unclear and constantly changing. Internally, organizational structure was nonexistent. Job roles were undefined, management layers were weak, and priorities shifted constantly without communication from leadership. Eight years in, "start-up style" is not a viable excuse for weak inner-organizational infrastructure at this level. Internal communication was surprisingly poor for such a small organization. Leadership simultaneously micromanaged nonessential details while going MIA on decisions that actually mattered. Staff were routinely left cleaning up after leadership's mistakes, absorbing consequences they had no hand in creating. The culinary director deserves specific mention here because the dysfunction there was in a class of its own. He was completely ineffective at his job and actively created a toxic environment for other staff. Maybe most troubling was the open disdain toward other food-related nonprofits and figures in the food access/culinary world. Leadership was visibly ego-driven and image-obsessed, which made the whole organization feel less like a food-access mission and more like a PR operation for org leadership, food businesses, and certain high-end chefs. Marketing was plain dishonest. It was telling to see the organization host lavish donor dinners for some of New York's wealthiest — often comped — while framing it as "fine dining as a force for change." If you care deeply about food access, there are organizations doing this work with more integrity and operational maturity.