My Nonprofit Reviews

I volunteered for PAL for 4 months during the spring and summer. I was so excited to find a no-kill shelter in my area and when I first started to work there, I was thrilled. At first I worked in the cat rooms doing the morning clean ups.

For the most part, the cleaning was not a problem but the treatment of the volunteers was. Any time one volunteer made a mistake, Kathi took it out on ALL of the volunteers. More then once I heard her threaten to let go of all the volunteers because of a mistake from one volunteer and she generally talked down to them.

I did not get to really see how terrible it was until I started working in the gift shop, answering phone and assisting guests.
We got a lot of calls from seniors with sick pets and who needed help from the Herdina Grant. When we got these calls we were told to tell them that the program was on hold for now but would be back in about a month and to call again then. Other times they called because they already submitted an application for the grant and wanted to know what was going on with their application. We were told to tell those people that their applications were still being reviewed. We always took down the callers name and number and reason for their call so that Kathi could call them back regarding the grant. A few days later, they would call back, and tell us that Kathi never called and that their pet still needed vet care and they wanted a real answer. Sadly, the volunteers who worked the phones could never give them the real answer and all we could do was take another message for Kathi that would be ignored.

To this day I don't know why those people were never helped or why we had to keep running them in circles when they were in need of help, but it was a major factor in my decision to leave.

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