The Best and Worst of the IRC

Starting a series this week looking at what it's really like to work for various humanitarian agencies.  Asked friends to send in what they thought were the best and worst aspects of various large NGOs and UN agencies for which they'd worked.

Today is the International Rescue Committee (IRC) - to read yesterday's review of CARE, see here.  Oxfam, the UN and other agencies will be profiled over the coming days. If anyone would like to contribute their thoughts, send an email to change.humanitarian.relief@gmail.com.

Aid Agency Reviews: The Best and Worst of the IRC

To sum up the responses below - the best aspects of working for IRC are the high quality program managers and coordinators, autonomy, the protection work, the diversity (especially gender diversity), their human resources department, and the black logo t-shirts.

In the not-so-good category, people mentioned the low pay, senior management, lack of annual leave, being donor driven, and the yellow logo t-shirts.

The Best of IRC

- A sink or swim attitude. No hand holding.

- Truly dedicated colleagues.

- Lots of women.

- No cowboys.

- Black logo t-shirts.

- A willingness to always evaluate, and always try to find ways to do things better.

- Institutional sarcasm.

- The best drivers in the business.

- Good medical care insurance including dental coverage.

- HR personnel in NY are quick and responsive and generally very helpful.

- Project Managers and Coordinators tend to be high calibre and committed and technically very good.

- Good security advice/support - as long as don't mind restrictions.

- They are well-respected and it can look good on your CV.

- Good at Protection - better than most NGOs.

- Lots of autonomy, creative thinking re program development is encouraged, collaborates well with other agencies, diversity of staff at all levels.

- I had always wanted to work for IRC as I had this idealistic image of working hands-on with refugees to help them rebuild their lives. The Human Resources staff at the NYC HQ were enthusiastic, efficient and made me feel like I was going to be a part of this incredible humanitarian team.

The Worst of IRC

- A sink or swim attitude. No hand holding.

- Feeling like you get paid less than everyone else.

- Curfew, when no one else has one!

- Yellow logo t-shirts.

- Losing the best national staff to higher paying NGOs and the UN.

- Being donor driven, and at the mercy of donors.

- If you aren't a US citizen the annual leave is shockingly small. 12 days simply doesn't count as leave for a Brit... and in the country where I worked in 2004 you only got 5 days R+R every 3 months, and a very limited financial contribution to your R+R flights in comparison to any other agency I know of.

- The salary is quite low compared to other NGOs, especially the Scandivigian NGOs. This is exacerbated if you are not from the US and the dollar is week.

- Senior management in [the IRC office where I worked] was quite poor - and this resulted in poor planning, both financial and program. They had received a huge amount of funding and expanded very quickly... but paid little attention to when funding was going to run out and were caught out due to poor planning and some weird sense that they had loads of money. Since then they have been cutting back and are now quite small - limited to their 'home' areas in that country. Equally, the different sectors tended to work in silos - partly this is the scattergun phenomenon (education working in x villages, health working in y villages, and WatSan or whatever working in z villages rather than focusing all the sectoral programs at the same villages to achieve a comprehensive result before moving on to other villages - as it is none of the villages really receive adequate development support) but was also due to poor management - there were never any multi-sectoral meetings with all the Coordinators until the end of my time there.

- I also found some financial management activities a little suspect - funding moved between projects for management/logistical costs. But this is quite common. But it seemed quite badly managed to me - there was inadequate awareness or planning of funding. The other IRC office where I worked was also a complete mess - they were something like a million overspent, which leads me to suspect that this might be an organisational weakness.

- I'm not sure what career development is like - it seems that a lot of sector Coordinators tend to move on....  don't know if there is clear career progression from technical post to Deputy CD and CD but certainly there is little training/career development or opportunities to get the experience one would require to move into a senior management post. However, IRC is very loyal to past employees and tend to reemploy.

- Compensation package.

- I think the country program was so large it was hard to make a cohesive link between the program sectors so it felt like everybody was doing their own thing, going after their own money and far from being a team effort it was highly competitive going out for your piece of the sector pie on large multi-sector proposals. This trend was only exacerbated by a change in leadership at the regional level. I left the organization feeling like IRC was turning into a wannabe beltway bandit running after large USAID projects (and their NICRA).

[Image from flickr]