Pros
The only organization in the country paying organizers to run crucial peace and human rights programs on the ground in communities across the nation. The program staff were given lots of resources to do our work and lots of trust from management, and the people in the communities we got to work with were amazing. I learned a lot about being an organizer, with support and encouragement from direct management, as well as learning from other coworkers that have been doing the work even longer. Lots of opportunities for collaboration across issue, i.e. Anti-war and immigrants rights, because of working in the same space. The pay and benefits were very competitive among similar nonprofits.
Cons
The financial cuts and layoffs in 2009 were devastating. Many regions have still not recovered the number of programs and staff that were in place before then. Top management also did not handle the layoffs well, keeping a larger proportion of highly-paid management and admin staff, and therefore having to layoff a larger proportion of direct program staff at the lowest salary levels. Also, after the layoffs, compensation and benefits became much less competitive, forcing even more good organizers with decades of experience to leave. The regional management was wonderful in my experience, the difficulties were how much was required to go through the central bureaucracy in Philadelphia. The Quaker tradition is to deliberate on decisions and make democratic decisions, but there was not enough infrastructure in place (or possibly intention) to communicate in a reasonable timeline with staff on the ground about what was happening in the process of decision making. They wanted to centralize media work at one point, but then we could never get the time and attention of the central media staff to do the media for our location.