Selling DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) to collect money - Anonymous employee Elevate TechFest Employee Review

I used to admire Elevate when they were running annual tech festival in the past. They should have not expanded their business beyond the annual tech festival; they have NO clue about what it takes to build an organization that runs community-based programs daily. They are good at selling their brand and government lobbying, and that’s why they were able to collect lots of funding from all levels of government and launched the new initiative last year focusing on DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion)-driven tech workforce development training programs. They promoted their new initiative using terms like DEI and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Color), and hired several new folks from BIPOC community last year to make their previous “white-dominant” team more “diverse” as part of their "DEI commitment" when they were selling the new initiative to several funders/corporate partners. Today, their new initiative is failing the entire Elevate internally and externally because of their poor, broken leadership team, which has no skills in people management, daily program operations and organizational development EXCEPT collecting money. As their new initiative is not going well, they’ve been more top-down and oppressive towards the new team members who have worked like 10-12hrs per day since they’ve joined the team last year. The leadership team does not thoroughly assess what the real issues are (themselves); they tend to blame employees based on the program/project numbers. Not to mention that Elevate leadership never had such a huge amount of government project funding in the past, and that’s why the leadership team had no clue about what to track as part of reporting requirements including lots of paperwork. I’ve worked with several senior leadership teams in my career, but the Elevate leadership team was probably one of the worst because they failed to create a supportive environment with clear directions and systems in place. Beyond my unpleasant experience with Elevate’s leadership, I'm mostly upset that Elevate was able to collect lots of public money using DEI and BIPOC languages, even though they had no track records of successfully running any type of community-based programs in the past. It deeply concerns me when I think about many community organizations led by hardworking BIPOC leaders that do not have adequate access to much needed funding while making a real impact in the community. It clearly shows the broken funding system in the non-profit sector.