GVI Reviews

- Salaries are very low, at all levels (in the field) - Many people work unpaid and are not even offered health insurance - Wage gap between international and local staff. Local staff are not valued. - Most of those at the top are white males - A lot of the expenses are covered using charitable funds. Volunteer's fees cover the office and for-profit side of the business, not much of the community development/conservation work. There is a document online that says "Where the Money Goes"- this is untrue and needs updating. - Volunteers and international staff take jobs from locals - Always running out of money, leaving the field teams to deal with high levels of stress and unpaid bills - The field teams live in extremely basic and sometimes unsanitary conditions. - Working hours are around 80/week if you work directly in the field. The salary averages out to about 3 USD an hr for starter staff. - During the pandemic, GVI let 90% of their field staff go, with no severance or financial help to fly home.

Absolutely no work-life balance. You are on-call 24/7 except for your holiday/vacation days. If something happens with a volunteer in the middle of the night or on the weekend, you are on call. Generally, staff have to live on base with volunteers for safety reasons. This is great for volunteers but essentially means staff are on duty 24/7. If you get up in the middle of the night to get some water, and a volunteer asks you a question, you are expected to put on your best customer service face and answer. This may not seem bad if you're planning to work there for 6 months, but it gets pretty old after the first couple of years. The compensation for field staff is well below the poverty line in most western countries, and staff are not offered automatic flight compensation (hint: if you push for it, they might give it to you, if they really like you!) Field staff earn only a few thousand dollars a YEAR and are expected to pay 1-2K just to get to and from their country of work. Local staff are paid significantly less than foreign staff, and the new model with the GVI charitable programs wants to put all local staff under the charity. This is so they don't have to pay their salaries from volunteer fees. They claim the charity aims to keep programs running when GVI volunteers cannot enter the country (for example during Covid) but, they do not actually send funds from the charity into the field without volunteers on the ground. (Unless this has changed in the past 35 days). The new "charity," is only set up to pay off overhead and operational costs, which in the old model were paid by volunteer fees. That means hardly any of the money, that volunteers pay for their trips (several thousands of dollars for a few weeks!), actually goes to support the projects in field. Instead, they expect volunteers and staff to raise even more money for their charity to pay those costs. This is something high-level staff had fought against for years, but during Covid it was used as an excuse to push this forward. The final straw for our whole team was when the CEO gave no condolences after the loss of a team member. When feedback was given, he continued to refuse to pay condolences or give support to the family of the deceased.