I have a family friend who worked at our local Salvation Army headquarters as a a secretary. This particular office took all the Christmas donations for children in need, put them in a warehouse, and on a designated day the staff and their friends picked through them all, taking whatever they wanted. She saw people hauling away bikes donated for specific families. Some local children had hundreds of dollars of gifts donated in their name, and on Christmas they received three cheap things, items likely not even from the person who sponsored them.
My friend quit, and I’ve not given them a dime of my money since then.
Do not give to the Salvation Army.
Do Not. Give. To. Salvation. Army
My turn.
I’m a wildfire and disaster logistics specialist.
I deal with a lot of agencies who provide disaster relief.
I used to say the Salvation Army’s disaster services were the one (literally the ONE) good thing they did.
They would come in, set up a canteen trailer, make and pass out hot coffee and donated food in a disaster, usually being one of the first agencies to get there and the last to leave.
Then I found out.
Every time they did this, regardless of if they were actually invited or deployed by the agency in charge (usually FEMA, sometimes others) they would SELF-DEPLOY. Meanjng they would just show up. Ok. That’s not TOO bad, sometimes agencies have to take initiative and get there before the red tape is sorted out. BUT. They, after they left at the end of the incident, they would send FEMA or the host agency a BILL. They used one or two paid employees (usually the driver of the truck and a supervisor); and many VOLUNTEERS, but they would bill for EVERYONE’s Labor at standard federal rates. They would bill for the food they distributed even though it was all donated by another agency or private parties. They would bill for the coffee they made and the supplies. Except they would use electricity from the shelter location, water from donations or from the shelter, and in many cases, they would get the coffee and industrial filters DONATED, but bill for them at retail prices.
Don’tFUCKING give to the Salvation Army.
The Salvation Army is also ass to the workers. A good number of people join it, naively thinking that it’s doing good, and end up leaving cynical and beaten down. The management is hostile, if not outright abusive, and demand some ridiculous hours of it lower to mid-level staff. Don’t support these people.
Unsettling update
Find better local charities and shelters and give to them instead!
Also just for even more horrific context on the original twitter thread?
Salvation Army reached out to Milknmuffins and asked what shelter she’s at with the promise to address the abuse in it. She…ended up saying where she was. She was thrown out onto the street. It’s also all on Twitter.
They invited her to a personal talk so she could explain the situation in person.
And then they threatened her with a screenshot of a rape-threat made supposedly by her:
And then threw her out into the street while claiming she broke house rules that
So yeah, the Salvation Army is a bunch of entitled assholes that will treat the most vulnerable like shit if they dare try to do anything that makes them look bad
The “Fuck Salvation Army” posts are making the rounds again, so conisder this your reminder:
Do. Not. Give. These. Assholes. A. Single. Fucking. Penny.
Do not support them in any way, shape, or form.
‘Tis the season to say FUCK the Salvation Army.
I’m a social worker. You will not believe the amount of times the salvation army has tried to screw over our clients, in particular ones with disabilities. We’ve had multiple instances of clients not being allowed in because they have service animals, which is a violation of the Americans with disabilities act.
Oh look you guys a topic I am extremely familiar with.
When I was first out of college I worked at a Salvation Army domestic violence shelter for three years. There were so many problems I could probably write a Lord of the rings length novel. Instead I’ll focus on the topics mentioned in this post.
First of all — Unfortunately, some of these problems are not exclusive to the Salvation Army and are actually part of the shelter system as a whole. Nonprofits pay extremely poorly and shelters pay the bottom of the barrel a lot of the time. A lot of shelters have positions called advocate or program assistant and those people typically have very limited professional experience in this space and sometimes come with lived experience of homelessness or related trauma. If that person has not processed that trauma, they may end up projecting their own expectations on every single person they serve. I’ve seen that in every shelter I’ve worked at, and it’s always extremely tacky and inappropriate.
The Christmas Angels bit in this post was interesting. From my own experience I didn’t see any staff remove items, but who knows. I will say that Christmas Angels was not a direct sponsorship program and it only served children up to twelve. I’m guessing a lot of the names on the trees you see in malls and department stores are fake to elicit specific donations commonly requested by different age groups. Maybe in small towns it’s actual individual adoptions, but in major cities the infrastructure to pull that off would be impossible. It was always a crazy spectacle when we had Angel distribution day.
Executive staff at Salvation Army locations are ordained pastors through the Salvation Army. That means sometimes you got someone qualified and sometimes you didn’t. They moved our Executive Director to another location a month or so before I left Salvation Army and his replacement was a horrible person with literally no understanding of abuse or homelessness. It was so bad that when I started at my current employer in 2015, I was so traumatized that my new boss (a smart but completely unemotional woman) treated me like a fearful deer and would go out of her to way to preface every meeting we had.
Executive staff at Salvation Army would make demeaning comments on people’s outfits (essentially implying they were slutty. they weren’t. at all.) I once went to HR about the Executive screaming at me and they more or less said she could do that because she was the supervisor. A huge culture problem at the Salvation Army is that executive’s adult children often work there, too, which creates a frankly inappropriate work environment and means issues are not properly managed because everyone is enmeshed in one another’s lives and have incentive not to address concerns. Also, the job paid ass. I went to grad school while working at the Salvation Army and when I finished I asked for a raise and they gave me a raise to $14.00. My friend was the counselor there and had a masters in social work. She was salaried at $29,000 (in 2014), which is criminal.
RE: “We wouldn’t kick anyone out for speaking up.”
Yes, they would. Most shelters are at fault for this, if I’m being honest. It is absolutely not a Salvation Army exclusive problem. If a shelter can frame a situation as abusive towards staff they can justify terminating someone’s stay. I cannot tell you how much my colleagues at Salvation Army did not like me because I would almost always vote against exiting a family. And this has nothing to do with the Salvation Army and everything to do with broke folks trying to reclaim their power by exerting it over others because you were burnt out. We once had a caseworker who got her feelings hurt by a client calling out her fuck up who decided not extend to extend the client’s stay (clients had to apply for an additional month every month) and then celebrated it by saying ‘happy early graduation gift to me.’ I was then put in the position of trying to find a new shelter for a mom with eleven kids. Yes, 11.
It’s because of my experiences there that I’m so adamant in my role at the shelter I work at now that we only terminate a stay for the most extreme situations and even in those situations to still treat the families with dignity and try to find them alternative accommodations. Luckily my teammates are really compassionate and I don’t feel like I’m trudging uphill alone anymore.
Oh, just read the rest of that Twitter thread and boy did I call that lmao.
Honestly, working at the Salvation Army was trash. The pay sucked, there was constant turnover, the resources were poorly used. It was just a huge mess. We didn’t even have full size toiletries to give to clients. We had Kirkland shampoo and conditioner we’d squirt into paper cups every day. How fucking dehumanizing. To be as rich as the Salvation Army was and to do that is unfathomable. They’d only let us give clients five diapers at a time. There was no training, no guidance, and staff concerns were always mishandled and swept under the rug. Our Program Manager went cuckoo during my third year (a major bummer because I liked her) and sent the whole team an email about never going to HR because they didn’t have our interests at heart. And like yeah, that was predatory as fuck and completely inappropriate, but it was also… true.
