Program Assistant - Anonymous employee WestEd Employee Review

Thank you for your candid feedback, and thank you also for your work with WestEd so far. I’m pleased that you value your colleagues so highly, as WestEd does: we know our work is impossible without our supportive and hard-working people. I would also like to address your comment that there is no paid maternity/paternity leave. To do so, I am quoting directly from a recent “Ask Glen” answer that our CEO, Glen Harvey, addressed to all employees: “As an organization, WestEd provides a very generous maternity leave/newborn bonding program. WestEd does provide a maternity leave program that includes a paid benefit for up to 4 weeks prior to date of birth and 8 weeks following date of birth for all eligible employees regardless of which state they work in. For employees in California, employees are also eligible for a state paid pregnancy disability leave for the same period noted above and all California employees are entitled to 6 weeks of paid family leave, which includes newborn bonding as well as time off to care for an eligible family member for other types of leaves. A handful of other states including Hawaii, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York also provide paid leave at this time. In addition to the paid leave benefits available to employees, job protections for extended leaves include up to 7 months for pregnancy disability/maternity leave in California and up to 12 weeks for other states although WestEd is almost always more generous than what is required if requested. All paid or unpaid leaves can be supplemented by an employee's sick and/or vacation leave balances up to 100% of salary. Family leave is one of many benefits WestEd provides. We have to strike a balance across all staff priorities and needs and the costs that we can fairly expect our clients to absorb. With health care costs continuing to rise, we would have to make very difficult decisions about asking staff to cover more of their own health care costs, if we were to expand our family leave benefits further.” I encourage you to speak directly with our friendly Human Resources team if you have any questions about leave options. Thank you again for your work with WestEd.