Advocates

Warren Deshon

Advocates is for people that snapped and will never fully recover. Like others the mentally ill have good days and bad days. Women are favored over men.

Judy

Stayed Far Away From This Place The Staff Amanda Is Very Lazy Help You To Moved And Get Everything Stolen She And Others Fake Workers Walks Out The Door. Leaving You With No Food Too. The Attorney General Will Hear This.. Taxes Payers Money. And Makes Clients Worst. Getting Workers Offs The Streets. Should Be Shuts Down.

Online Person

This organization is reprehensible. Their group homes are a huge problem. They are poorly managed, under-staffed, and often dangerous, with many abuse incidents between clients and recurrent issues with drug and alcohol use. In many, if not most, clients receive few if any of the services Advocates is mandated to provide them as a Massachusetts state mental health contractor, including services as basic as food stamps and transportation. Clients are often simply warehoused so Advocates can collect money from state contracts, then neglected, receiving few if any actual mental health services. If a client improves at an Advocates group home, it is despite their living environment, not because of it. Problems stem from top down incompetence and massively too low salaries and credentialing for middle management positions, particularly clinical program managers supervising group homes. For example, clinical program managers - who are supposed to run group homes for psychotic clients 24/7 - are only paid $46,000 in cities where yearly rent averages $24,000, immediately becoming rent overburdened unless they work second jobs. Very few long term Advocates group home program managers are licensed in any mental health field. If they were, they would be working jobs paying living wages in eastern Massachusetts. They are not even required to have college degrees. These need to be experienced licensed master degree social workers paid at least $65,000 a year, or the group homes will continue to be nightmares. You can't scrape the bottom of the barrel here. Many group home managers are completely unqualified and incompetent for their positions. One was a repeat college dropout who only showed up to a full time job a few times a week and eventually got demoted to an entry level position after a client died in their group home from medical symptoms. Another was a 22-year-old girl straight out of state university who had no idea what she was doing and got demoted because she continually threatened to call the police on her clients whenever they manifested bipolar symptoms, instead of doing anything to help them. Neither of those people was fired. That would entail Advocates acknowledge it did something wrong by hiring and retaining them for so long. They were just moved to lesser, non-management positions, continuously collecting $35,000 a year funded by tax payer government contracts while doing little real work. That gets to the fundamental problem: Advocates leadership refuses to acknowledge or address their organization's enormous structural problems. They refuse to properly train, certify, monitor, and pay their staff, or weed out bad apples, and instead resort to constant prevarication, doubling down on a farcical narrative of institutional infallibility. Although many Advocates employees are great, caring people, and some clients may receive decent care in some circumstances, the corporate leadership itself is toxic. This prevents good people from fully supporting their clients. There is also a clear racial component to the leadership issues. Almost all the lowest paid direct care staff are immigrant people of color, while almost all of their higher paid supervisors, up to the highest leadership, are underperforming white Americans. The direct care staff are typically better educated in their own countries than the people they work for, massively harder working, better all-around people. But they perform all the menial tasks. Absolutely disgusting. Advocates.inc is the mental health equivalent of private prison contractors who are given state contracts because they cost less, but provide terrible services that jeopardize their clients’ welfare and safety. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts should either no longer subsidize this, and other similar corporate entities and manage these institutions directly, or properly supervise them as federal law mandates while providing them more funding.

J Doe

Agency is one of the more chaotic, poorly trained and managed, and clinically reckless I have interacted with. It is beautiful to me that, at least in their downtown Framingham location, their agency is housed in a medical building named after a drunk politician who drove a woman off a bridge and left her there to die and then ran away without taking responsibility. It's an excellent metaphor for how this agency actually operates.