mental health technician

senior counselor

program supervisor

senior program manager

wellness specialist

Cascadia Health

I'm not sure where to begin. Cascadia is a disaster in so many ways. The environment and culture that is created by Cascadia is toxic. They tout certain stances (being trauma informed, utilizing evidenced-based, strengths-based techniques, being "culturally diverse", etc) but these are shallow cover-ups of a deeply lacking organization.
Cascadia is supposedly "non-profit" but profit largely if you're high up on their totem pole (which will never happen because it's the same handful of people for all of eternity).
My coworkers and I have been abused by our manager in various ways (verbally abusive, adjusting shift hours/locations w/o consent, requires staff to do work above/below their role/pay grade, has made employees cry and laughs at them, etc). HR doesn't care and is resistant to help or change things upon staff reporting. My coworkers and other employees stop reporting because it doesn't matter anyway. It becomes humiliating for us.
They do not compensate you for your education or experience adequately. Multiple people in the company are in masters programs and another in a doctorate program and they are getting paid minimum wage or less than $15. They have more education than most of management and get paid pennies, which is laughable. Cascadia should be embarrassed. Instead of cultivating a up-and-coming environment, they strangle you out of opportunity and fair pay which forces people with education and innovative ideas out. I imagine Cascadia as a whole eventually dying out if it keeps going this way.
It's completely obvious that they literally don't care. You can ask or fight for adequate pay and they'll tell you they just can't do anything about it, or tell you to look for employment elsewhere. They really will.
Most if not all facility managers MAYBE have a bachelor's degree and have adopted a toxic mentality. They become obsessed with pinching pennies and picking on staff  instead of providing a safe/adequate facility for their clients and employees. That's right- managers are also expected to handle the finances so they are under a lot of additional pressure to finance an in-patient facility. That's so unbelievable to me. No one in their position is qualified for that kind of responsibility- which gets them high on their power.
My manager is NOT trauma informed and has made abusive and non-culturally aware comments to our clients, but gets away with it despite any staff documentation or reporting.
Clients are aware that the company receives a significant amount of money for their care because they don't see any of that money being put into their care. It causes stress, anxiety, and frustration for them and for staff. It's difficult to listen to them agonize about not getting adequate care and not being able to do anything from your position. Clients lose respect and trust in Cascadia and their programs.
I have worked here for three years and have never gotten a raise. They conveniently are going under a "raise freeze". Staff have gotten absolutely sick and are working to unionize but management is actively working to scare and misinform staff. The CEO and his team actively send letters with threatening language and scenarios and Cascadia has hired a law firm to for union-busters. Long story short, they have spent thousands of dollars to prevent employees from negotiating to being paid and treated fairly, which says a lot about what Cascadia thinks about its clients. If Cascadia truly had the client's care in mind, they would be paying their employees adequately. Employees are the ones providing direct care, which is affected by pay and treatment from management.
You get PTO which is about the only good thing. However, you need to request it at least 21 days in advance. If you "call out" more than 3 times in 6 mo., you can lose your job. If you request PTO 21 days in advance often, you can get denied or just told that you can't be taking that much time off.
If you are a person who needs accommodations and/or struggles with any disability, you will not be treated well or equally here. You can fight for ADA accommodations but HR will fight back instead of working with or for you. 
At Cascadia, turn-over of employees is extremely frequent. They don't care- we've had a "staffing crisis" for the past almost 2 years which causes employees to be overworked and put in horrible situations, affecting client care and staff mental/physical health tremendously. As a result of Cascadia's apathy, you're not an asset as an employee- if you leave, they don't care, they'll just put your job onto others. There's a sense of guilt that comes with leaving, which is why I'm guessing a lot of people stay. 
I would highly suggest looking elsewhere for entry-level experience (at least you'll get paid a little better. Hopefully the work culture is more positive elsewhere, too). Some suggestions are LifeWorks NW, Telecare, and Albertina Kerr.

The actual work at Cascadia was great, I loved my co-workers and the residents! Yet having a supervisor that consistently disrespects and belittles, and discovering that management was not supportive of my concerns, was just too much. This was not just my opinion, I quickly learned it was the consensus at my facility and many others, and that management was just as poor and toxic as this manager. 

Cascadia, at it's inception, cared about their staff and worked for real change in their residents. It has been ten to twenty years since that culture was alive. I need to be honest here, so I will. Cascadia has a two-tier system of treatment for staff versus management. Perhaps worse, they help residents, and they have a treatment plan - but they don't challenge or get to the root of their behaviors. Likely because Cascadia receives several thousand dollars from the state of Oregon, for each resident they keep at one of their facilities every month. 

You are required to give three full weeks of notice before you can take any PTO. PTO is generous, but there's the catch! Cascadia thinks they can give extra PTO and pay employees a lot less. Guess what, PTO is not the same as proper compensation.  
If you get written up, for any reason, you can't change positions for three months. 

They do not compensate their direct care staff sufficiently, their Residential Counselors (I, II, and III) are some of the lowest paid in the Portland Metro. After doing some research and simply emailing a handful of non-profits I confirmed that Cascadia spends twice as much on administration as other non-profits. Pay. Your. Employees. It's that simple, Cascadia, you are terrible. Sorry but it's true. 

I did my best, I did my best to address my poor supervisor and unethical management, on numerous occasions. I told them what they were doing well, but I was frank with them about what is wrong with how my supervisor was treating me, the lack of accountability and support by them (Cascadia management), and lack of proper compensation; all to no avail. I'm not the first one complain to them about these specific issues, I'm literally one of a dozen in the recent past. Read my lips, they are Not willing to change. 

If this company has an ounce of integrity remaining, they would completely change the way administration handles complaints, especially complaints against them. It seems that if you tow the line and you are good at documentation, that's all you need. All you need to protect your job, get a promotion, and move ahead in the company. 

So, if all the direct care staff at your facility complain about how you are belittling, disrespectful, critical, and never give recognition - that's okay. You constantly tow the line and your good with documentation, that's good enough for us. That's the clear message I received after working at Cascadia for over five years. Working for Cascadia Behavioral Healthcare has been the worst experience of my career.  

If you are looking for a company where you'll never be compensated for your work and you won't be supported, if you want a company that lacks transparency, accountability and ethics; look no further.

There's nothing all that remarkable about Cascadia that isn't also true of nearly all other NGO's, especially in the mental healthcare field.  The issues are easy to understand.
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-- Your clients, or the people who really need mental healthcare services, cannot pay for the service.  You get your funding from grant money.
-- The people supplying the grant money know utterly nothing about mental healthcare.
-- The agency you work for (like Cascadia) exists entirely on grant money, and must do whatever impresses the people with grant money.
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As such, you will almost never be using evidence based psychology, because that approach does not have the shiny bling bling style to it that keeps the grant money coming.  Grant people like to see techniques and practices that are not only useless, but in many cases, make the client's condition worse.
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Moreover, agencies like this are often populated by people who haven't resolved any of their own psychological issues, and in many cases take up a job in the mental health field because on some level, they're actually interested in exploring their own problems, rather than helping others with theirs.
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Finally, many people cannot be helped.  If your client rocks back and forth and can only say 4 words, then I'm sorry, but you honestly are wasting your time trying to teach this person day after day, week after week, month after month, how to be "independent".  They are not ever going to be independent, and the "teaching" you're putting them through is only irritating them, and they can't even understand what's going on.  Three years of teaching "independent living skills" sees zero change, and all you've done is irritate someone for three years.  So why do they constantly insist on teaching this?  Grant money.  The people who pay the bills like seeing it.  That's the only reason.
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So if you get a job in this industry, be ready to go through the motions, all day long, of "teaching" people who cannot learn, cannot retain information, and cannot understand what you're doing, with zero chance of promotion, while working for supervisors who themselves honestly need counseling.  You will be told to engage in "teaching" that actually hurts the clients and makes their condition worse, not better, and it won't matter how many peer reviewed studies you cite.  Science and evidence don't pay the bills.  Making the client worse makes the grant people happy and they're the ones with the money, so shut up and increase the client's psychosis please.

When I first started at Cascadia in 2014, I thought that it was absolutely wonderful. I had a boss that truly cared about me and helped me develop professionally. 
It all went downhill when new middle management was hired, and ever since, it was an absolutely awful place to work. 
Middle management were in cliques. If you weren't in their club, your work life was made very difficult. If they didn't like you, they would find a way to get rid of you (through APS allegations, Investigatories, etc.). Gaslighting was the way of Cascadia. Everything always pinned on the worker at the lowest level.....Lack of accountability for mistakes in management. 
I worked for Cascadia until 2023. I tried to stay for as long as I could because I felt like everyone was so afraid to stand up and speak up for the clients we served. I felt responsible for them. Truth is, I loved my job. I truly did. I loved working with the clients. When the stress of management/leadership is way more acute than the stress of assisting people struggling with severe and persistent mental illness; there is a problem. My hope for the future of Cascadia is that the upper management would open their eyes and ears. My hope is that they would be able to see this pervasive pattern of dishonesty and gaslighting that doesn't help the staff who work in these very difficult positions to provide quality care for the clients they serve. Being a "Whole Community," means looking out for EVERYONE in your community, including the staff who work tirelessly to help those who need it most. 

Cascadia is a typical Community Mental Health setting with one very critical factor that makes it a poor choice for anyone hoping to help people; it is plagued by inept managers. I worked there for 4 years under the management of the Child and Family team. The manager was so unfocused that a single supervision session could become a full review of my entire career and I would never get to ask for any kind of support or direction. Our team dreaded her coming by to "check in" on us because it meant we would be roped into a conversation that went nowhere and would take precious time away from getting our notes done. This manager left half-way through my time there and the whole time breathed a sigh of relief. Within 6 months, upper management hired her back over the protests of the team. Two clinicians found new jobs within 3 months of her return. 

Every day was a stress filled boiling pot with no time allotted to manage caseloads or case management or get notes done. We were expected to complete notes in session and finish other tasks when we had no shows. Management further demonstrated its lack of care toward clinicians by requiring more and more paperwork for use to complete as time went on.  

The only reason I can think to work for this company over the numerous other and better mental health agencies is that now their workforce has unionized. This happened after I left, so I cannot speak to how effective the union is at getting work improvements out of management. But, any company were the only reason to join is because you get union representation is not a good company by any stretch of the term. Don't feed this haphazardly managed house of cards, just let it fall.

First of all, Cascadia has had multiple Medicare fraud lawsuits, one as recent as this March, in a $93k settlement. They nearly closed down in 2008 due to fiscal insolvency and frankly I don't see much of a future for this organization or its employees. 
In the ECFs, you're not so much a counselor as you are a babysitter/billing machine. No self-respecting behavioral health organization would impose 'quotas' and stretch the truth as far as Cascadia does to make money. 
To boot, I've never met a more unprofessional group of so-called clinicians in my life. Boundaries and ethics go ignored, clients are bullied and bossed around; I remember an instance in which my own supervisor threatened to send a client to state hospital if they didn't "behave..." That is no way for a social worker, let alone a supervisor, to treat clients. 
Speaking of the way supervisors treat people--much of the interaction between management and employees was completely unprofessional and at times downright childish. The morale of the office was chronically in the toilet and management only served to feed the gossip-mill by encouraging employees to constantly "tell" on each other. It left very little room for actual work to be done, and client care suffered greatly due to office spats and unprofessional nonsense. I hadn't seen such behavior prior to this since middle school. 
But if you're looking for a slacker friendly job where you'll never be fired, this is the place for you. You can even sleep on the job without reprimand! 
In total, this is not the place for you unless you are very entry level and perhaps desperate.

This company is one that is run very top heavy. Those on top are paid very very generously, while those on the lower end are severely underpaid. Those being underpaid are the ones interacting daily with challenging clients and and documenting their needs. Most of the most the work is pushed off to the direct support staff whom are not getting much help from their copious amount of “directors”. However, there are some mid level manager that truly enjoy their time at Cascadia, but are not getting the recognition they deserve. 
Compensation: Cascadia has the ability to pay their direct care workers much more, but values having weekly catered lunches and outings for those on top. 
Workload: case managers and therapists have exaggerated caseloads that do not allow them to focus    on specific cases or give their clients the attention they deserve or are needing. They are constantly overbooked and passes down work from those in higher positions. 
COVID-19: Cascadia did not respond appropriately to the pandemic leaving their support staff and clients vulnerable. There was not only a lack of planning or caution, but they were encouraging facility to increase their intake of clients. Thought Cascadia is there to serve clients they were not appropriately screening clients and causing illness to thrive in those environments. They chose to increase revenue rather than keep clients and staff safe, meanwhile those on top were able to work from home part-time. 

During my time working at CBHC we had chronic and severe understaffing. Staff retention was also a big problem, for good reason -- the low wages and toxic environment were only the beginning. It was mandatory to be frozen into the upcoming shift if an employee called out in order to maintain federal minimum staffing ratios for our clients, and these freezes happened regularly. Working 16+ hours only to turn around and come back for your next shift eight hours later -- was stressful and physically exhausting, but might have been fine had it only been a rare occurrence. It happened regularly, sometimes multiple times in a week. Executive staff clearly did not care about working conditions and treated hourly staff as expendable. Staffing issues clearly affected the quality of care our clients received. During COVID, there were regular emails about "budget shortages" etc but the extra COVID grants the organization received in addition to regular federal grants are fairly publicly available info. And, if there was adequate staffing and a reasonable workplace environment they wouldn't have had to pay for so much overtime, freeze bonuses, and extra for agency CNA's to fill empty schedules. Incredibly shortsighted system. I stuck it out for a year because I care about my clients, but ultimately the toxic environment became too much and I had to quit for my mental health. 



What is the best part of working at the company?
You get to help people that cannot afford other service providers.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Managers will get you for everything, If you call anyone out for anything, they will legit focus their anger on you.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Managers are horrible, which leads to unhappy workers. So if you dont mind passive aggressive managers who have the emotional capacity of a two year old with an ear infection.. this is the job for you.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
You arrive early (because its insane the moment you walk in and you'd like to use the bathroom!) and after going through massive amounts of emails, you put on your 'im okay' face and hope that no one see's through you, while you take every client for 1-2hrs at a time (based on job) do all the misc. tasks, complete piles of different notes/types of notes, and eat your meal in between clients (once on the toilet so they wouldn't interrupt your break) while your union fights for basic rights. Your coworkers all choose who to complain about for the day, you sip ungodly amounts of coffee while telling client's about coping skills and offering support (despite this company sucking out your soul) then you do more work, notes, etc, until you leave three hours late, on average. Also they make you work up tp 18hr shifts if understaffed or freeze you during storms if your in residential care.

The learning curve was very steep and I often struggled to keep my head above water due to the fast pace, overwhelming demands, and constant policy changes. Upper management is out of touch with what's happening in the clinics. The organization is run like an administrative operation rather than a clinical one and it shows. Grunt work often gets escalated to the LMPs because the support staff refuse to do it (which they are instructed to do by their managers). There was a lot of drama between staff, which made collaborating for patients' sake far more difficult than it should be. Cascadia has a lot of sway in the community and receives a huge amount of federal, state, and local funding. Unfortunately, they focus on the wrong issues, neglecting the day-to-day operations. LMP and clinician retention is poor for the aforementioned reasons, leading to high attrition and poor continuity of care. The populations served by Cascadia (SMI, extreme trauma) suffer from this. CMH is tough regardless of the organization you work for, but Cascadia has the potential to be a lot better than it is. That said, there are a lot of compassionate and skilled clinical staff there and some of them are strong allies. It was just very hard to know who to trust. 

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Mental health technician 170 salaries reported	$24.11 per hour
Senior counselor 19 salaries reported	$68,027 per year
Program supervisor 13 salaries reported	$69,995 per year
Senior program manager 11 salaries reported	$86,704 per year
Wellness specialist 4 salaries reported	$24.68 per hour

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