maintenance technician

dietitian

therapist

groundskeeper

chef

The Refuge, A Healing Place

What is the best part of working at the company?
A therapeutic workplace undergoing meaningful positive change, offering fulfilling and impactful client interactions within a setting intentionally designed for healing. The beautiful campus, combined with strong, supportive workplace friendships, creates an environment that fosters both client growth and staff collaboration.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
The most stressful part is navigating periods of transition and change, particularly as new processes, expectations, and structures are being implemented. While ultimately positive, these adjustments can create temporary uncertainty and increased workload as staff adapt and ensure continuity of quality client care.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
The work environment is collaborative and mission-driven, with a strong focus on client care and healing. The culture values teamwork, supportive professional relationships, and open communication, particularly as the organization continues to grow and improve. While the work can be demanding, there is a shared commitment to learning, mutual support, and providing meaningful, quality care.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
A typical day involves providing direct client care through individual and group sessions, completing clinical documentation, and collaborating with the treatment team to ensure continuity and quality of care. The day also includes supporting clients through therapeutic challenges, participating in team communication, and adapting to the dynamic needs of a treatment environment focused on healing and recovery.

What is the best part of working at the company?
I genuinely value my time working at The Refuge, A Healing Place. The mission here is meaningful and important: helping individuals work through trauma and find a path toward healing. I find the work personally rewarding and appreciate the opportunity to connect with partners, support community outreach, and contribute to a program with real purpose.

The campus and environment are also beautiful, and there’s a strong spirit among many coworkers who truly care about clients and the mission. It feels good to help people and see lives change.

While leadership strives to guide the organization strategically, there tends to be a high level of corporate involvement in operational decisions that sometimes feels overly prescriptive, but the on-campus leadership really do care and will lend an ear to listen to feedback in a professional and respectable manner and do advocate when appropriate.

What’s Worked Well: Meaningful work with a clear sense of purpose, Supportive colleagues and strong client relationships, Learning opportunities and professional growth

Overall: I recommend The Refuge as a place where you can do impactful work and be part of a team that genuinely cares about clients. 

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
What can be stressful about working in business development is shifts in direction and priorities, this makes planning and building steady external relationships at times, challenging. That said, the work itself is meaningful and rewarding because you’re helping connect clients with healing resources and partnering with people who genuinely care about the mission, which makes the stress worthwhile at times.

Typical day, meetings, meet with clients, stress, more meetings. I learned my value there, as I was treated terribly as an employee for the 2 years I endured. Management was a nightmare. My supervisor isolated me from my entire team and cut off all communication to get me to quit and to make it look like I wasn't doing my job. Other therapists were advised to ignore my email communication to make my work look non-existent, although I documented all attempted contact with my team. Hardest part of the job was knowing that clients were unknowingly participants in the northern moving South Florida Shuffle and not being able to do anything about it. Most enjoyable part of my job was making many professional connections and friends from my time of employment here. Also, seeing those gates shut behind me for the last time in the rear view mirror is a close second.

What is the best part of working at the company?
The clients are incredible, and many of the colleagues are as well. It is deeply meaningful work to provide trauma-informed care.

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
With so many changes happening so frequently, there isn’t a structure to hold onto when you’re asked to be flexible when things change. New management is trying their very best to provide more structure, but there simply isn’t enough time to do all that is asked of you each day.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
You are very much considered independent. There were weeks where I barely saw any colleagues because we were so busy that it didn’t feel okay to leave the office.

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
Groups for at least 2 hours a day, then possibly meetings through lunch 2-3x a week, and clients/groups in the afternoon. Group schedules are typically given the morning of so it’s hard to schedule out clients ahead of time.

I'm going to try to be as nice as possible; I think a lot of my coworkers here meant well and want to see this company succeed. It is a beautiful campus. The food is great. Your coworkers are like brothers in arms; like, you will go through some crazy things together.
The cons...
The leadership just isn't existent; good luck trying to get ahold of anybody with any real power to put things into action. You will constantly be running and wearing multiple hats while trying to put fires out that were caused by the lack of leadership.
I don't know if Acadia wants to kill this company and sell off the husk that remains, but it's doing a good job of it.
Coworkers remain only because of clients, which is the most rewarding part of the job, or the distant past, clutching to memories of what this beautiful facility used to be. It's very depressing lol.

There is nothing I am more Passionate about than working with Trauma and addition, however becoming cooperate changed the purpose of what we were doing, making more about money and less about healing.  When clients began to die after leaving the refuge because they were not given adequate amount of time to heal from their intense trauma, the environment and passions of the therapists began to change.  With that said, the modalities that are used at the Refuge to support the healing process are second to none. there are many people working there who give 100% of themselves to the clients and are as passionate as I am about helping them live again. The homeopathic client centered approach to healing is what drew me to the refuge to begin with. It is a beautiful facility with many loving and caring staff members.

I very much enjoyed my job, each day was unpredictable which made it interesting. I believe that I was making an impact on the clients. However, my experience with management was not as positive. Management made abrupt and frequent changes without implementation plans. They would announce a change and expect the staff to figure it out without support. Some of the programs needed more structure and highly trained staff to support client recovery, but management did not address these gaps despite it being discussed regularly. Communication from management was very poor, the clients seem to know more about changes than staff do. There was daily confusion as staff were not adequately informed or trained. 

What is the best part of working at the company?
The culture here is like family. I would not want to work anywhere else. The care we provide for clients is top notch and our mission is instilled in all of us. 

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Every job gets stressful at times, I don't think there is anything specific that is stressful on an ongoing basis. 

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
AMAZING! The leadership team is phenomenal, and our staff is just like family. Nobody is a stranger when you work here! Everyone is willing to pitch in and help out, no matter which department they work in. 

What is a typical day like for you at the company?
We all work together on a daily basis to ensure that the clients are taken care of. We all work really hard on a daily basis as a team to get the job done.

This facility used to be a top tier treatment center in the country. While things changed to some extent over time, with the arrival of the current CEO mid-2023, the facility has taken a nose dive.  Don’t expect to speak with your supervisors in private because everyone will know your business by end of day. The hardest part of the job is trying to ethically practice at a corrupt corporation where supervisor will belittle and use profanity at you regularly. There’s a reason why they’re hiring…people don’t leave jobs, they leave inadequate mangers which this place has plenty of. 

I joined the team at the beginning of the year after hearing how great the experience was for a friend who had gone through the “amazing trauma program” years ago. I could not have been more excited. It wasn’t long until I began telling my friend that things were going well but I didn’t think it was the same facility she went to. It was still pretty good. The last few months have been disastrous and decisions were made that truly defy explanation. I, and many others from the clinical team, are on our way out the door. We feel unsupported by new leadership. It is almost as though the corporate team is trying to create a culture of cowardice. I’m grateful I was given the opportunity to work at the refuge, just happy to be getting a new job while the refuge still looks good on my resume.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Maintenance technician 4 salaries reported	$19.50 per hour
Dietitian 4 salaries reported	$71,125 per year
Therapist 3 salaries reported	$62,333 per year
Groundskeeper 1 salary reported	$16.50 per hour
Chef 1 salary reported	$22.00 per hour

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