Do NOT work at the Tulsa Botanic Garden
With the Tulsa Botanic Garden posting yet another round of hiring of positions, I wanted to warn any potential applicants.
Being as vague as I can without giving away my identity, I worked as a full time administrative staff member (salaried) in 2025.
Upper management makes 4x the amount of other employees, including horticulturists, which are required to hold college degrees in their field. Management is completely disorganized, has no experience with working for nonprofits (the CEO worked for the drillers for the entirety of his career), and severely overworks their employees while taking long vacations several times a year. During the off seasons, as a salaried employee you are regularly expected to work over 40 hours a week without compensation or extra PTO/flex time, and are ostracized, punished, and looked down upon if you don’t. During Botanic Garden of Lights you are expected to completely turn your schedule around (while upper management somehow gets off consecutive days around the holidays even though you aren’t allowed to take PTO during BGOL).
Due to the toxic working environment, low pay, and abysmal benefits, turnover is ridiculously high. While I was there I saw at least 8 positions turned over and there are only 26 positions, including part time employees. Rather than addressing what is causing employees to leave, management “restructures” departments and positions and renames them so that potential applicants don’t catch on to the high turnover. If you look back at their social accounts, there have been at least 3 posts this year with several positions being hired and they all have different names even though they’re the same jobs.
The employees (with the exception of upper management) are all incredibly hard working and kind people and their passion is absolutely being taken advantage of. The gardens themselves are gorgeous and the education programming and accessibility they offer are so incredibly necessary to the community, and it pains me to write this post, but after watching myself and so many of my friends be worked to complete burnout and lose their passion, I wanted to prevent this from happening to another person if possible.
With the job market being the way that it is, I do not take making this post lightly.
I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments or via DM.
Edit:
I completely forgot to mention that management is all very old fashioned and requires all staff to have no tattoos, piercings, or unnatural hair color and cover them. This is very unusual for nonprofits, and they have verbatim said in multiple meetings they try to hire “artsy” people and how many artsy people do you know that don’t have at least one of these things.
Second edit:
The only HR person is someone on executive leadership, providing a huge conflict of interest. I saw many people report things to HR and saw nothing change and employees be unofficially penalized.